In which she rails against the tyranny of the quiet birth

"Breathe! Breathe!" goes the sound of the police (and what to say instead)

Happy August, dear reader!

Since I last wrote you, I’ve returned to Brooklyn, where I currently await THREE fellow Leo babies. In my near decade of attending births, I’ve never attended one on my birthday (August 7th): as a student, I never had clinicals in August; as a midwife in the MIC I always asked for the day off in advance; and as a homebirth midwife I’ve always tried to take vacation in August or, when I was in partnership, be off call that week. This is my first year in solo practice where I’ve accepted due dates clustered around my birthday (8/4, 8/7, 8/18), most of them clients who have birthed with me before and who I adore and therefore could not say no to. Given my commitment to getting the day off in the past, you might be surprised to know I am rooting for the possibility of attending a birth this year.

Birthdays are a funny thing and often hard for a lot of people, me being one of them. It’s not that I dread getting older so much as I hate the pressure of planning a special day when, in fact, the thing that would make a day special for me would be to not have to plan anything at all, to get a break from the executive functioning and decision making that is a huge part of my life. My tactic in recent years has just been to get the hell out of dodge — to plan for vacation that week so that, no matter what we are doing, it is special. I distinctly remember being in Medellin, Colombia on my birthday in 2016 and waking up to make myself and the kids breakfast and get us all ready for a day of sightseeing because Andy had forgotten it was my birthday, but I was still in a great mood because who the fuck cares if your husband forgets your birthday when you are in Medellin, Colombia!

Medellin: where even a mall with three children under 9 is a fun birthday treat, because you’re in Medellin.

Since I can’t be in South America this year, I kind of figure maybe the same principle applies to birth: who the fuck cares what happens on your birthday if it’s also the day you watch another person be born? In 2019, I attended a birth on my father’s birthday and I still remember the profound feeling of being in that space knowing 70 years earlier my Dadi’ama was birthing my father, at home in Lahore, with a midwife as well.¹

Without amping the possibility too much (I do, in fact, have alternative beach plans that day so hopefully it will be great either way, because, who the fuck cares when you’re at the beach!), I’ll share that the person for whom the likelihood of birthing on that day is highest is someone whose prior birth I hold incredibly dear in my heart, a woman whose sister’s birth I had also attended just five months before her’s, a woman who weathered the twists and turns of an epic, all-through-mother’s-day-weekend labor with exquisite grace and patience, giving birth on the Monday following.

And here I want to immediately disrupt what I’m sure you’re imagining when I say that, because when I say she weathered those twists and turns with exquisite grace and patience, I do not mean she was quiet. No, her grace was grit; her patience was not silent. One of the moments of her birth that I precisely hold so dear is that, when she began pushing, she began to moan an incredibly operatic and, yes, loud birth song, while (another!) sister and husband crowded next to her on the bathroom floor and sang along, matching her pitch, their three voices reverberating off the bathroom walls and out the open windows and into the springy Brooklyn street below.

Did I catch you, though? Were you imagining quiet? It’s okay. It happens to the best of us. Most of us have been sold the idea that laboring with grace means quiet. That having patience means quiet. That being peaceful means being quiet. That laboring “well” means laboring quietly.

And that is a whole ass racket sold to us by a culture that wants to undermine our self confidence, capacity, autonomy, and strength.

If you’ve followed me on Instagram for a while (or if you’ve read my lengthy “About” page here on substack) , you know one of the things I write about a lot is the tyranny of the “peaceful birther” in our cultural imagination, and the way in which that cultural imagination is patriarchal. To quote myself, the idealization of being quiet and calm in birth “is a direct reflection of the expectations placed on those who are socialized as women throughout our lives to make ourselves small, inoffensive, pleasant, appealing. We are not supposed to take up space, be loud, or be too much, in birth or in life.”

I must admit, I was surprised, when I first started attending home births, of how internalized this cultural conditioning is: how many people who had had, to my mind, beautiful and empowering births, would apologize for being loud even as they were pushing babies out of their bodies; how many would sheepishly comment on how “out of control” they were when I came to do the postpartum visit the next day; how many would still be “unpacking” that they hadn’t been “peaceful” during labor 6 or 12 or 52 weeks later. I understood why people birthing in the MIC felt this way; they were, often, shamed by staff for being too loud or “scaring the other patients;” the expectation was that everyone would get an epidural and would therefore not need to make any noise. But why did so many people giving birth physiologically, with someone who accepted their sounds unequivocally (me!), also feel this way? The answer, of course, is cultural conditioning, but it was still a revelation. Part of why I write about this issue so much is because I keep hearing this from clients — though less now that I try to normalize vocalization in labor before labor happens — and because it never seems to stop resonating with people when I do. We need a lot of reassurance, apparently, that it’s okay to make even a fraction of the amount of noise a bodybuilder might make while lifting a barbell while pushing entire humans out of our bodies.

Recently, I got this DM on Instagram:

I’ve been meaning to message you [to] say THANK YOU.

I gave birth to my second baby two weeks ago and something about your posts about birth not needing to be quiet and peaceful really helped me give myself permission to go deep into myself during this labor and birth. Although both my babies were born at the same birth center, with my oldest, I felt a lot of pressure to be an “easy” laboring person and even though his birth was exactly what I had “hoped/planned” for — I never quite felt fully out of my logical head.

With your words in my head, for the birth of my daughter a few weeks ago I gave myself permission to go exactly where I need to go and it was one of the most primal, transformational, and loud experiences of my life. I am so grateful.

I think this message illustrates so much of what I’m trying to get across here, from the expectation that we must perform “ease” even when we’re birthing, to the power inherent in accepting that we can be exactly what we need to be in birth without judgment. I get messages like this a lot. Once, when I was doing an IG poll on vocalization of labor someone wrote:

Whenever I feel insecure or weak I think about myself marching around in labor, puking, roaring, kicking my midwife, and making my husband get naked in the shower with me. I was assertive and bossy and it was the truest I felt to who I really am. It was like trauma re-wiring for me. I grew up in a religious household and was told certain traits make someone a “good girl” (quiet, subdued, deferring to others, covered up b/c nakedness was shameful). In labor I was like fuck that. I was unashamed, uninhibited, holy. It absolutely changed my life and changed my practice as a midwife.

I truly could just stop there, I think. This human articulates the amazing potential of being authentic and accepted in labor so well, what else can I add?

Well, I’m me. So here’s more:

The poll I did on Instagram, though of course skewed by who my readership is (people who tend to at least be interested in physiologic birth), was equal parts affirming and heartbreaking. There were plenty of people who shared the sounds they made with pleasure and a little humor. For example:

“I screamed so much my throat hurt after. Also, I was screaming ‘THE BONES!’”

“My 2 year old told me I said ‘Ooooh, oooh, like a very friendly ghost.”

“At 5 yrs old I told my mom she roared like a lion in labor.”

“My partner said I sounded like a wounded elk.”

“It felt so good to yell the class ‘F’ word deeply and loudly.”

“The only thing that helped me through was screaming ‘FUCKING BABIES!!!’ over and over lol. There was no peace and there was no calm till that boy was out!!”

“My birth was one of the loudest / most uninhibited I’ve ever been. I’m so proud of myself!”

“When I was pregnant you wrote something about not having to be quiet during labor that unlocked so much freedom for me in my birth experience. It was fun and loud and I loved it.

But there were others who expressed shame, or being shamed:

“I wish I had made more noise. My nurses kept quieting me down and I busted the blood vessels in my eyes from holding in tension. 😫”

“My midwife told me to be quiet to ‘save my energy.’ I literally couldn’t be quiet. 🤷🏽‍♀️”