Recently, Boston.com featured this article as proof that an increasing number of women are spending more time worrying about their appearance during and after childbirth, than the birth process itself. Of course, those of us who have participated in childbirth in one form or another will likely disagree. But, to me, the greater issue here is the common media's continual misrepresentation of childbirth and childbearing women, and the influence this collective, tainted version of reality has over the millions of information consumers it reaches.

Anthropologist Vicki Elson, MA, CCE explores this idea of childbirth misrepresentation in the media in her documentary Laboring Under an Illusion. Drawing from 62 television and movie birth scenes, Elson compiled a montage of distracted birth partners, panicky, screaming women, rushed start-to-finish labors and a generally poor representation of birthing women. (According to Elson, most TV and Hollywood birthing women are '...married, white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual women in their 30's, happy to be having her first baby.') And, yes, most actresses portraying a birth experience are in full hair and make-up because, let's face it: wilted hair dos, smeared make-up, sweat and amniotic fluid don't necessarily boost ratings. (Or, do they?)

There is a great body of wisdom and research which tells us that a woman should feel safe, protected and unobserved during the birth process in order for her body to open, relax and allowbirth to proceed.Not unlike an animal in the wild whose birth process can only occur in the absence of significant threats, such as the real or suspected presence of a predator, a woman's emotional sense of well-being impacts the physical process of birth. Broken down into hormonal fluctuations and fight or flight responses: when a woman's sense of calm, comfort and safety are compromised - so is the birth process, itself. Catecholamine production plummets. Fetal ejection reflexes halt.

Non-coincidentally, Lamaze International's 3rd Healthy Birth Practice delineates how having the right type of labor support can foster the feeling of safety and protection - mitigating the impact of outside, intrusive forces.

Popularized by Grantly Dick-Read, the Fear-Tension-Pain cycle aptly demonstrates how fears/anxieties and resulting physical tension negatively impact the birth process. The 3rdHealthy Birth Practice of having continuous (skilled, loving, caring) support can address much of this fear and tension, and their effects on labor and birth. Likewise, skilled and evidence-based childbirth education can help a woman identify and reduce her fears as well as teach her multiple labor-coping techniques; a loving partner, family member or friend can assure the woman against feeling alone during her journey through childbirth; a skilled doula can assuage a woman's concerns about communicating with her provider and can coax her through the self-defeating moments every woman faces in labor. But can doulas, childbirth educators and loved ones erase a woman's concerns about how she will look in the timeless documentation of photographs? Can plain-old vanity effect a woman's ability to release, relax and let go? What role does and should the camera play in the birth setting?

To my knowledge, there is no reliable study about this (if any, at all) but one can certainly postulate.

Childbirth does, in fact, involve a decent amount of sweat, tears and (some) blood. And amniotic fluid. And vernix. Perhaps some emesis now and again. This is all a normal part of the process. But for a woman who is constantly aware of what her labor, birth and/or immediate postpartum photos will look like (or what the people present during her labor and birth will see, and think), her willingness to give herself fully to the process of childbirth - and whatever comes with it - will most certainly be hindered. It's bad enough that for several generations now, we have collectively been talked into believing that childbirth is nothing but grueling, life-threatening misery. (Yes, I acknowledge that in some instances, for some women, it is.) But, if the sentiments in the Boston.com article were to catch fire and gain momentum, we would then be peer pressuring each other into feeling obligated to upload a staged photo shoot image of mom, dad and baby to our favorite social media site within moments of baby's arrival - sans body fluids and runny mascara. There is enough deprogramming to be done about our collective consciousness perceptions about childbirth. I hope we don't have to add this to the list.

And what of inviting a professional photographer into the birth setting? Lacking any evidence-based resources to offer guidance on this, I can only recommend the following: respectful stealth would seem required to avoid eclipsing the opportunity of documenting an amazing, emotionally and physically tiered journey and, instead, intruding upon a sacred scene so vulnerable to the presence of 'others.' (At the end of this post you will see some pictures taken by a professional birth photographer that seem to achieve the former.) On the other hand, others would argue there is no place for the camera in the birth setting at all. I can understand the impetus to document the journey of bringing a baby into the world. I also believe in the importance of 'protecting the nest' of the birth setting and participants.

Least of the issues I raise here, is the concept and judgment of beauty. Goodness knows, over the history of human kind, perceptions of human beauty have varied widely. Women in certain parts of southern Asia can still be found wearing a series of stacked rings around their necks - forcefully causing both a dangerous and coveted elongation of the musculature surrounding the cervical spine. Women of the Mursi tribe in Ethiopia are known for their lip stretching - by which they can insert a clay disc into the permanently stretched lower lip tissue and thus display an aspect of their culturally-accepted beauty. Women of the renaissance age were considered most beautiful when bountiful in habitus - a thinly framed woman represented illness and malnutrition. Fast forward a few hundred years and, in our Northern American culture, just the opposite appears to be true (interestingly, despite rapidly increasing obesity rates).

So as we consider what constitutes 'beauty' in childbirth, what do we really want to propagate? Staged, studio-like shots of a new family that don't even come close to capturing the magnanimous event that just took place in their collective lives, or the raw emotion and wonder that childbirth can truly encompass?

kellykuntz.com video: http://kellykuntz.com/thebirthofmorgan/
Posted by: Kimmelin Hull, PA, LCCE

Published: November 30, 2010

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