One of the most compelling artefacts described in this history of human birth is a stone carving discovered at an ancient temple site in what is now Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe totem pole, 11,500 years old, 6ft 3in tall and weighing 1,100lb, shows successive generations giving birth: a faceless figure at the top delivers a woman, who delivers another woman, who delivers a man, who is ‘proffering his phallus’. The exact meaning and function of this object is long lost, but it is clear that it has something to do with fertility. For as long as humans have had a culture, that culture has been – understandably – concerned with the mystery of reproduction and birth. The totem pole is a reminder of a very basic truth: everyone who has ever lived came out of a woman’s body.
If that doesn’t sound miraculous by itself, consider that humans are not exactly precision engineered for propagating the species. Combine our narrow pelvises (for walking upright) with our big skulls (for our big brains), and being born becomes the most perilous thing most humans will ever do –unless they happen to be female and end up giving birth themselves. And if mother and baby got through labour, prehistoric conditions meant that survival was still far from assured. Lucy Inglis describes how ancient peoples often buried their infant dead inside the home, often at a threshold or, heartbreakingly, near the fire – perhaps because the importance of warmth to fragile newborns was already well understood.
Some, of course, didn’t even make it out of the womb. Inglis quotes a letter from a Babylonian slave girl called Dabitum to her master: ‘For seven months, this child has been in my belly, the child is dead in my belly since one month and nobody takes care of me.’ Dabitum lived in a world that would be unimaginably alien to us, but her pain and loss is agonisingly recognisable.
Nonetheless, the ancient world had little room for sentiment. If a baby got stuck, perhaps because it was breach or back-to-back (this happened to me in my first labour), early medicine had little to offer. The Greek physician Solanus gave graphic descriptions of how to dismember a foetus in utero so that ‘the body collapses and it becomes easy to change the position’. His advice is grisly, but, as Inglis notes, it would have saved the lives of many women. More suspect is his advice that women should deliver lying on their backs – a position almost guaranteed to slow things down and make things more painful, but something that male medics have been keen to enforce for as long as they’ve been involved.
The obvious choice of experts when it comes to childbirth is other women, but women have been able to practise medicine only infrequently in human history. Often they have been effectively banned from the profession because they were excluded from education, while ‘wise women’ (frequently midwives) were considered suspiciously close to witches. The result: a lack of knowledge about the female body and even more dangerous labours.
The Chamberlen family of male midwives were an extreme example of male proprietorship over the pregnant female body. They arrived in England from France in 1569, Huguenots seeking refuge, and brought with them a ‘machine’ that supposedly aided women in labour – who were blindfolded to protect the mystery of the device. Actually, what they had was a set of forceps – the kind of thing still used today when contractions alone won’t budge the baby. Had the Chamberlens made this public knowledge rather than focusing on private profit, it could have helped thousands of women. Instead, I can only imagine that the theatre they enforced led to the kind of distress that often slows things down dangerously.
It’s a vivid illustration of the tussle that has gone on throughout history over who gets to control reproduction – which is the ultimate power in any society. That’s why the history of the birth-control movement is so hard to untangle from the history of eugenics. Marie Stopes’s campaigning and writing gave millions the gift of managing their own fertility, but she was also unapologetic in her quest to reduce the number of ‘inferior infants’.
Inglis is fascinating when she’s focused on birth and the individual women doing it but the book suffers when she tells wider stories that are already well established. The history of American immigration law, for example, is important, but I can read it elsewhere. And Born outruns itself in the final pages, trying to cover both the ‘natural’ vs ‘medical’ war over childbirth and the rise of natalism, and doing full justice to neither.
Inglis’s conclusion that ‘we are living in a time of fathomless change for women’ feels more glib than the preceding material deserves. Perhaps it would be more true to say that J.D. Vance’s attacks on ‘childless cat ladies’ and Nigel Farage’s gestures towards limiting abortion are not change but continuity: another chapter in the endless contest over who controls birth.
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