EMILIE JOHNSON

So, here she is. The ultrasound is, for now, the only real way she is making a visible appearance, since I look pretty normal and just continue to feel seasick. About 14 weeks now. The process of finding where and with whom to deliver is a tricky one in NYC. Maybe everywhere, but it seems even more challenging here in the big apple. My sister, Julie, is pretty brilliant (doing a double PhD in Anthropology and Communications at Indiana Univ. with 2 children under 3) and she has helped me to think through a lot of questions about birth. She had both of her girls at home.

We are looking at the Birthing Center at Roosevelt Hospital with a group of midwives there. I can't figure it out though. They are largely unreachable - they do not pick up the telephone (not ideal for a care provider). They do 20 births a month, so if your baby is born outside of its designated month, they won't take you...well, it is not like that exactly, but they have a strict range of dates and if your birth falls outside of those, even if still considered pretty safe, I guess it is the hospital for you. Care, as I imagined it, is hard to find.

There is a growing body of people in the US who are challenging the practice of birth and how it currently happens, often without any question from the women and men going through the experience. One book Julie recommended is "The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth," by Henci Goer. So far, crazy. You open the book and the author lays out some astounding facts about how birth gets done at the moment in the US. Things like:

- Cesarean section is the most common major surgery performed in this country...The consensus of medical literature is that half of these operations were not needed.
-Nearly half of women giving birth vaginally still have an episiotomy...Reserach proves that, with rare exceptions, this procedure does no good and often does harm.
- Virtually no pregnant women manage within the conventional medical system escape without having tests, drugs, procedures or restrictions that studies show offer little or no benefit when used indiscriminately but which introduce risks.

Alarming, because going into this experience, I don't trust the people in whose hands I may end up. The medical world often views birth as something from which to deliver a woman; the doctor must intervene. Yet, what I like about this other way of thinking about birth is that a woman's body is trusted, the woman is the actor - who delivers the baby - not the doctor, and birth is seen as a natural process. All of that makes sense to me. I remember watching "The Business of Being Born" and hearing that, physically, lying on her back is the worst position for a woman to labor and deliver a baby. Made me really doubt a medical establishment that insists on a position for its own convenience.

Anyway, so we are meeting with the midwives this week. I have a long list of questions. My nightmare is that I will end up on a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, epidural in my back, fetal heart rate monitor hooked up, my legs wide open - at the mercy of some doctor who could decide to intervene in any number of ways - all in a process I believe my body capable of handling without intervention at all. I'm not interested in a painless birth - in fact, I think that pain will be useful in understanding my role in how to best get a baby born - if I assume the role of primary actor. I'd like to work with someone who trusts my body as much as I do.