Birthing Stories | by Cate House -- Endeavors, Winter 2000

In Print:
Birthing Stories
by Cate House

Telling Bodies Performing Birth. By Della Pollock. Columbia University Press, 290 pages, $49.50 (cloth), $18.50 (paper).

You’ve probably heard bits and pieces of your birth story. How your mother was rushed to the hospital, what time you were born, how much you weighed.

But what about the rest of the story: What was the relationship with the doctor? Were there complications? A lot of pain?

“Many women have been taught that pain is an embarrassing subject—that it’s taboo and not to be talked about,” says Della Pollock, professor of communication studies.

But Pollock disagrees. She believes that women need to tell and want to hear birth stories, that the silence should be broken.

That’s why she’s put together a collection of birth narratives, which make up the focus of her new book, Telling Bodies Performing Birth. Here, she brings to life many different types of birth stories. There’s one about a woman who gave birth by in vitro fertilization in the wake of her mother’s death; another about a woman who delivered twins, both breech (feet first), and whose IV had a kink in it, cutting off the anesthetic in the middle of the C-section; and another about a woman who had her baby early, before she realized what was happening and could get to the hospital.

Pollock even includes narratives of her own birth stories (she has two children to whom she dedicates the epilogue of her book). In fact, when she was interviewing women about their experiences, they would often turn to her at some point and ask, “What about you?”

“It was like I was being tested,” Pollock says, “to make sure that I had suffered at least some of the same things and, so, could be an authentic listener.”

Pollock interviewed 40 women and men in all. The book features eight and touches upon many of the others. Choosing was not easy because she didn’t want to make generalizations about the women’s stories. Each was unique.

She was particularly interested in stories that engaged certain cultural issues: class, reproductive technology, gender relationships, sexuality, doctor-patient relationships. She wanted the stories to be able to speak to other people. “The focus of the book is on the performance of the stories,” Pollock says. “It’s not about birth. It’s about birth stories.”

Pollock says many of the stories have overtaken her. In her performance classes, she’ll start talking about one of the stories as an example, and then all of sudden she’ll just stop and tell the story as if in the mother’s voice. “I’ve tried to become vulnerable to the narrators and let the stories of their bodies sift through my body in a way that means these stories really are a part of me,” she says.

Part of the story, Pollock explains in the introduction of her book, is reflected in how people tell about their experiences. Some women would only meet her in private and speak in whispers; others, gesticulating wildly, would share their stories in the produce section of the grocery store.

“We have a lot of expectations about how birth is supposed to be,” Pollock says. “It’s very common even today for parenting magazines to have reports from doctors saying, ‘don’t listen to other women’s stories, just pay attention to your prenatal instructor; she’ll give you the right version.’ So there is a strong sense of what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.”

To Pollock every story is worth telling. “They’re a part of our everyday lives,” she says. “We tell them to help make sense out of our experiences.”

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