Saturday, 26 March 2011

Childbirth through art

I already made a collection of pregnancy through art, this time I'll focus on childbirth. The first section includes historic view of childbirth. Note the different birthing positions, and ask yourself why today we give birth lying down in a bed?

Many women have described their experiences of childbirth as being associated with a spiritual uplifting, the power of which they have never previously been aware ... To such a woman childbirth is a monument of joy within her memory. She turns to it in thought to seek again an ecstasy which passed too soon.

GRANTLY DICK-READ, Childbirth Without Fear

The Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl was a complex deity, known in one aspect for luring people into bad behavior and in another for absolving them of their sins.

Egypt: relief from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera (304-30 BC; Egyptian Museum, Cairo). This relief shows a squatting woman in childbirth (using a birth stool), while being assisted by two goddesses

Detail of Mochica Stirrup Spout Jar Depicting a Woman Giving Birth. © Werner Forman

Handmade oil painting reproduction of The History of Medicine in Mexico The People's Demand for Better Health, detail of childbirth, 1953, a painting by Diego Rivera.

Scene of Childbirth, bas relief, Italy, Rome, Museum of History of Medicine

Childbirth was probably easier for most women in early cultures, especially in hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone was accustomed to physical labor and supple and fit from daily activity.

SUZANNE ARMS, Immaculate Deception II

Woodcut of a Midwife Assisting a Childbirth. © Bettmann

Childbirth during the medieval times took place on a stool or in the lap of another woman. More on history.

by Abraham Bosse (ca. 1602-1676), whose engravings offer detailed glimpses into the daily life of early France.

Victorian England

Birth in France

It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think of ... the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.

ISADORA DUNCAN, My Life

Inner & outer harmony

Doula

Statue by Ron Mueck

Natural childbirth allows the hormones that have been working for women for thousands of years to fulfill their functions. This is more important than just helping a woman through labor and delivery. Birth-related hormones also affect well-being much later in life.