Labour of love? What women need to know about childbirth

‘The birthing mother is surrounded by the dusts of death,’ reads an inscription on a 3,000-year-old clay tablet, thought to be an ancient Assyrian incantation to ward off death in childbirth. There have been pressings of beads into clay, writings on vellum or cave walls and singing and making art about childbirth and motherhood for as long as small humans have been emerging from women’s bodies. Yet contemporary depictions of the process of becoming a mother – known as ‘matrescence’ – can be misleading or simply absent. As Katie Vigos, who set up the online Empowered Birth Project for women to share their birthing experiences, has said:

The female body in the midst of giving birth – blood, pubic hair, buttocks, the image of a baby exiting a woman’s vagina – seems to trigger people to report images. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to show photos of physiological birth. It’s straight-up censorship.

Framing women’s bodies as being much more than objects of desire is at the heart of Lucy Jones’s book. ‘When a human animal grew inside my body,’ she writes, ‘I started to realise that some hoodwinking had been going on.’ When her first child is born she feels she has been ‘fundamentally misinformed about the female body and maternal experience’. Her quest to discover as much as she can about the physical, neurological, social and mental changes that occur during matrescence fuels both her scientific research and her profound personal interrogations:

Despite having given birth twice, I did not know that 3-6 per cent of women suffer anal injuries during birth… A proportion of those women will have serious, life-changing complications.

And who realised that water births can harm women because they prevent midwives from protecting the perineum? In the chapter titled ‘Birth’, I kept scribbling in the margins: ‘We need to know this stuff!’

Jones is excellent on the difference between historical views of motherhood and the actual experience: