Birth Story: A History of Power
$42.00
Barrister and human rights advocate Elizabeth Prochaska's cultural history of birth, drawing from history, medicine, law, sociology, and memoir.
It matters who tells a story. For much of recorded history, birth stories have rarely been preserved. Since birth has entered intellectual life, it has been divided by the disciplines that claim authority over it. Medicine approaches it as a clinical procedure; demography as population management; economics as the reproduction of labour; law as regulation and rights; feminism as oppression or identity. As birth rates fall and governments become increasingly anxious about women’s reproductive choices, birth has become a national resource. No intellectual tradition has comfortably held birth in its totality: as bodily experience, political conflict, existential transformation, and creative power. If women do not give birth, humans would vanish from the earth in a century. Birth is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, one of the few philosophers ever to consider its significance, “the miracle that saves the world.”
Our response to birth’s unruly power has been to force it back into a binary by telling two opposing ideological stories: nature stories and danger stories. The nature story is a story of female perfection. Women are natural because they are responsible for human reproduction. The danger story is a drama of imperfection. Women are imperfect containers for the fetus: their bodies defective, unpredictable, perilously ill-designed for the very task nature assigned them. The danger story turns women’s risk into a commodity for medicine. Whatever realities these stories are founded on, they make claims to certainty about birth that are a disguise for power. They do not allow for a better, more communal way forward.
Ambitious in scope, intellectually rigorous, and strikingly beautiful in its language, Birth Story brings together history, philosophy, politics, and personal experience to investigate the stories we have told about birth—and the ones we might tell.
It matters who tells a story. For much of recorded history, birth stories have rarely been preserved. Since birth has entered intellectual life, it has been divided by the disciplines that claim authority over it. Medicine approaches it as a clinical procedure; demography as population management; economics as the reproduction of labour; law as regulation and rights; feminism as oppression or identity. As birth rates fall and governments become increasingly anxious about women’s reproductive choices, birth has become a national resource. No intellectual tradition has comfortably held birth in its totality: as bodily experience, political conflict, existential transformation, and creative power. If women do not give birth, humans would vanish from the earth in a century. Birth is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, one of the few philosophers ever to consider its significance, “the miracle that saves the world.”
Our response to birth’s unruly power has been to force it back into a binary by telling two opposing ideological stories: nature stories and danger stories. The nature story is a story of female perfection. Women are natural because they are responsible for human reproduction. The danger story is a drama of imperfection. Women are imperfect containers for the fetus: their bodies defective, unpredictable, perilously ill-designed for the very task nature assigned them. The danger story turns women’s risk into a commodity for medicine. Whatever realities these stories are founded on, they make claims to certainty about birth that are a disguise for power. They do not allow for a better, more communal way forward.
Ambitious in scope, intellectually rigorous, and strikingly beautiful in its language, Birth Story brings together history, philosophy, politics, and personal experience to investigate the stories we have told about birth—and the ones we might tell.
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