Whenever I visit the Women’s Pavilion of our local hospital, I feel both very happy and very sad. What I see there is so different from how the women of my mother’s generation had to give birth back in the Soviet Union. As I explained before, every experience of a human being in the USSR was fashioned in a sense that would break his or her spirit and sever the connections between family members. This was a process that began while one was still in the mother’s womb.
When a woman went into labor, she would be brought into the hospital and separated from the child’s father for the next 10 days that the stay at the maternity ward usually lasted. Women were kept together in large wards irrespective of what had actually brought them to the hospital. If a woman had a still-birth, for instance, she’d be kept in the same ward with a bunch of women who delivered healthy babies. Imagine the emotional state of a woman who’d have to look at other people’s happiness and think of her own dead baby for 10 days.
For some mysterious reason, underwear was strictly banned in maternity wards and the nurses – who always made an impression of having been trained by the Gestapo – hunted after every pair of panties. Women were assigned a time slot when they were supposed to give birth, and nobody cared if labor proceeded on a different schedule. When my mother went into labor with my sister, she had to schlep all the way to the nurses’ station and ask for somebody to help her deliver.
“No, you are not scheduled to give birth for the next 4 hours,” the nurse barked.
“I’ve given birth before,” my mother. “I know what is going on, and this baby is coming now. Please help me.”
“I told you to go back to your bed, you stupid broad!” the nurse hollered.
Later, the doctors told us that we were very fortunate that my sister came out alive and unharmed.
The worst part of delivery was having to get into the delivery chair. It was very high, and for a pregnant woman in labor getting into it unassisted (and, of course, nobody was willing to assist women) was torture.
After the birth, the baby would be removed from the mother’s side immediately. Fathers were banned from the event altogether, and had to roam the area where the hospital was located for the next 10 days, hoping to get a glimpse of their wives through the window.
Babies were brought to their mothers to be breast-fed on schedule and then removed immediately. Of course, nobody cared that babies might not be hungry according to the schedule. The rest of the time, babies were kept in a big room far away from their mothers and could scream their little heads off in loneliness and abandonment. If you’ve ever been around a baby, you probably know that hunger, loneliness and being separated from their parents are the most traumatic, horrible things a newborn can experience. This is precisely why all of this was done.
The nurses were careless and indifferent. As a result, cases where babies were swapped by mistake (or even by malice) were not infrequent.
The father would finally get to touch the baby when the mother was discharged. He had to pay the traditional fee to the nurses for getting the baby: 5 rubles for a boy and 3 for a girl.
This is how very uncomplicated deliveries took place. What women who had medical complications had to experience would be characterized as torture under any definition of what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The real tragedy of Soviet life was that every tiny detail of a person’s daily experience was rendered humiliating, painful, and intolerable.
Today, this is still pretty much how you give birth in FSU countries, except if you live in a very big city and are rich enough to pay for a stay at a private facility. The nurses at the expensive facility will still be Gestapo-like, the underwear will still be banned, and the baby will be handled like a slab of meat, but at least the father will be there and you’ll get to be close to the baby.
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Rhodesia and Zimbabwe have not been so good regarding medical things either. For instance, health screenings in schools were like being lined up like cattle to undergo a horrible experience. Nothing medical had anything other than a punitive aura around it. Even animals did not receive anything other than rough treatment from the vets. The animal side of people was not well respected.
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Not surprising.
British (more specifically English) family life has always seemed to me to be shaped by an active dislike of children and resentment at having to provide for them. As an outpost of that culture, a lot of the nice cover is going to be stripped away leaving the hostil core.
And Sub-Saharan cultures don’t seem any better. I don’t know the specifics of central southern Africa but it’s not far from places where children are either used for the raw ingredients of magic or are routinely thought to be possessed by demons and undergo (sometimes lethal) exorcisms. This latter practice is now present in Europe through the wonders of non-assimilatory multi-culturalism.
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Actually in general the Shona culture does take care of its children and children are very much enjoyed. Not so much the white, colonial culture I come from:
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/animal-will-fight-to-death-to-protect.html
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By the way, I have written a great deal about the weird hostility of my parents, but I have never had anyone who has really believed me about this. That is not to say that my parents are hostile nowadays, but that has been the tendency. Now almost everybody I tried to relate this to came up with the notion that there must have been something very weird about me to evoke these highly negative attitudes they had. I kept saying I had done nothing strange at all, and then people would accuse me of over-sensitivity. They would assert that I must be assuming the existence of parental aggression where none in fact existed. So, I thought, fine, this kind of hostility is also considered culturally normal in Australia. It turns out it isn’t, just that people have a problem stretching their imagination to contemplate something they have not themselves experienced.
My memoir is writing about this topic, but it is basically unreadable, because people do not want to countenance this kind of thing and assume I must be making it all up, or exposing people, perhaps, who had good will to me, or blowing something out of proportion, when the opposite is true. I have tried to portray the reality is soft and muted colors.
But so it goes — and the attribution of excessive emotionality to me when I try to point something out is, of course, patriarchal complicity.
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No, it isn’t just Australia. The problem is that placing one’s parents under critical scrutiny is the crucial stage in the process of growth. You will never become an adult unless you do it.
The patriarchal prohibition against becoming an adult is very high. So is the resistance to the idea of becoming an adult.
When you begin walking in the direction of personal growth, this scares most people and gives them a vague realization that the should be doing the same thing. They experience guilt for not maturing, for remaining tiny, scared tots for life.
