Why We Fight

My husband is a Band of Brothers fan. I'm not sure how many times I've watched the entire series with him, and the number of times he has watched it far surpasses mine. One episode is titled "Why We Fight." It is towards the end of the war and thousands of Germans are surrendering each day. A magazine article being read by one of the members of Easy Company describes why Americans are fighting in Europe. "Apparently the Nazis are bad, very bad" is the summation by the private. Another private starts yelling at the surrendered men and asks the rhetorical question, "Why are we even here?!" In midwifery, I sometimes feel the same way that Private Webster felt; tired, frustrated, angry at ignorance, haggard, and wanting someone to yell at and vent my emotions.

So why are we here? To fight. To fight for women's rights, to fight for birth's rights, to fight for society's rights. When birth is relegated to being a medical disaster waiting to happen, women become simply incubators that are to be manhandled and controlled until the desired outcome is achieved: the delivery of a child. Then, and only then, the woman becomes a woman again, a mother, a human, who is supposed to not dwell on the trauma and abuse that just happened to her and her body and rejoice that she was spared from the dangers of delivery and that her baby has survived such a traumatic event. I ask myself so many times, how can people see this and not just be horrified and outraged?! How can they sit by and not fight for their family member or their friend when they are being physically attacked? Would they do the same thing in another situation - out walking in their neighborhood, if someone came into their home? NO!! They would FIGHT for their loved one's safety and FIGHT to get away from this attacker. Why is it that when the letters MD are attached to someones name they suddenly become some form of god-like figure and are allowed to attack women?

And so we fight. We stand up to say that birth does matter. That women's choices to labor and birth her baby how she deems best are worth fighting for. We fight to say that women are capable of making informed decisions regarding where they birth and how they birth - in water, standing up, laying down, squatting, hanging upside down for all I care. We fight to say that it does matter how a woman feels about herself before, during and after she births her baby. We fight to empower women to know that they are able to deliver their child without surgery, without instruments, without someone yelling "PUSH!" at them. And then we rejoice with them when they reach down and pull their baby up to their chest. We cry and laugh and hug and celebrate that they have a new member of their family who has just entered the world - because it truely is a miracle every time birth happens.

Birth matters. More than many know and more than many may like to admit. And so we fight; another day, another month, another year. Because birth matters.