Ideas - Birth gives us life. But do you know its history?

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

We are all born. Birth is the story of all of us. So why aren’t we more curious about its history? That's what historian Lucy Inglis wanted to know. She's spent 15 years researching birth — around the globe, and across the centuries. “When you go into labour, you are a ship on the sea," says Inglis, referring to an ancient Assyrian chant acknowledging the physical perils of giving birth. While medical advances and greater freedom of choice inform birth in countries like England and Canada today, her book Born: A History of Childbirth argues that birth has a deep global history that proves it has always been a highwire act, shaped by both nature and culture. IDEAS explores the visceral, intimate realities of childbirth that have always been in evidence.

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cairs.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this Ideas podcast, could you follow us on the app you're using? It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. On ideas, there's something for everyone.

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That's what Lucy Inglis wanted to know. I think I was trying to answer why we don't put the emphasis on this life-changing, fundamental event, because it's fundamental to humanity and the continuation of humanity. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyat. English historian Lucy Inglis spent 15 years researching birth around the globe and across the centuries.

Her book is called Born, A History of Childbirth. This book contains many stories of individual women and mothers, pieced together from ice age bone fragments, medical scrolls, and 19th century pamphlets about contraception. but their voices have not been easy to find. I think there are many, many books focused on the experience of pregnancy or the experience of birth. Many of them are great texts. I don't think there is much information on the female experience birth, whether it's individual or collective within society and different societies.

She wanted everyone to know more about the history of birth because she thinks the relative silence around birth belongs to all of us. I think it's partly to do with that dreaded phrase, the patriarchy, but women can undermine the reproductive experience as much as anyone else. We've developed this idea that it's a challenge that you take on and you should just deal with it. Another factor in the silence is the raw bodily realities of the subject. Childbirth is really messy. I mean, and pregnancy can be fairly gritty.

And as some know all too well, pregnancy and birth can go wrong. We don't really want to talk about that because the outcome for most people is so positive. You get a baby, you know, it's a new life. It's all focus on the good things. That's not to say we should focus on the bad things, but we're talking about the whole experience and as it's lived by women every day. Lucy Inglis wanted to look unflinchingly at that whole experience. So before we begin, a word of warning.

Our conversation could be a tough listen if you're pregnant or have suffered a recent reproductive loss, though you're definitely not alone in that. We were going through quite a complicated time with fertility and my husband and I, and trying for children and being pregnant and not being successful, which many people experienced. These situations can be life-changing, both persons, and in a historian's case professionally. My vocation is finding out as much as I can about particular subjects. So of course, I was fertility and pregnancy, you know, obsessed for quite a long time.

And it was only towards the end of that period because we had set a limit on when we would stop trying, that objectivity emerged. And I realised that I could bring my experience as a historian to bear on the subject for not just, me and not just the individual woman, but for people to understand that there's so much to this subject. I asked Lucy Inglis to start at the beginning with the singular mechanics of human birth. We are unique because we, the female pelvis is too small to give birth to a truly fully developed baby. Hence, we are born early to facilitate the birth. This is called the obstetary Dilemma. We don't really know why this is, we have evolved to be this way. It could be to do

with us learning to walk upright for extended periods. Hence, the balance of the body changes and the pelvis is smaller. So the human infant is incredibly dependent upon caregivers for months when it's born, which is, it doesn't exist outside of us, really. So we form these very, very close bonds with offspring, with the newborn. And our bodies, have evolved to make that hormonally possible and essential and emotionally essential, because then we are bound to this child to keep them alive. That does make the human race unique. It has also had practical consequences.

You point out that women, ideally as a result of the obstetrical dilemma, need help in giving birth. Who was helping them for most of human history? For most of human history, it would have been of the women that they were close, associated with in their community. And from the very early texts that we have, pictures, hieroglyphs even, from ancient Egypt, there are two assistants. There's one behind the woman and one in front. And it's quite likely that in very early communities,

the woman who was offering literal physical support, as embracing, then there would be someone else who was providing refreshment and keeping the place warm and bringing blankets or skins or something, dealing with comfort in general. But the two essential members are the sort of the bracing position and the business end. As you indicate, this history that you've written goes right back to the beginning. What kind of evidence or storytelling exists about, childbirth and say the Paleolithic period? Mainly it's archaeological, which is great in terms of we have the knowledge from those events.

