Trying to Understand

This is from Birth as an American Rite of Passage:

After much research and more questioning, I had reached the conclusion that American hospital birth rituals are medically damaging and psychologically
disempowering and degrading to women. Once I had arrived at this conclusion, I had a good deal of trouble understanding why anyone would want a technocratic birth. Although it is true that I did not encounter many women who really wanted a highly technocratic birth, I kept running into woman after woman who felt generally comfortable with such a birth...I must take seriously the notion that American women do not rise up in protest against technocratic birth because it is in fact what most of them want.

Why? To ask why women want technocratic births is, in a broader sense, to ask what technocracy has done for women that they should value it so. The answer to that question seems clear: in the early years of this century technology began to give women the power to expand beyond the "natural order" that made so many of them, in an industrialized society, appear to themselves to be slaves to their biology. Ever since the invention of the bottle - the "war cry" of a generation of women - technology has increasingly offered women a way out of the home and into participation in the wider social world. And this trend has not slowed. Women's continued expansion beyond the "natural order" that kept them in "women's domain" is increasingly facilitated by technology, which women therefore have special reason to value and to seek.

This makes sense to me. I have wondered why so many women reject nature in favor of technology, and now it finally makes sense. People who are not hoping for a natural birth, or people who say "I want a natural birth, but we'll see" - they have an entire belief system that relies on doctors and medicine to alleviate their fears of the dangerous and bewildering natural birth process, to make it mechanical and predictable. I had thought for a long time that it was simply fear of pain, but it is more than that. It is fear of, among other things:

* physical danger
* exile from culture/social expectations
* being enslaved to unpredictable biological rhythms

and has little to do with birth itself. What we believe about birth is part of a larger system of beliefs, and these beliefs affect how we labor and where and how we deliver our babies. "What we believe is what can come true for us...If a woman believes on the deepest emotional level that the hospital is the only safe place to birth, then if she tries to deliver at home she won't be successful" (Lewis Mehl).