[This and the previous sequels are from a Chapter from Placenta Wit: Mother Stories Rituals, and Research, edited by Nané Jordan, Demeter Press, 2017, pp. 142-155.]
BIRTH GIFTING: MOTHERS AT THE CENTRE
Through placental relations and placental thinking, we can imagine this gift economy as located in the heart of the primal mother-baby dyad. There, I would locate a specific embodied maternal order of the gift that flows from mother to child, and onward into the whole social milieu, as life goes on from this primal, primary relationship. As Genevieve Vaughan notes, there are many hidden ways of the gift that are not yet named. I thus name the placenta, with its gift morphology (growth, structure, and design), as an embodied gift economy that has always existed. The eventual maternal act and power of giving birth flow from placental relations.. Beyond the birth process, mother and child are released from their in-utero placental bonds and set off on the trajectory of new mother-child gifting relations.
In the current market system and exchange economy, placentas are literally thrown out after birth. This is a striking action and metaphor for our social understandings of the maternal gift as being literally worthless. The notion of garbage itself is “refuse” or what is refused. Thus, the gift is refused and made invisible. Mothers know little about their babies’ placentas, often never seeing them in the hospital except for as a bloody lump in a metal side tray left aside after the birth. In the exchange economy, value is only apparent when the market assigns value to the placenta, as in its use for stem cell research or in the cosmetics industry. We could read this in newspapers and hardly connect stem cells to the placentas of our own early lives, born from our mothers’ bodies and blood. The association of birth blood with refuse also relates to long-time taboos, secrecy, and shame associated with menstrual blood in Western cultures (Grahn). Rather than socially upholding the sacred function of the female body’s life-gifting powers, the public prefers the death blood dominate in popular media culture, and the lived realities of violence and war. In contrast, the blood of life and birth receives silent attention.
Further separation rituals, such as early cord cutting and taking the baby away from the mother at the moment of birth, disrupt mother-baby bonding, hormonal systems, and unity. These procedures ultimately interrupt the physiological peak of mothers’ experiences of relief, pleasure, and love in birth gifting, which are part of early bonding and begin the moment a mother becomes pregnant (Buckley). There is an intended dynamic of “safe” birth care at work in obstetrical practices in order to diminish the risks of birth giving. Ostensibly, doctors work in concert with medical protocols and interventions to ward off the risk and fear of death and feelings of pain—truisms of birth. Mothers and babies do walk along the edges of life and death in birth’s passage, in which giving birth is an overwhelming experience that can be painful or dangerous, and requires our whole sense of being. The life-saving capacities of modern medicine are important in this regard. Yet it appears that through fear of pain and death, dominant authoritative structures have become linked to the medicalization of birth and the overuse of interventions. Fear of entering an overwhelming experience such as birth, and often without support, education, understanding, or some attending human warmth and kindness, may also be keeping people tied to a system that loses sight of the maternal gift. Also lost are the positive experiential potentials for relief and even pleasure in giving birth through one’s own power and agency. As we continue to apply medical technologies and market-based, hierarchical attitudes of authority in birth care, can we shift birth practices toward more giftlike ways? Can we put mothers and babies at the centre of birth gifting through placental thinking?
In midwifery, a “motherer,”as Genevieve Vaughan names it, is anyone who satisfies needs unilaterally, not expecting reward. Is this a missing or lost gift economy in birth? Of course, there are doctors who practice this gift, putting mothers and babies at the centre of birth, who view mothers kindly and lovingly with care. But directing the gift of compassionate attention is a more common philosophy for midwives and doulas, which includes the ability and commitment to support and empathize with the mother. In a diagrammatic perspective, this looks like a circle, with supportive caregivers holding space for the mother, who is at the centre. In this circle, the mother can retain and direct her own energies and agency for birth giving, both physical and psychic, toward herself and her baby. She is in trusting relations with her attendants, who direct their energy toward her (and not themselves) as needed, and have ability to step back if not needed. In authoritarian and hierarchical systems of care, the energy of birth is directed in straight lines up and away from the mother and baby and toward the attendants at the top. Attention tends to focus on the birth attendants as they dictate the directions for birth experience and implement their expertise, often without regard to the mothers’ wishes. Mothers may feel depleted or worse, traumatized from giving birth under systems that appropriate their birth-gifting power without regard for the centrality of their agency and experience. Obviously, there many nuances and complexities to this topic, and often more analysis is needed on a case-by-case basis.
In this regard, birth giving inherently asks a mystery of us. It is older and wiser than our clocks and interventions, and unfolds uniquely for every mother and baby who enter its experience. I have witnessed home and hospital births with “motherer” attendants at hand, where those mothers and babies are held at the centre of a circle of care and love. Attendants keep a respectful watch, moving toward or away as asked or needed. A birthing mother, feeling safe to surrender into her own birth process—however this is for her as she navigates pain, body sensation, pleasure, mind and emotion of it all—exudes her own hormonal cocktail. Birthing energies, generated by mother and baby, can instill a sense of grace in the birth room as baby arrives, earth side.
Thus, placental thinking is enacted in holistic and empowering models of woman-centred birth, which value mothers’ integrity and wellbeing. At home, in clinics, birth centres or hospitals, anywhere really, mother- and baby- centred care is always advisable and possible, no matter the interventions or procedures that are needed (World Health Organization). This gifting of care through a socially just attitude depends heavily on the people, philosophies, and practices in these places. Placental thinking moves beyond patriarchal, authoritarian, market-based practices of birth toward valuation of mothers and the experiential gifts and gifting of life.
CONCLUDING PLACENTAL GIFTS
Reclaiming the role and value of the placenta may help transform our understandings of birth and return human origins to the mother. Becoming a placental thinker, I call for new science, arts, and understandings of birth to arise from social movements of birth, from mothers’ direct birthing experiences, and from the wisdom that is deeply embedded in mothers, birth givers, and humans being born. We would not be here without the eons of human birthing relationships that have come before us, nor without the stream of mother gifts that predates our own lives. We are given the gift, and we can pass this gift to others. The passing along of gifts is most poignant in the opposite of birth—death. Placental thinking speaks to the fundamental necessity of human regeneration. We are durational beings that die and require the next generation to be given life to go on.
I honour the sacred gift of life that comes from so many birthings, which includes attention to our human interrelationship with the Earth as Mother, from which we draw continually and return all the gifts of our life force and source. In such ways, the placenta is making its wisdom known among mothers and others. Worldwide, mother-gifting pathways can be traced, claimed, and followed for the sustenance and affirmation of life, which is at the maternal roots of our human being and doing.
(End of the Essay)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Nane Jordan.
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