So they lash out against you and vociferate that you are crazy, that you invented everything.
Their screams are meant to silence the doubts in their own heads.
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I never imagined that most people — the absolute majority — could be so immature. We can count university professors and feminists among them, not to mention relatives, alleged friends and passers by.
I am absolutely certain, in terms of my experiences society as a whole did not used to be so mature. The majority of people of adult age were in fact adults. Nowadays to find an adult anywhere is the absolute exception to the norm.
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Tragic.
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Pretty much the way I was born, as told by my mother. So I don’t think is only a soviet thing. Personnel were not exactly rude on her words but not exactly qualified. I wanted to come to this world and they didn’t want me to. In the end they had no choice but to listen to me!
It was very cold, and yes my father had to wait those famous ten days to see me. No money whatsoever was paid though.
I was relieved that the atmosphere was very relaxed when I went to see my friend deliver last year. She didn’t have any complications so I don’t know how good they’d be at handling them.
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I’m glad you didn’t listen to them and arrived on this world notwithstanding! 🙂
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Reblogged this on Oyia Brown.
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Rambling thoughts, questions.
What were pre-Soviet Ukrainian births like? How much of this is purposeful Soviet methodology and how much is cultural weirdness?
When I think of pre-Soviet Russia I certainly don’t think of any kind of social environment I’d ever want to live in and have a hard time imagining that giving birth was anything but a horrible trauma for most women.
How did the women in the wards treat each other?
*a lot of the worst soviet practices often seemed to stem from treating human logistics in purely technocratic terms, one the other hand I often think that the Soviet government just kept on treating the great majority of people like …. serfs (who simply acquired new rulers).
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Of course, the Russian Empire was an uncivilized, unenlightened place with a much poorer record of women’s rights than Western European countries or the US.
After 1917, there was a very intense drive towards female liberation that was very successful in a variety of ways. However, in the area of everything that had to do with female physiology, things remained almost as bad as during the tsarist times. Everything was done to make the physiological side of existence as a woman as unpleasant and horrible as possible. Just the forced, public gynecological exams one had to be subjected to since early puberty would be enough to traumatize one for life.
“How did the women in the wards treat each other?”
– Our people tend to be a lot nastier to each other than people in any other culture I have encountered. It is, indeed, curious whether it was always like this or is a result of totalitarianism.
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Rhodesia wasn’t much different. For instance even though The accumulated global knowledge as to how to stop menstrual pains must have been pretty substantial by the seventies (the pill being one option), no information was conveyed to me. Even very simple things that one woman could have conveyed to another, such as don’t have a congested or full bowel if your period is due, could have helped immensely. But nothing was conveyed. Just take an asprin and a hot water bottle. Since the pain was equivalent to having a hot blade thrust into my lower abdomen and kept there for a couple of days, this was akin to criminal negligence.
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“Even very simple things that one woman could have conveyed to another, such as don’t have a congested or full bowel if your period is due, could have helped immensely. But nothing was conveyed. Just take an asprin and a hot water bottle.”
– I’m even worse because I have never heard of any of these things.
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Oh. Trial and error. I figured them out.
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I never knew them either.
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Коли моя мати народжувала їй лікар також сказав – тобі ще не час, і пішов спати, а коли він повернувся вже було запізно. Але щодо медсестер все і досі правда 🙂 Якби не бездушна радянська медицина, я мав би брата…
Зараз стало дещо інакше. На сьогодні в Україні прийнято завчасно домовлятись з лікарем про те, що ти будеш у нього народжувати, і заплатиш йому, у випадку позитивного результату, від 400 до 1000 дол. Але і це не гарантує чуйного ставлення з їх боку. Я знаю випадки, коли така домовленість, навіть за найвищої вартості, не забезпечувала уважного ставлення з боку лікарів. Зараз є маса сайтів де українські жінки діляться враженнями про лікарів, і намагаються обрати найкращих, з тих, що їм по кишені оплатити. Народжувати без домовленості ризикують лише фаталісти, чи ті кому байдуже до долі матері чи дитини, соціально незахищені верстви. Але ми з дружиною, декілька років тому вимущені були ризикувати. Пологи почалися у ніч на Різдво. Мороз -20С, машина не завелась, швидкої допомоги чи таксі було годі чекати – свято, усі святкують, в тому числі й лікарі. Свята – це найгірший час для народження чи хвороби в Україні. Ми вимушені були звертатись в найближчий пологовий будинок, на чергову бригаду, а не туди, куди, де ми домовлялись. Але, Слава Господу Богу, усе минуло добре. До слова, в нас вже досить поширені партнерські роди. Я весь час пологів знаходився поруч з дружиною і дитину передали мені через декілька хвилинг після народження. А лікарю, звичайно, ми віддячили потім в сумі 400 долл. США. Дружина перебувала у платному одномісному номері (щось біля 200 долл. за тиждень). Дитина весь час була з нею. Аналогічно було і в усіх моїх друзів.
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The panties thing also existed (and possibly still does). If you ever find out wtf that was all about, I’d love to hear it.
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The U.S. was not that different then.
http://obnurse35yrs.wordpress.com/my-1st-birth-event/
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Completely different.
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I would just book the OR. Elective c-sections are fast, convenient and can be sutured with dissolving stitches and sealed with Derma Bond. No need for all that other mess, and the natural birth banshees can suck it!
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“Natural birth banshees” is a great way of putting it. 🙂
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learning a lot about pregnancies thanks to you
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