IndexImplications of ChildbirthAnalysis of Traditional CulturesAttributes of ControlWider Implications - PopulationFertility FactorsPower in Sex and Gender RolesPersonal ReflectionsGoals for a Fuller UnderstandingImplications of ChildbirthYou will be transported through automatic doors into bright fluorescent lighting. A hallway stretches out before you, empty except for a few frowning nurses. In the blink of an eye you find yourself in stirrups in a room full of strangers and being constantly scrutinized with no explanation. Everyone seems to know what they're doing, but there's a certain roughness to their experience. Because you are not informed about what is going on, these people make the decisions that affect your body. When you enter the hospital to give birth, a sense of control goes away. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This loss of control in this case has lasting effects on mothers, especially when things suddenly get worse. Technology has led to the modernization of childbirth in developed countries, sending women mixed messages about their bodies in the typical hospital environment. Childbirth is no longer the social event that still persists in other cultures, but often occurs in a sterile and unfamiliar environment. This experience (being surrounded by strangers, sober and invasive procedures, no control over the choices made about one's body) has been compared to rape. The question remains whether postpartum depression is actually misdiagnosed PTSD. This will be compared to descriptions of childbirth in more traditional cultures. Also addressed here are concerns regarding women's sense of control, population, patriarchal relics, and influences that influence the choice to have children. Analysis of Traditional Cultures For a basis of comparison, let's look at how other cultures view childbirth, past and present. Once in labor, food, alcoholic beverages, potions and herbal teas to relieve pain were brought to a woman in medieval Europe by her "godsibs", friends who would take care of her after their husbands had essentially been kicked out (" godsib" would eventually turn into “gossip”). Much of the food and drink would also be used for postnatal celebrations (Kitzinger 2012). The midwife would consist of a social group of women, not dependent on an individual's experience: “She was never short of a shoulder to grasp, a chest to lean against, or a strong hand to support an ankle or a knee. If one woman got tired or had to return to her children, another quickly took her place... ready to support her in any way she desired. Sometimes he knelt or lay on his side and other times he stood with his arms around a friend's neck” (Kitzinger 2012, p. 302). Social anthropologists are regularly shocked by the number of women involved, crammed into the hut, crowding the room with laughter and uproarious chatter. Social births, compared to what we will later call medical births, have an important function in maintaining and strengthening community relationships, primarily among women (Kitzinger 2012). These relationships are not only strengthened by the birth event itself, but are also deliberately facilitated by the lead midwife. Social conflict is believed to disrupt the labor process and actions will be taken to alleviate social conditions and stress on the mother, creating an environment of positivity and empowerment for the new mother (Kitzinger 2012). Japanese, Indian and cultures and countriesNative Americans such as Uganda, New Guinea, and West Africans continue to emphasize the importance of touch, massage, and movement during childbirth (Kitzinger 2012). Technocratic cultures like that of the United States, where the woman lies on her back, represent the exception to the generally accepted idea “birth is movement”. Swinging on ropes, suspended by other women who join in this dance, the birth process follows the rhythm of the uterus during contractions. This is very different from typical childbirth in a developed country, where it is considered exclusively a medical event and considered in terms of risk. This has left women feeling like they've missed out: “Evidence is growing that postpartum distress – often attributed to postnatal depression, an illness that arises from within the woman – is not depression, but disorder from post-traumatic stress resulting from an experience in which she was helpless by a medical model of birth that involves obstetric management, physical immobilization, lack of emotional support, frequent interventions, rigid timing and an operative birth. The result is that for many women, birth is an experience comparable to rape. They feel helpless, maimed, isolated, and often in an emotional double bind because they have been violated by the same people who “gave” them the child (Kitzinger 2012, p. 304). Kitzinger calls for awareness of the political agenda and methods of profiteering of medical births to benefit pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies. Controlling Attributes The broader physiological effects on mothers reflect the message sent to many women that their bodies “are not capable of giving birth without medical intervention” (Meyer 2013, p. 221). Four attributes were identified in an attempt to quantify the degree of control experienced by women during childbirth. Decision making, access to information, personal safety and physical functioning. Decision making was most prevalent in women's relationship with the concept of control during childbirth, including choosing to use or abstain from pain relief, location of birth, and creating birth plans by thinking about scenarios in advance. The choice of home birth was directly related to the woman's desire to be the primary decision maker during the process. This choice gave them freedom of movement, a consideration from one woman who had a