HW 36 - Pregnancy & Birth Stories

Interview with my mother:

My mother said that she was extremely happy and excited about being pregnant with my older brother. She and my dad were in a new parents group that met with a “birthing instructor” once a week after work. She said the class started after dinner and ended so late that when the lights came back on after the weekly film the
future dads were all out cold – sound asleep. Meanwhile, the future moms were pretty nervous about the actual births shown in the films. She said it was an international group all giving birth at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. One woman was Vietnamese. She brought in some special sticks to put between the toes of another woman whose baby was in the breach position, meaning
its feet were down instead of its head so that she would have to have surgery for a Cesarean birth instead of a natural one. The Vietnamese woman lit the sticks so that they burned without hurting the other woman’s toes. My mother said the baby turned around and did not turn back again into the wrong position. The baby was born naturally, and the parents gave all the credit to the Vietnamese woman. The future parents all got along well and met at one of the parents’ apartment after everyone had given birth. There is a really funny picture of all the babies.
One of the dads was a guitarist in a rock band called The Talking Heads and madea video with all the babies sitting up at a bar. The mothers were all told to
leave the room for the actual filming, and they refused because the babies
kept slipping off the bar seats.

My mother said my brother was born seven weeks early. She said there are some contractions that are not the real thing called Braxton Hicks contractions and she thought they were them. The contractions kept coming so my dad took her to the hospital at 6:00 in the morning. It was Easter and even though the doctor, Fernando Moreno, was not all that religious, his family was. He missed his kids’ Easter egg hunt. The nurse said that she could tell my mother was not ready to be admitted yet because she was smiling. “When the time comes, no one smiles.” They were told to walk around outside for an hour or two. My mom remembers the contractions hurting so much that she would have to sit down on the steps of houses near the hospital. When they went back inside, my dad said she wasn’t smiling. My brother was born at 11:30 at night so it was a long day. She did not want pain killers because they make the baby drowsy but she had to be given a drug to make the contractions work better. This drug makes the contractions go to a whole new level of pain, and my mom said the music from the movie Jaws kept going through her head. I guess the contractions felt like a shark coming with its mouth wide open. All the special breathing techniques were useless she said. What helped was digging her not very long fingernails into the palms of her hands. The moment the baby was born, the pain magically disappeared and she remembers the doctor saying, “What was the boy’s name you chose?” Even though my brother came early and weighed barely five pounds, he was healthy. My mother stayed in the hospital for a week with him and the day after they came home the telephone rang, and they were told to bring him back to the hospital. He had to be tested for sickle cell anemia, a disease that has no cure. Luckily, he only has the trait for it and not the disease. My mother said she was terrified and then relieved except for being told that children with the trait often have respiratory problems. Reed has not had them. That fear was just replaced by others. My mother says she watched Reed almost all night long for the first month she was so scared he might die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which she had read a lot about.

When I was born six years later, my mother said she was probably more nervous than
the first time. This was because she had had five miscarriages in between. My parents were thinking about adopting a baby when my mom got pregnant again. She had to have a lot of genetic testing to find out what was going wrong. She says the problem with genetic testing is that after you’ve learned all that can go wrong with chromosomes you can’t even imagine everything going right. She still remembers the phone call at her office from the doctor telling her that I was going to be a healthy baby. She said she ate as healthily as she did for the first pregnancy but did crazy things the second time like crossing the street if someone was smoking a cigarette near her and not even having one cup of decaffeinated coffee. She went into labor on Christmas Eve and Dad and my brother had to go to the hospital early on Christmas morning. She had the same great doctor as the first time and felt really badly that he had to leave his kids on Christmas day after prying them away on Easter six years earlier. She remembers that my dad and the doctor watched football games all day long, and Reed played baseball and soccer in the hall with nurses. When it was nearly midnight, the doctor said it might have to be a Cesarian birth. She went into an operating room for surgery, but the doctor said he would like to avoid surgery by using forceps. My dad says forceps are huge and look like some kind of medieval torture instrument and that my mom was scared that they would hurt the baby’s head. A nurse said that her doctor was an artist with forceps and that the baby’s head would be perfect. I was born almost at midnight, and my brother was so happy I was a boy. He wanted to call me Bullwinkle, Wink for short.

Hearing about what it was like for my mom to have my brother and me reinforces my thinking about what a very big deal having a baby is. Nothing is ever the same for parents again so they better be prepared for it. Maybe I believe this because my parents do (although I do not follow what they think blindly), but I think that the Republicans who are trying to reverse the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision so that abortion can be illegal again are crazy. Some even think women who get pregnant from being raped should have to have their babies. My dad thinks that in general men shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on the subject, and I agree with him. A baby needs to come into the world being wanted.


Interview with Meghan, a family friend who had her first baby in October

Meghan said that unlike my mother she was sick everyday for the first three or four months of her pregnancy. Then she was told she had something called Maple Syrup Urine Disease (you can’t make this stuff up), which if not treated could cause coma and death for the baby. A week later she was told that she did not have this condition. Later she was told she had gestational diabetes. She did have it, but fortunately it goes away after birth. After going through all the childbirth classes she found out the baby was in the breach position. She was told to swim everyday and do exercises that were hard to do in the last month. The baby did not turn around. Her feet stayed down, and Meghan had to have a Cesarean section. She said she made an appointment to have the baby the way you make an appointment to go to the dentist and never had one labor pain. She was very disappointed.

