Is it OK to have a child? (lrb.co.uk)

di Meehan Crist

knew only that I had to survive,’ Jane Lazarre 
writes about the process of giving birth.

I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command ... pushing with all my might, I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying.

‘To let the baby out,’ Maggie Nelson writes, ‘you have to be willing to go to pieces.’ ‘Just this is miraculous,’ Carole Maso writes. ‘That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.’ Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there are ecstatic births, orgasmic births, traumatic births, and what would be traumatic for one may not be for another.

How we make sense of such experiences has always depended on the contingencies of biology as well as those of time and place, gender, class and race … leggi tutto