hospital birth during the study: "I knew I would be stuck on the bed and tied to a monitor and not be able to move around ” (Meyer 2013, p. 222). Staying at home allowed women to do or say whatever they wanted, as well as have control over who entered the space (rather than being left in a room full of strangers or interns). well informed was another key aspect of feeling in control during the process. Women are expected to be informed about how routine labor and delivery is progressing by a member of staff case of a medical event could prevent a traumatic birth experience (Meyer 2013). Personal safety is directly related to a woman's relationship with the people around her and relationships with staff are maintained before birth and during pregnancy. It's about how well supported and respected the mother feels in that environment. The relationship with the staff before delivery was very important during caesarean sections, as it allowed women to feel comfortable and confident that someone they trusted was making the right choices for their body while needing medical care .On the other hand, during home births, midwives often place trust in mothers themselves, giving them the security they need to know they have control over their bodies (Meyer 2013). Physical functioning is the last critical component of control during childbirth. Much attention is rightly paid to pain relief related to warm compresses, movement, and mental state when entering the delivery room (greater expectations of control have actually led to greater expert control). As for the epidural, some women felt more in control with opioid pain relief, allowing them to focus on something other than pain. Other women thought that without an epidural they would feel less in control if they swore or screamed/screamed (Meyer2013). Meyer (2013) concludes that a woman's control is the determining factor in determining whether the birth was a positive or negative experience. The sense of satisfaction or accomplishment that follows a successful birth in the mother's eyes improves self-confidence, and the outcome of their experience also influences women's future decisions about pregnancy. Wider Implications - Population The choice to continue having more children or having children at all is one that governments have taken for granted in the past. Until recently it was rightly thought that the number of children born would cause population growth. However, some climates of modern society have created circumstances in which fertility rates fall below replacement levels (Longman 2006). Remote areas are seeing declining population rates (for individual countries like Russia, Canada, Singapore, South Korea, and others); It is also still true that infant mortality rates have now declined as well (Longman 2006). Countries have taken an active role in encouraging women to become baby machines again. Tax incentives for families in France, speed dating approved in Singapore for busy professionals, and daycare compensation in Sweden are all attempts to encourage childbearing in order to prevent further population aging (Longman 2006). Longman (2006) attributes this chronic emphasis on a larger population to the historical importance of numbers during the imperialist era. Generally, whoever had the most troops won, and this study even suggests that Britain's decline as a world power was linked to its declining fertility rate. These rates (the number of women having children) also decline due to rising taxes on the shrinking population (Longman 2006), creating a spiral of reluctance to conceive. A broader consequence is that single-child families, more libertarian-minded and usually more educated, are declining rapidly. It is a fact that having only one child does not contribute much to the future population. What happens is that more traditional and religious families continue to have a greater number of children, adhering to a more patriarchal fundamentalism, while smaller families are more individualistic (Longman 2006). Longman outlines the potential shift in population values ​​based on the possibility of smaller, libertarian families greatly diminishing while larger, more nationalistic, religious families essentially take over (2006). These social changes tend to propagate typical patriarchal characteristics (Idiocracy is a comedy that exaggerates this same concept). These characteristics evolved after the agricultural revolution and with it, surplus food to support families and growth (before this, population limitation was more pressure to avoid starvation).In these societies we witness the marginalization of "bastards" or "illegitimate children" because they do not carry on the legacy of their fathers. “Legitimate” children will take their father's surname, with the idea that they belong to their father's family, not their mother's. In essence, this gives men powerful and emotional motivations to take responsibility for their successful children and also results in multiple attempts to have a particular child (Longman 2006). This is what we see even today; A clause in China's one-child policy stipulates that rural families can have a second child if the first was a girl (to try to have a boy). Furthermore, women who remain childless in Western society are often questioned harshly or considered hypocritically selfish (Longman 2006). By leaving women with few other desirable choices other than motherhood, more children are born in a prophecy of diminishing individualism, and we see these values ​​increasing, not decreasing in our society, despite the postindustrial decline in overall birth rates. Fertility FactorsWhat determines these birth rates around the world is different and complicated. We already know that economic growth, or lack thereof, has significant effects on fertility rates. Higher literacy rates among women