Mid-wives-drash

Last week, I celebrated Passover at the home of friends. At this seder, the hosts invite their guests to comment on various parts of the seder.  Last year, as we read the Exodus story, I noticed this part for the first time:

And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shifrah, and the name of the other Puah.  And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.  But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.  And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive?  And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.

And I decided that the following year, I should comment on that part.  So I did.  And after some requests, I thought I'd share what I said here:

I’ve wanted to become a midwife since before I can remember, and I’ve also celebrated Passover since before I can remember. But it was only last year that I really noticed this small section in Exodus about midwives. As we just read, Pharaoh leaves it up to the Hebrew midwives, named Shifrah and Puah, to make sure all Hebrew boys are killed as soon as their moms get off that birthing stool. The midwives not only disobey Pharoah by refusing his command to kill the Hebrew boys, but they also outright talk back to him (and lie) when he asks why they disobeyed, saying basically, “Hebrew women are just too good at giving birth, we don’t even get there in time.”

To me, this anecdote is incredibly rich.  As with all things I love about birth, it speaks to the power of women and that incredibly powerful, inexplicable force pushing women to bring forth life from their bodies.   However, it also speaks to the powerful role that these particular women, these midwives, played in the eventual rebirth of the Jewish community, our passage from a life of slavery out into a life of freedom. 

Shifrah and Puah are some righteous babes.   I find the meaning of their names fascinating: Shifrah stems from the Hebrew verb to swaddle or clean, as in a baby, and Puah comes from the Hebrew verb to cry out, as a laboring mother does during birth, as does her newborn baby during the first moments of life.  There’s some more depth to their names, however.   Some rabbis have postured that Shifrah and Puah were actually Moses’s mother and sister, Yocheved and Miriam, making the roles of these women even more central to the eventual redemption of the Jews in Egypt.

In English, midwife means “with woman”, but it seems that Shifrah and Puah, or Yocheved and Miriam, were also, and perhaps more profoundly, with their community and with God. They could not separate their work with women from their service to God and to their community.   Their duty was not only to usher women through the passage of childbirth safely, but also to usher an entire population through a period of time when survival was uncertain.  Shifrah swaddled the babies, giving them security when it suddenly felt like there was nothing to hold on to, and Puah cried out when the mothers cried out, signaling that their suffering was, in fact, surmountable.  As Yocheved and Miriam ushered their community through the parting of the Red Sea, it is said that Yocheved cared for the elders, almost swaddled them, while Miriam danced and sang and cried out with joy.  While these midwives enabled women to give birth and nurture their babies, male or female, they also used their hands and hearts for something more: undying support, encouragement, and selfless love as the Jewish people gave birth to their freedom.

I owe many thanks to Ruchi, a far more knowledgeable Jew-ess and doula friend of mine, who by some Passover miracle, found the time to respond to my questions just hours before the seder she was hosting.  

Chag Sameach, Happy Easter, and most of all, happy birthing.

My Clients Are the Most Best

Two of the many perks of being a doula are:

-meeting really interesting people with all different kinds of skills
-being privy to various birth announcments, pictures, videos, and general updates as the teeny little blob I met on that big day slowly becomes more and more of an actual person.

Earlier this week, those two perks came together, when one of my recent clients (who happen to be very clever filmmakers) sent me their video birth announcement. Published here with permission, of course:


Birth Announcement from Ben Coccio on Vimeo.


Most best birth announcment ever!

Overall, there's good news

Oy! No posts since December? I'm hiding my head in shame.

My excuse is that I've been overwhelmed with the 2011 shit storm of misogynistic politics and can't handle writing about it all. For example: South Dakota and Nebraska thought it would be fun to legalize the murdering of abortion providers, while Utah thinks it's a gas to prosecute women as murderers for having miscarriages.

You see? I can't even comment. It's just too much to handle. Ok, one comment about Utah: Whether or not you agree with abortion, whether or not it is legal and safe, it is a truth of human experience that women will find a find a way, any way, to terminate unwanted pregnancy. But if women had access to safe abortion, they wouldn't be so tragically desperate as to subject themselves to intentional violence. This bill says a great deal about how much these politicians value women's lives.

But recently, there has been very, very good news! Planned Parenthood's budget was NOT cut last week! Ina May came to town! Doctors defended homebirth! And I've attended some truly beautiful births this year.

I witnessed a vaginal twin delivery in which baby B was footling breech. Baby A slipped out like butter, and before the doctor could try a manual version (to turn Baby B), it's teeny little foot poked out. Then its cute tush! It was magical.

I spent all night long with a mother, rocking her baby down. As the sun rose and the snow fell, she felt her baby coming, and whispered, "He's coming, he's coming." Magical.

Ina May came to town to promote her new book, Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesto. She bestowed upon us some true gems of hilarity, common sense, and wisdom, including this little query, directed toward anyone skeptical of the normalcy of vaginal birth: "Why do we all think that only men's thingies can get really big and then really small again? Ours can, too."

She also shared this video of an elephant giving birth, complete with elephant CPR. It's intense and graphic (as Ina May said, a two year pregnancy requires a LOT of amniotic fluid), but incredibly beautiful and life-affirming.

Ina May also told us to blog more. Yes, Ina May, I will. I will blog more. I will blog the good word! Such as news like this: a year or so ago, some American doctors published a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) that claimed that neonatal mortality rates were higher among planned homebirths than hospital births. Earlier this month, some other doctors took another look at that study and realized it was completely flawed. And by the way, these other doctors happen to be Canadian and Dutch, hailing from two nations where homebirth rates are higher, c-section rates are lower, and infant and maternal mortality rates are lower than ours. So I'm more likely to believe the doctors whose patients are dying less. Here are their conclusions in Medscape and AJOG.

Finally, I got to spend an hour talking about myself with a fellow rad Barnard chick a few weeks ago, and now the fruits of that conversation are forever imprinted on the scrolls of the internet. More specifically, in an article in Yale's feminist blog, Broad Recognition, about how doula work takes feminism in a pretty different direction than we've seen before. It's going to later be part of an exhibit at Concrete Utopia called "i am not a good enough feminist" (I effing love that title).

I think that's enough information and links to satisfy your birth brains for now. Don't fret, there will be more soon!