Birth Your Way

"Yes. This might seem an unusual choice, but I use a quote from this book as the introduction to a chapter of my own book on 1989, and the years since then. It’s about pain. “Home birth works best for women who want to cope with pain, rather than hand the pain over to be reduced or eradicated by professionals.” She talks about the progression of labour and the experience of “pain with a purpose – positive pain.” There are two ways in which this is important. Firstly, maternity care in Eastern Europe has been pretty awful and in many places still is pretty awful. It is doctor-led and under Communism midwives were almost abolished. The doctors received the fat envelopes of “gratitude money” often paid before the birth. Instead of the mother being at the centre of the experience, it’s the doctor. We did a study on the day of the week babies were born and we found that there were many more born on Fridays or on the days before national holidays, the times that the doctors didn’t want to be there. So they were inducing the births with all the pain and complication that can cause, to fit into their own or the hospital’s schedules. Sheila Kitzinger really lays it out and should be translated into all the languages of the region – Serbian, Russian, Romanian, Slovak – I think one of her books is already in Hungarian. Power needs to be given to the parents. Obviously birth can be dangerous but it doesn’t usually need to be treated as a medical emergency. There has been the complete absence in Eastern Europe of the understanding of birth as a psychological experience that will affect mother and child for the rest of their lives. Birth and pain are also useful as analogies for what happened in 1989 and the sense of empowerment that was suddenly felt. 1989 was a good birth when people felt they had power over their own bodies in the most vulnerable and most powerful moment of their lives. The baby of democracy was born healthy and red and screaming. But people lost that sense of their own power, of their own self-confidence, and, although there has been no return to the authoritarian regimes (except in Russia), the political parties now share the space that a single party once occupied. There is a jungle of democracy now, with a powerful ruling class, a political elite, politicians working closely with big business. Some of the multinationals in Central and Eastern Europe don’t even allow trade unions in the workplace and people risk losing their jobs for joining trade unions. This kind of thing wouldn’t be possible in the home countries of the multinationals and, in the crisis, it has been easy to sack tens of thousands of people. There is very little job security and that sense of stress has been the downside of democracy. Job insecurity is the biggest failure of the new democracies or the biggest failure of the people, not to have organised themselves to protect their rights. There has been a real reluctance of this now 20-year-old child to grow up. The Central European countries have joined the EU but they see it as “us and them” and they often sit and wait for Brussels to do something for them rather than, in the case of small farmers, for example, getting a lobby group together from different countries, to actually change things from the inside as adult participants. There is still a feeling of people looking up towards authority, waiting to be rescued."