But do they then go back to chopping cane/working in the paddy-fields?

[oursin]

An article in today's Guardian Women's Page which made me (being a historian of medicine, rather than anyone who's ever given birth) go WTF???!!! about 'freebirth', which is, apparently, about giving birth in one's own home, without any kind of birth attendance, except maybe a husband in the next room.

Okay, I found spooky reports I read of some fundamentalist sect arguing that midwives fossicking about in ladies' nethers was somehow teh lezzie gay and only husbands should be there in the birthing chamber. But this strikes me as seriously into the realms of the higher woo-woo.

As someone is quoted in the article, historically speaking women haven't crawled off into the undergrowth to give birth as a solitary spiritual experience - they've at least had other women around them. Giving birth alone was usually associated with trauma or problems of some kind or other (e.g. out of wedlock pregnant servants in total silence in shared garrets).

"Women have been giving birth since the beginning of time and birth is very rarely complicated" shows a startling lack of interest in engaging with the very solid historiography on maternal and infant mortality rates, which were extremely high, even in much of the developed western world, well into the 1930s: I adduce in evidence the fact that when Grantly Dick Read published his first book promoting natural childbirth in 1933 it got very little attention, because people were more interested in having a live mother and baby as the desirable outcome; only when it was reprinted in the 1940s when survival was assumed and quality of experience could become an issue of concern did it take off as a best-seller.

Also: the woman who eschewed all antenatal care and ended up being rushed to hospital in labour with twins? Suggests a whole possibility of scenarios where issues that would have been taken into consideration and managed for best outcome turn into major urgent crises.

Nature is not kind and not cosy. And this is not 'natural':

The only way I had ever been able to picture myself giving birth was alone, or with an old crone in silent attendance. At night in the woods by a stream was my preference.

It bears no relationship to women's historical experiences of giving birth: it sounds like something out of a fantasy novel.