It's also very sad because we only really see the fatalities. We don't see the success stories. There is an exception in Denmark called the Fisherwoman of Barham and she died probably of sepsis. She was originally thought to be a fisherman and cataloged in a museum as such. It turned out that when they examined her pelvis, it was scarred on the inside from having up to between 10 and 12 children, they think. Wow. But there are artworks from the Australian continent.

Because of their different religious beliefs, you have quite a lot of the very early goddess depictions. And it's literally the mother, squatting and the baby emerging headfirst, usually surrounded by animals and symbols of the natural world. Women are shown giving birth among animals, often stags with preternaturally large antlers, bears, and sometimes birds in early hunter-gatherer cave art. It's thought that these paintings were made when caves were used for temporary shelter during hunting phases or as ritual sites. This does not, however, mean that early women simply hunkered down and gave birth during the hunt before resuming their subordinate role. It's more likely that this scenes depict a symbolic part of the life cycle of a woman

and represent unity with the natural world. These images are sometimes called double goddess figures, although this is misleading as they show a child being born in the safest possible way, head down, rather than a cosmic mythology we cannot hope to understand. It is not a leap to imagine that this would be something hoped for by any laboring woman, given that for much of human history, a breach birth, when the baby is born the wrong way around, feet first, could spell death for both mother and child. Women were not just represented in art, they were also makers. In eight cave complexes, in France and Spain, a significant proportion of the handprints that accompanied paintings of the hunts,

judged by shape, size, and relative finger lengths, were from hands belonging. to women. In 2008, a carved female figurine was found in Germany that was about 40,000 years old. Can you describe it? This is the Venus of HoloFels. Yeah. Yeah, she's wonderful. Quite a lot of the Venus figures. You get a few different kinds. You get very slim young Venus figures, sort of ethereal. You can see that they're symbolic. Whereas the Venus of HoloFels is a very, very crude carving of a woman after giving birth. I think she's got marks around her ribs indicating emphasizing her sagging stomach and the genitalia is ravaged, let's be honest about that. One of the things that we don't talk about with modern labour and childbirth is the trauma, the female pelvis and the soft tissue goes through during this process. And what's the story do you think that she's telling this figure?

If the theories are correct, this was the feeling of one woman about. her body postpartum and the evidence that we have from the size and the way it's carved is that it was supposed to hang from her neck or from someone's neck like a pendant like a pendant so she is looking down at her own body and looking down on this little carving whether she carved about herself or whether it was carved about someone else i think it brings the immediacy of that moment of the shock of everything that's gone on in those whether it's hours whether it's days 35 minutes, you know. It's just a great depiction that crosses all the boundaries of time.

One theme that emerges from your book is that birth doesn't just happen naturally, that it's a lot of effort and work both physical and mental. Historically, do you think women get enough credit for that kind of effort? No, I don't. For those nine months, you are growing organs. I mean, it's putting together flesh and blood, Macarno, in the dark. And also so many women take it incredibly seriously and always have done. If you look back to ancient history, the Hittites, the Elamites,

all the people of the ancient civilizations, really put so much emphasis on women's reproductive health and the course of a pregnancy, which led to lots of negative things like superstition and taboo. But equally, you could see how important and how invested these people were. The term natural comes up a lot when we, talk about childbirth, but you say that cultural values have always shaped the experience of childbirth. Can you give an early example of the kinds of cultural beliefs and taboos that would have

influenced the act of giving birth? Most of them emerge around the time of established religion, which isn't a surprise in itself, because established religion is about control. So you're always looking for the next thing to control. But the earlier customs, mainly people were just hoping for the birth to go well. And there are examples of very early spells and prayers. There's not much difference pre-Christianity, in essence, to spells and prayers. They're essentially the same thing. And a lot of them are to do with essentially when you go into labour, you are a ship on the sea and it's that dangerous. And all you're hoping for is a safe port which represents the baby.

