‘SHE CAME THROUGH ME’: Situating Birth Stories and Women’s Embodied Wisdom in Folkloristics

Abstract

The mainstream image conjured in the American imagination of birth goes something like this: There is a clean, bright hospital room. In it is a laboring woman, she is on her back, her legs in stirrups. Beside her is her anxious, perhaps nauseated, husband. A masked doctor is seated between her legs, offering instructions. Perhaps there is a nurse or two present. This is the fantasy of birth that has been neatly packaged and presented to the American public over and over again. But it is hardly reality. Even in the reality of a similar scene the image conjured obfuscates the nuances of a necessarily individualized experience. Does the woman have an epidural? A fetal heart rate monitor (internal or external)? An IV? What is she feeling? Did she and her partner take childbirth classes (if yes, what style)? The doctor is usually only present for the pushing stage or emergencies. The birth world is full of counter-movements, ulterior motives, harmful policies, unscientific medicine, technology, tradition, and outlaw practitioners. While this scene is what the late 20th/early 21st century American imagination has conjured, the reality is much more complex and individuated. Those initiated to the birth world find so much depth that it would take a lifetime to explore all of its corners and learn all of its practices. At the center of this web are women and their babies, navigating one of the oldest and most universal rites of passage.