(b) The still more absurd superstition that a baby should be 8 or 9 lbs at birth. This is universal in England, and whether it is the daily newspapers over the birth of a prince, or a poor woman’s neighbours over the birth of a new pauper, everybody is jubilant if an 8-lb baby is born. It may have required a team from Harley Street to deliver it, and it may, and usually does, lose weight after birth; but all this does not matter: nobody cares, nobody troubles to think, provided that it has registered the full 8 lbs in the first hour of its existence. Unfortunate women, permanently injured by instruments, smile triumphantly over the thought that they have had a baby-boy weighing 9 lbs. But what can we expect when their doctors encourage them in these lunatic transports?
(c) The belief, deeply rooted in the modern and lay minds, that it is God’s decree that children should be brought forth in sorrow. Having rejected the Genesis version of the origin of man and all living creatures, it is remarkable that the modern world, led by its men of science, should take so seriously a curse mentioned in the first book of Moses, which, even if its effect be admitted as possible, had probably only a tribal or national application when it was uttered. And it is still more odd that they should regard us and our womenfolk as still lying under its spell. For, apart from the fact that there are savage and semi-civilized tribes still in existence with whom childbirth is not nearly such a sorrowful event as some might suppose, but a simple and easy function (teste almost every ethnological work), why should we assume that the Jewish women, to whom the curse originally applied, were normal or lived normally? From our knowledge of the Syrian Jewess, it seems highly probable that, if her remote ancestors resembled her, their confinements must have been extremely sorrowful. But what has that to do with us? This never seems to have occurred to the modern medical man; and, taking the Genesis curse as his motto, he has now solemnly allowed the agony to be piled up, till it is no longer merely in sorrow, but almost in tragedy, that children are brought forth—not to mention the extra-corporeal equipment of instruments, etc. And, why should there be any limit? When once the principle is admitted, where is the line to be drawn, particularly if it pays not to draw it? We protest, however, that even if we admit—which we do not—that there must be “sorrow,” this can hardly have meant the miserable failure and elaborate scientific technique which modern medicine has made of parturition in general.
Now, in view of these three articles of faith, not only are the doctors and the public in an attitude that paralyses all endeavour to effect a change for the better, but both the doctors and the public have ceased to ask whether any such change is possible. Having ceased to ask the question, no effort is made to inquire into the means of achieving the end it suggests; and, as usual, everything is staked on artificial aids. Anyone who, like ourselves, asks whether there are not other ways of overcoming the enormous difficulties of parturition among modern women, in order to remove this cloud from life and love and restore pleasure to a natural function, is laughed at.
Nevertheless the present writer continues to ask the question, and for the following reasons:
For a long time it has seemed to him suspicious that Nature, who is so uniform in her methods and who with such unfailing consistency has made all vital functions pleasant, should have made this one conspicuous exception, particularly in regard to a function linked to the most vital moment in our lives. Being unsatisfied with the verdict of science on the subject, therefore, he made inquiries on his own account, and was not at all surprised to find, not only that a number of existing races still enjoy infinitely greater ease in parturition than most European women, but also that, as he expected, there are still to be found among mankind faint vestiges of that ecstasy which he believes must once have attended the function in normal circumstances. Even the dreams of some European women lead the inquirer to suspect the existence of this ecstasy not so very far back along the racial line. When, however, the present writer expressed this view in a recent work dealing with the subject,[[8]] he provoked the most violent indignation, particularly among women themselves.
[8]. See Woman: A Vindication (Constable and Co.: 1923).
After having made a number of observations and experiments on the higher animals, he discovered not only that parturition is in fact ecstatic among these animals when in their natural condition, but also that their ecstasy can quickly be altered to anguish by only the smallest divergence from the normal in their food during gestation.
Observing animals in a state of nature, moreover, he arrived at this interesting conclusion, that their young, even when the mothers are in splendid fettle, are only skin and bone at birth, that their birth is an ecstatic function to the mother only when they are in this state, and that young born in this way not only never lose weight, but grow as plump and vigorous as could be wished in the first twenty-four hours.
If, however, the gestating mother’s food be so modified as to make it unlike the natural food of the species—for instance, if large quantities of potatoes, bread, cabbage, and rice-pudding be given to a female cat, with rations of cooked instead of raw meat—the birth of the kittens, which are grossly fat, is immensely difficult, and some of them may be still-born or appear only after long delay in mutilated fragments.
The present writer has confirmed these facts repeatedly, and they led him to ask this question: whether civilized women, even in antiquity, have not habitually taken the wrong food during gestation, with the result that their babies have been too fat or too hard in the bone at birth?