And you are in the land of death when you're in labour and essentially a limbo. So which is why it's associated with water as well because we have all, it's kind of like the river sticks, you know, passing over and superstitions about water being associated with death. So all of these are in the earliest texts that we have. So how are they expressed? Chanting was quite common, I think, in the very early period, particularly in the evidence that we have from pre-Christian Northern Europe.

So chanting while the birth is going on? Yes. What sorts of things would be said? The baby's very rarely mentioned. It's much more to do with the woman coming back to her loved ones. She is currently lost. And there is one that mentions pregnancy. as almost a death sentence.

And now that that sentence is coming to pass, a bit like Faustus, if you imagine. You know, you've made this pact. The woman gets to be pregnant and has a possibility of a successful birth, but there is also this spectre waiting for her, and that's the deal she's made with pregnancy. And it's about the desperation of those final hours.

And I think that's very resonant for women giving birth in times when medical assistance was not available. What would you say is the most colorful superstition or taboo that you came across as you did your research? Knots are a very common theme throughout childbirth, so very often in some of the Venus figurines. They wear girdles, and these girdles were knotted, and they contained a certain amount of knots,

which you undid a knot every week over your expanding tummy. And then hopefully when all the knots were untied, you were ready to go. And also they had an idea, because the uterus is such a strong muscle, which was a known fact, the idea that if a baby couldn't escape, it was because the womb was knotted. So this untying of knots means you're relaxing the womb ready for the baby to escape, basically. And this passed over, it must have been tens and tens of thousands of years.

And there is an incredible sort of culture of not tying or not being in the presence of knots or knots in blankets. The way things are woven by a pregnant woman can change depending on where you are and results in some amazing works of art. What about things to look or not look at when you're pregnant? This certainly was contentious into the 1960s or post-Second World War.

And this was you mustn't look upon anything or be too fond of anything. that is different. So being very fond of rabbits, for instance, you might end up giving birth to rabbits. And this was a theory. But also more importantly, people on the street, there was a much higher incidence of deformity and accidental damage of people walking around than there is now because of medical advances, things like vaccinations and changes and different diseases dying out, basically. And women, pregnant women, were told absolutely not to look at anyone in this situation because that would affect their baby. Extraordinary. You write that until the last

three centuries, quote, the history of childbirth cannot be separated from the history of pain. What do you see as the most significant developments in helping labour pain? Well, we've always had opiates. The human race has had a long relationship, an evolutionary relationship. with the opium poppy and also with henbane, which is a, it's a drug, it's a plant that often grow side by side with opium poppies, bizarrely, is one of nature's wonders. And if you eat opium gum and you're not used to it, it can give you terrible stomach cramp,

and Henbane eases the stomach cramp and enhances the effect of opiates. And a lot of early medical texts, particularly ancient Egyptian ones, emphasise the use of opium, it was that common. It was a panacea. So we've always had that and it's almost so common that quite often it isn't mentioned in text specifically because people, if they had access to it, would have had it on hand in the kitchen anyway. It would have been part of the household medical cupboard. And also physicians thought pain was extremely important in judging the progress of any disease. So pain, and particularly pain during labour,

told a physician as much about the progress as anything else. So anything that stopped him having that insight, he wasn't necessarily keen on. And I think that's something that's still going now. But then, of course, we get the early anaesthetics. We had them from the crusades onwards, but they're a bit a club over the head more than helping you through labour. and you don't really need an unconscious mother.

That doesn't help anybody. Yeah, and then you got ether and chloroform, which could be administered in a measured fashion. The doctors who were successful with it, particularly those associated with Queen Victoria, for instance, who was quite vocal about her use of chloroform in her births because she did actually want other women to not suffer in the way that she perceived she had.