After the baby was born, she felt extremely depressed even though she loved her baby
tremendously. She was angry with herself for feeling that way and had to have some
medication. She did not tell anyone except her husband about the way she felt, and she pretended to everyone else that everything was fine. Finally, after about three months she felt normal again, and now finally she is really having a good time with her baby. Meghan’s experience just is more evidence that having a baby is not something that you do lightly. Not only does it change your life forever, but a lot can go wrong that you can’t anticipate. It’s a huge responsibility and right now I can’t imagine being ready for it.


Interview with our neighbor

Our neighbor had a girl at the same time my mother had me. She is Brazilian and has
always had asthma. For some reason her asthma is worse in New York than it was in
Brazil. When she was pregnant, she had several bad attacks and ended up in the hospital. She also had to stay home to lie down at the end of her pregnancy because the doctor wasafraid that she would have a miscarriage. After taking birthing classes, she ended up having a Cesarean birth because of the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck. Like Meghan, she was extremely disappointed. She also ended up with an infection in the incision and had to go back to the hospital

The baby had something for the next three months called colic, which meant that she cried for hours without stopping every night. She and her husband almost went crazy and had no sleep. On top of that it was the terrible winter of 1994. There was so much snow and ice that it was hard for her to go out during the day. She and my mother would take turns lunch with one another, and even though they live next door it was hard to get past all the piles of snow and ice. She felt like a prisoner especially knowing that it was summer in Brazil.

This is another experience to confirm my thinking that if you are going to have a baby you had better be ready for anything, and you probably shouldn’t be under 30. I think you should have a lot of experiences to get you ready for the anything that can and probably will happen and also so that you don’t resent your loss of sleep and freedom.

I would be interested in finding out more about Caesarean section births vs natural births.

HW 35 - Other Peoples' Perspectives 1

Of the people I asked about their perspectives on birth, everyone said that they did not want to think about having children for a long time. The two girls and three guys said they wanted to wait until they were in their thirties and the third guy said he wanted to wait until he was in his forties. The reasons for waiting ranged from wanting to have a good career to feeling like they need to have a lot of experience to be able to be good parents. They also said they would need to be making a good income because children cost a lot of money. They have seen what they cost their parents. One girl said she would not even want to have children unless she met someone she thought would be a great father. She also said she had read that early marriages especially with children usually end in divorce.

Regarding the stage of pregnancy the girls said they would not look forward to getting huge and being scared about the pain of childbirth. One girl said she thought that today when most women want to have a career and would also need to work for the family to have enough money having a baby is a huge decision and that it is a much bigger decision for a woman than for a man. The guys did not have much to say about the stage of pregnancy. One said he was glad he was male and did not have to worry about getting pregnant. A girl who heard him say this said, “I hope you are the subject of an experiment gone rogue and that you will be the first man to get pregnant. You won’t realize that you are pregnant until it is too late to have an abortion and you will be having triplets.”

Regarding avoiding getting pregnant, they all believed in being careful about birth control if they were in a serious relationship. Not one of them is in a serious relationship. They are also not against abortion. I asked if they thought it is more important for a baby to be wanted than to be born to a woman who was not ready to be a mother. They all thought it was important for a baby to be wanted. One girl said her parents are Catholic and that her mother is not against abortion even though her grandmother (her mother’s mother) is. No one thought that Roe vs. Wade should be reversed so that abortions would be illegal because women would continue to have them anyway. One of the girls knew that when abortions were illegal, there were dangerous abortions performed and some girlds died. One of the guys said that he didn’t think that men should be against abortion since they were not the ones who had to go through pregnancy and having a baby change their lives. When I said that having a baby should change the father’s life too, he said “Oh yeah. Guys our age and even five years older aren’t ready to be thinking about being dads." Obviously this makes birth control/abstinence highly important.

HW # 34 - Some Initial Thoughts On Birth

In the article “Mothers-to-Be Are Getting the Message” about how a text messaging program called text4baby can help educate pregnant women and new mothers
on taking care of their babies, the reason it says a program like this is needed is that “the United States ranks 30th in the world in infant mortality rates – between Poland and Slovakia.” It also says that “28,000 children born in the U.S. each year die before their first birthday – and many more face disabilities and serious life-long health problems, often because they are born prematurely or at low birth weights.” This probably sounds surprising to middle and upper middle class white people. Black people know all about it. My father’s sister who grew up in Detroit got pregnant in high school. The baby died. She didn’t tell anybody about it until she was six months pregnant. Then her mother took her to a doctor but that was a late time to start getting medical care.

I bet that most of the 28,000 babies who die in this country have poor mothers and a lot of them are minorities. This makes sense because if the mothers were white and middle class it would be some kind of emergency or embarrassment for America. The two reasons I can think of that causes all these deaths are the education system and the health care system. If girls have better education, they are not going to want to get pregnant in high school. If there is free health care the way there is in a lot of other countries the girls or women can have regular doctors. Poor people don’t have regular doctors. A lot just go to emergency wards of hospitals if they are really sick, hurt or dying. Having this text4baby health care advice for pregnant women and mothers sounds like a great idea but especially for poorer people who don’t have regular doctors and who don’t buy a lot of books to tell them what to do.

Questions I would like to explore in this unit:

How is the health care for pregnant women who are poor in countries with low infant mortality rates?

What is the health care like for babies once they are born in countries with low infant mortality rates?

A lot of black children have been raised by their grandmothers. I don’t know if this is still happening as much as it was when my dad was growing up. Is it? (My father’s sister is bringing up her grandchild because the father of the child who was her son is dead. The mother disappeared.)

Is a reason why male conservatives are so against abortion that they want to be able to control women?

What percentage of babies are born as a result of an unplanned pregnancy and how do their grades as they grow up compare with babies whose parents had the intention of having them?