around the world correlate with having fewer children (Robbins et al. 2014). Access to condoms, on-demand reproductive healthcare, social/political autonomy all impact women's ability to make individual choices for themselves. The choices a woman makes in the domestic sphere can vary from almost total autonomy to total absence. The degree of separation between the public sphere of men and the private sphere of women has a great influence on the number of children she will have. An influential woman with a demanding career in a city will usually have fewer children than a stay-at-home mom in a suburb. The suburbs are an example of this division between worlds; women are kept on the outskirts of cities to take care of family full of children while men go to work, which we discussed in class. While calling this phenomenon the entrapment of women might be an exaggeration, this is how architecture reflected patriarchal values ​​during the era of good housewives. We see extrinsic forces that keep women in domestic roles even in the natural world. Roughgarden discusses mate guarding, a behavior in which the male actively keeps females in their shelters and prevents them from leaving (2004). In the case of ground squirrels, the male blocks the exit of the burrow after mating to prevent the female from leaving and males from entering to ensure that the offspring remain his (Roughgarden 2004). It also explains the protection in terms of mammals versus avian species. Internal gestation in mammals means that the female has control of the embryo; to have control over the offspring, the male must also have control over the female. For birds, eggs can be directly controlled, and flight gives females autonomy over their own behavior (Roughgarden 2004). In humans, the solution to many global problems can be found intertwined with women's rights and autonomy around the world. Power in Sex and Gender Roles We have previously discussed how a cross-cultural analysis reveals an increasing powerlessness of women in Western society with the standardization and medicalization of childbirth. Compared to more traditional societies, women face a lack of control and experience power over their body when it is handed over to a stranger in ahospital. Power dynamics between men and women are so integral to our daily lives that their normalization makes them almost invisible. Women face the emphasis of staying at home everywhere in their lives; husbands, workplace and, above all, other women. While patriarchal values ​​underlie the subordination of women around the world and husbands typically exert pressure to stay at home, it is other women in the family or among friends who, through ridicule and gossip, shame women who do not they manage to have children and taking care of them is their first priority. Personal Reflections The expectation that women give up their lives to become breeding machines is so ingrained in our history that the world is blind to how obsolete it has become. Today, the pressure to have many children is a relic of the past and direct evidence of an organized religion with a misogynistic agenda. In the United States we no longer need more children to increase the population, to combat infant mortality, or to have more labor on farms due to urbanization. Even thinking about calling a woman selfish because she doesn't have children is a hypocritical embarrassment. Let's break it down a bit. When people talk about having children, they are talking about “having a baby.” Many people desire the experience of having a baby only for their own personal growth and boredom in their lives, usually completely ignoring the fact that to remedy this boredom, they are giving birth to a human life. They forget that these children grow up and become, yes, real people. People who have to deal with overpopulation, poverty and dwindling resources. I'm pretty sure this is the definition of selfish. Yet despite everything, we harass childless women. Furthermore, we widely question and condemn women who want to be sterilized. Why don't those who want to start a family, a huge responsibility, have to go through the same countless appointments, interviews, doctors' sentences and bewilderment that women who simply want to carry on as they are before and after sterilization go through? We consider the choice not to have children and to live our lives a greater responsibility than that of giving birth to a human life to care for. This is simply not true. To think that being a mother is the only and greatest job a woman can achieve is an insult to every woman capable of conceiving as well as every woman not capable of conceiving. As a child, still uneducated, I thought that sooner or later I would become a mother. , and a young me settled down with the number of three children. And with feminine magic I would produce two sons and a daughter at will. Clearly this was a personal bias, as it was the same structure as my current family; it seemed to work well. It would be fun to raise boys, I would definitely need two to look after each other, and a daughter would be more relatable. I thought being a mom would be the epitome of my life and would take away all my other desires to learn, travel, and experience bigger parts of life. Obviously, I learned more about the reality of having children. Starting a few years ago, my ideals have changed dramatically and continue to change today. I saw my young mother, a 19-year-old mother, worn out, suffering from depression and dissatisfied. My humanistic and scientific education has opened my eyes and mind to the consequences of the harsh expectations placed on young women, to the problems of overpopulation, and to the real sacrifices that millions of mothers silently give up for the love of their children. Do I really want a child? Or I just want the experience of raising them.