So chloroform, the physicians who used it successfully used it very judiciously and really worked, they often worked on each other to see what the tolerance was and how much you could absorb and still stay in the game of delivering the baby. And yet, specifically in Victorian time, I believe, if I'm not mistaken through your book, that there were people that felt that pain needed to be part of the birth experience. Oh, yes. Yeah, and even now, why? Where does that kind of ambiguous view of birth pain come from historically? There is a big element. There was when Victoria spoke up of the British medical establishment saying, you know, as it says in the Bible, women should experience pain when they give birth,

as if it's some kind of religious or moral obligation that you should be in pain when you're in labor. And however hard we try and get rid of this idea, The idea that if you're morally good and brave, you won't be in pain, it's so stubborn. It won't go away. And yet it is an inevitable part of the process. Yeah, you're going through in terms of the baby, but also the associated material and fluid. You're getting rid of a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. And going through gigantic hormonal changes, but also hormonally induced muscular contractions.

you can assist with them, but you can't stop them. It's not, no matter how many breathing exercises you do, you're not going to stop it. Once that train is on the tracks, you are essentially a passenger in many ways. It leaves you in a position where people are dictating to you how much pain you should feel. I find that very, very odd. And not only through the process, but afterwards as well, and even to today it isn't something that's easily talked about in the company of other people. No, because as well, you should be so grateful if you've had a healthy baby. Why would you complain? That brings a sense of shame sometimes, which can become internalised because you haven't got anyone to talk to about it.

And quite often, medical professionals aren't as sympathetic to a postpartum mother with birth trauma as they should be. The last bit that I was hoping you'd mention also in terms of innovation to deal with pain is, of course, the epidural. So a surgeon, my Spanish isn't too great, but called Fidel Paget. He was a doctor in Morocco. It was in the very early times after the First World War of airmen losing their legs. And also with artillery and these sorts of things. So amputations of the lower limbs were. happening a horrific rate and he designed a spinal block for this operation to go ahead with

the least pain for the recipient. So the epidural became, from the late 30s, became accepted as a method for relieving labour pain. But then of course the Second World War intervened. So the emphasis went back onto wartime surgery, field surgery, where great advances are always made in horrific wars, which is such a sad thing. So after the Second World War, in the late 40s and the 50s, that the epidural passed into becoming the sort of backstop for labour pain. The most significant development in reproductive history during the Renaissance was an extraordinary invention promoted by a famous English family of male midwives,

or a co-cher. So the flip side of what sounds like a very positive story is a, a darker chapter in all of this. There's a family called the Chamberlains. So, yeah, the Chamberlains were a medieval family from Norfolk. Guillaume Chamberlain was a French Jean-No surgeon

who found refuge from religious persecution in England in 1569. He went on to have two sons, both named Peter, the elder and the younger. The Peters followed their father into the male midwife business with great success.

They also used their father's secret invention and devised elaborate and bizarre rituals to maintain its almost mystical reputation. They combined superstition and religion and a lot of hocus pocus when they would attend births. If you summoned the Chamberlains to attend a birth, a special carriage would arrive outside your house. servants would jump down and unload a large locked box covered in gilded carvings. The Chamberlains would give the impression that this gilded box contained some massive and highly complicated machine. The women in labor would be blindfolded and everyone would be ordered out of the room. If you had your ear pressed up to the closed door while the Chamberlains assisted the mother to be,

you would hear the sound of bells ringing and other sinister noises as the machine went to work. This was the legend that spread across Europe. In fact, the invention was not a machine at all. Inside the locked box was another far smaller box that contained a carefully wrapped, extensive set of well-made cast-iron foreseps. Peter the Younger is widely credited with the creation of the foreseps, but it seems more likely that his father Guillaume brought them with him from France, and that they originated from an even older design. In any case, the success of the Chamberlains could not be denied,

and they rose to the top of their profession. Men and new interventions enter the birthing chamber in 17th century England, as described in Born a history of childbirth. It's a book written by my guest, English historian Lucy Inglis. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light,

even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.caiates. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,000.

500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. Lucy Inglis has written a global history of birth. She thinks we haven't looked deeply enough into the physical act that delivers each and every one of us into our lives.

Mind you, there are practical barriers to general discussion. For instance, most people don't share the details of their birthing stories unless you ask directly. My first daughter pushing was three to four hours. I had burst blood vessels in my face because I pushed so hard, so many different positions. And by the time I did dial out, it was very quick so they couldn't give me an epidural, which I knew I always wanted, even at that young age.

I think I was 20 or 21 when I had her. Even then, the most harrowing facts of birth can come to seem matter-of-fact over time. My second daughter, I had health issues in the sense that I had preclampsia, highly monitored after five or six months, and they had induced me because she wasn't moving out, and also because, there was some stress in her heart. They did an emergency C-section. Because my second was a high-risk,

they obviously knew the third would be at high-risk as well. Understandably, labor and delivery soon get displaced by more baby-oriented memories. Their smell, the way they smile, they looked. Those are the moments that I remember the most out of all three birds. So there's forgetting. at the personal level. But Lucy Inglis says, the forgetting is cultural too. In her book, Born, a History of Birth, she writes about the potential reasons for that, including inequality.

The input of women has so often been negated and overridden by masculine voices of doctors, husbands, organized religions, and theorists who've denied the needs, challenges, and realities of pregnant women. But at the same time, the history of childbirth includes other men, too, ones who dedicate their lives to making childbirth safer. Let's talk about the great historical shift from birth helped and attended by women, as you described earlier, to birth professionalized and overseen by men. What caused that shift? So male physicians had very much. prior to about 1730 had very much shied away from women's problems. Administering to them during pregnancy for the ailments or writing a nice prescription was one thing,

but many men did not want to get involved with examining women gynecologically or really getting to the bottom of a problem. And usually if a male surgeon or a male doctor was required in that period, he was supervising a midwife who had been with the mother quite possibly for many months. So this was the normal pattern that we were extremely successful, in North America, across North America, extremely successful, semi-professional female midwives who were taken on as soon as the mother knew she was pregnant and became part of a weekly single. series of rounds. And then she would take on only as many as she knew she could look after, but she developed very good relationships with them. And they are incredibly successful. And two days later, they stay with the mother, let's say 12 hours after birth. And then two days later, they come back on their pony or with their horse and trap. And they have lunch with the mother

to check that she's eating and that she's nursing and check on the baby. And all these relationships, relationships are totally invaluable. But because we're growing in the 1730s, 40s, we're going towards an increasingly urban and professional society, then men push themselves to the forefront of anything that's profitable. And that is seeing as many women as possible and ensuring their successful birth as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next patient. And this minimise, and the female midwives of the youths of the youths of the youths, UK in particular, were absolutely outraged by this intrusion. And it was the start of

true female literacy, because many women were quite often bought up to read, but not to write. But in the 18th century, that changed. So you get lots of fairly ordinary women who are professional midwives, but are literate, writing serious pamphlets on the intrusion of men, and also saying men don't wash their hands, they don't understand the importance of hygiene in the chamber. They're not sympathetic. You get, and you can understand why, because for them, it's a job. Where did male midwives fit into this picture? Male midwives come about around that time, and they are trained. We were particularly fortunate in London. We had a male gynecologist, midwife, obstetrician, William Smelly, very unfortunate name, and his Scottish compatriot.

William Hunter, who ended up being the Queen's obstetrician, but William Hunter was very much Mr. Hands Off. He was great at the theory of pregnancy and everything that could go wrong. He was really good on things like preeclampsia and understanding the symptoms, and he didn't understand it as preeclampsia, but he knew what was going wrong.

But Smelly was fantastic at training people, and he trained women as well, and he trained poor women for free to work in their communities. and he was very, very instrumental in London and throughout the UK and actually eventually throughout the world because his books on labour and obstetrics in general made it all around the world.

So by the 1750s, he was training lots of young men and women. William Smelly's success and reputation grew fast. He taught more than two weeks. 280 courses on midwifery, each lasting a fortnight. He charged by ability to pay, so the many poor women who took his course paid very little, while the young men, hoping to break into the lucrative industry of man midwifery, had to pay the full fee. He also had a pregnancy doll, now known as a phantom. It was a half-life-sized anatomical model with a removable cushion fitted over the belly to hide the internal. organs and uterus shown at full term inside. He would ask his students to gather around and instruct one of them to pull a string from the phantom. The uterus would then release a bag of small beer attached to a hidden cork which poured out of the doll and all over the students to simulate water-breaking. Many of the young men were shocked, which was his intention. Smelly and his phantom

taught over 900 pupils of both sexes who delivered more than 1,100 women in London's West End during their courses. Many of these women would have been poor as patients were not charged on the condition that his students could attend the birth. How did the Caesarian, the C-section, first enter the picture? So there are lots of accounts of the C-section

being used since the time of Caesar but it was a death sentence for the mother. And very often they waited until the mother was actually dead to deliver the baby, which as we know now is usually fatal also for the baby, unless it's done exceptionally quickly. The outcomes probably would have been much better with early intervention, but that's something we've learned over hundreds of years. But after the Crusades, again, a time of war and time of medical advance,

because East met West, and we gained a lot of knowledge from the Muslim medical community and brought that back to Western Europe. But again, the outcome for the mother. And then in 1500 in the Alps, there was a sow gelder, which I found as amazing as an occupation. But I think he was probably an all-round pig keeper. Jacob Neufa delivered his wife Elizabeth by emergency cesarean section. And it was successful and she survived.

And it's supposed to have gone on to have had other children afterwards. Extraordinary. Yeah. From the 1800s onwards it becomes more common. People become braver with it, mainly because of surgical technique. And so that's when they become more routine and successful. Yes. And one of the big advances was that they worked out not to cut straight down the middle, but to make transverse incision. And which if you think about it is probably not the obvious one for a man approaching the task. But of course, that's the one that works better and avoids the major organs, which was a big concern for them. If you read the early texts, a lot of failures are to do with hitting organs. So when did birth as a hospital procedure first begin to happen routinely? Yeah, this would be back in the 1750s when we started really building hospitals. And the early incidences, and again, with the event of male midwives arriving,

It's kind of seen that you could have so many female assistants on a maternity ward, again, rise of urbanisation. They could all be in one place and then you could have these female attendants going round, doing the laundry, observing them moment to moment, but then you would have a man who was overseeing all of it. And unfortunately in London we were losing 80% of any ward to purple fever because they didn't wash their hands. and that's not to say that that is not all doctors that needs to be said now because there are lots of incidences of male midwives who are incredibly successful

and they make a point of hygiene so it didn't take long for people to work that out but that became so it kind of emerged in 1750s and then in the 1780s people were still saying I don't think I really want to go into hospital I think I manage at home and then by about 1820 when we've finally got a handle, we don't really know what causes childbed fever,

but we've got much more of a handle on early germ theory, then people start to have more confidence in hospitals. And then by the 1850s, and we're really in the industrial revolution, hospitals were a necessity just for the amount of women who were giving birth. Yeah. Could you speak to that, just in general terms, like what you see as the upsides to that process of medicalizing. both. It depends on how

complex, because we think naturally possibly one in eight pregnancies is compromised in some way and does need intervention. So otherwise they progress at their own rate, which is different for everybody. I mean, everybody's heard very quick labours,

everybody's heard very long labours. So the upside of it is that someone has eyes on you pretty much all the time. and there are things that are not available outside a medical environment, such as, and this is one of also the huge improvements in advances in medical technology. So we understood from about 1,600 onwards that fetal heart rate was the great indicator

of how well the baby was doing and ear trumpets and things like that. But as we all know, there's a lot going on down there. It's quite noisy. So it wasn't easy to work that kind of thing out. And it wasn't again until advancements in technology from really the 30s that allowed us to listen to the fetal heart rate. And now it's amazing. You know, we've got the scalp monitors.

We've got every monitor going. And we can monitor blood oxygen. We can do all of these different things. It's just fantastic. Because you can have the calmest mother in the world for whatever reason. And the baby can be in distress. equally, you can have an extremely distressed mother and the baby's actually okay. So those kinds of things are invaluable in a medical setting.

And the downsides? And the downsides are unsympathetic experiences, I think, is probably number one. And also anecdotally, because I spoke to a lot of women, I still think that early intervention is not adopted often enough. And I think that is again harking back to women not being taken seriously. Which is a feature of women's health care even today. Yes. With that in mind, you have looked at thousands of years of birth history in your book. As you say, you've spoken to so many women as well.

So this is a really big question. But how far do you think we've come in making childbirth better for everyone? It's cyclical. would be my immediate answer. I think the 20th century, because we're moving at such a rate technologically and socially, on every level, scientifically as well to do with genetics and things like that,

we can expect certain things from a birth based on the genetics. I mean, you know, there are all these different factors. So we've come a very, very long way, but attitudes most certainly are flexible and cyclical. And I think we're currently passing back into a period of global conservatism. And I don't think that helps mothers particularly, certainly in the experience of childbirth. And if you look at it from a scientific point of view, we're more successful.

In settled first world nations, we're more successful than we've ever been. And if you look at Iceland and Finland, their statistics are, they're brilliant at it. They just get it right. If you look at sub-Saharan Africa, we are not getting it right there. We're introducing medical technology that is unsupportable in these birthing situations very often fails. And people put themselves out of their environment in order to travel to a hospital that then has no power. And they're reliant on something to save them and their baby that isn't functioning. Or, you know, there's no taxi or the taxi breaks down or there's no ambulance.

and we're making people rely on something that isn't going to work for them. So I think we have to rethink the fact that every advance is not an advance for everybody. And it is not always recognised or reflected in financial circumstances because the United States of America does not have a great successful birth rate statistic. What's the reason for that? I think that there are enormous racial, intentions regarding treatment of laboring women. And unfortunately, if you are black or Hispanic, you do not get the, you certainly don't get the prenatal care in the majority of care.

If you're poor, you do not get the prenatal care that you need. The catastrophes are usually younger women with less education who haven't been given any advice during pregnancy and are not. living in secure circumstances, then receive poor healthcare and have very poor outcomes. And it also has to do with the cost of health care. Yeah, because it's just too much. I mean, I think entry level birth is something like $130,000. That's insane. I mean, it's just extraordinary because how does anyone afford that?

But if you look back at all the work you've put into building this history of childbirth, how do you hope it can revise our understanding of the experience, of childbirth. I hope that the book gives people lots of information and individual stories of women who for tens and tens of thousands of years have tried to express what it's like to be pregnant and what it's like to give birth in extant artwork or the evidence of their bodies even and that they can experience a great sense of community and continuity through these stories and also perhaps learn something they haven't learned before about how the science of childbirth is evolving and and also not feel that if they have worries or concerns that

they're alone you know the amount of ladies that I've spoken to who have gone into labor really not knowing very much about what's going to happen almost deliberately which is not a criticism. It's just not my approach, obviously, having written a book like this, but there is validity in most approaches. And it's really important to believe that the female experience of pregnancy, but particularly labour, is so centralised, it's so personal, that there is a, now, I think, possibly more than ever, that is this idea that you have to do it on your own. And I hope this book shows that has not been the case for as far back as we have records. So you don't have to do it on your own.

Ask friends and relatives about their birthing memories, and you'll hear a range of experiences. No matter how difficult you have a birthing process, when you see the baby, you forget everything. So most of it I have forgotten about it. yet memory can come into focus. I came from Pakistan and back home when I see it, it was completely different. My first experience was very difficult.

My first child in 1968 in Canada, in Vancouver. Didn't know anything. Didn't know anybody at that time. When I started ready to go to hospital, but I was not ready to give birth. So they kept me in the room, isolated. I didn't have any support. But they didn't even let my husband come in. He was sitting outside the door.

And I was by myself every half, and our nurse will come and check me. And I was not ready. So it took me about two, three days. and I could hear they were talking when doctor came to see me, and they were thinking to have C-section, but they said they will wait. And another day passed. I was ready, but they had to force it.

So it was very difficult, and especially if you don't have any support, I was by myself, and I was very scared. I can't forget that. You don't talk to, like in my culture, you don't talk to man about pregnancy or birth or that. So I had nobody to talk to. And I was not very fluent in English at that time.

I'm talking about 1968. So I couldn't really converse comfortably with the doctor or ask the questions. I wish I was among other people, like if I was back in Pakistan, it would have been different. There would be my mother, my mother-in-law, or support will be there. They will tell me how to react at that time. At that time, I was alone and I didn't know how to do it.

And even no nurse or doctor was around me at the time. And so I would say that that was really very difficult, and I can't forget that. disparities still exist around giving birth. Loneliness and poor communication too. But overall, mothers, parents, have greater agency than in the past. These days, either you have midwife or you have doctor or you have nurses, you can talk to them, ask them questions. You need support.

There are choices now around giving birth in a country like Canada. Hospitals, home births, birthing centers, culturally specific. birth practices. Pain relief or not? Labor and delivery inevitably holds surprises, but parents to be are invited to design a birthing plan if they want. My plan was not to have a plan at all. I didn't want to get too attached to how a labor should go. I was just ready to ride the wave and see how things went. So if I needed an epidural, I'd get one. If I didn't, that was fine too. Pain and uncertainty are still part of giving birth. But for some, with the right support and a little luck, the experience can be meaningful and memorable.

So I labored mostly at home, and then by the time my midwife arrived to check my dilation to see if I should go into the hospital. Surprisingly, I was fully dilated. So at that point, there was no going back. And so I came in and I was laboring with my support system, my husband and my mom and sisters. The most memorable moment for me was actually giving birth in a water tub, like in a birth pool. And it felt natural for me to use that method. When I am in water, I do feel calm. I feel warm.

I feel supported. I wanted to do an unmedicated birth. And so I put it on my birth plan. I didn't expect it to be something that I was going to go through because they say, you know, so many things can happen. And just the logistics of getting the birth pool to the hospital. I told myself, you know, I'll give it a try. If it doesn't happen, I gave it my best. But if it does, that would be fantastic. So the fact that I was able to actually labor in the birth pool as well as give birth in the birth. birth pool and have my baby come out on me while I'm sitting there with him while I'm still in it. It was such a fantastic experience. It's funny because I'm not a very emotional person. I don't remember a lot of memories like that, but especially for my first daughter,

I remember how she looked like a little cat, and that's how she kind of cried to when she first cry, like almost like a meow. And holding her and this smell, I had said, please clean her up before you give her to me. I'm not that mother. And she just smelled so beautiful and new. And just looking at her, I'm like, I just felt so connected to her.

I asked a final question of Lucy Inglis, whether there is one lesson she took away from looking at centuries of childbirth. I think it's that the role of the mother should be more respected in terms of that short, brief window of her life when it's being turned upside down. And she's experiencing so much incoming and outgoing at the same time that it's difficult to retain. a sense of self and control. And I think that hopefully this book will give people, I'm not saying they should be thinking of the book when they're in labour,

but it will give them some kind of factual bedrock about how this is part of life and give them a sense of how they fit into one of the most important historical things that will ever happen to us. The moment that I remember the most is the actual feeling of my daughter being born. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I could feel her shoulders and her whole body just moving through mine. It felt like magic.

It felt like an actual human coming through me and giving life to a new human. It felt like the world kind of stopped in that moment. Pregnancy and birth are attended by myriad, personal, emotional, social and physical dangers, but also joy, triumph, and wonder. In nine short months, from two cells, the body constructs a new life and brings it into the world in a unique moment where all is possible. You've been listening to a conversation about the early history of childbirth with historian Lucy Inglis. She's the author of Born, A History of Birth.

Special thanks to Nikut Mustafa, Amrina Patel, Maria Muhammad, Anna Lukhchic, and others who shared their birth experiences. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey, with help from the Heid Mustafa, Nikola Lukhic, Sam McNulty, and Annie Bender. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production by Sam McNulty and Jean-Francois-Bisson. Nicola Luxchich is the program's senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.