At the baby shower, a friend discovered I was going to have an elective C-section. This is a very excitable and highly principled friend (she wouldn’t be my friend otherwise, for obvious reasons), so she stopped in the middle of the room and offered an impassionate speech about the evils of elective C-sections and joys of “natural” birth.
“Feminism. . . Medicalization of the female body. . . An important experience to have. . . Pain is a part of life and should not be avoided. . . Back in the nineteenth century. . .”
A woman with a very tiny infant in her arms stopped behind my friend and was listening intently. When she paused to draw a breath, the woman with an infant exclaimed, “Vaginal birth is horrible, horrible! It’s terribly painful! It sucks! Don’t do it!”
There was so much real pain in her voice that nobody felt like continuing the debate.
“You are a feminist, how can you choose a C-section?” my friend asked me later.
“It’s because I’m a feminist,” I explained.
My friend is a California feminist and I’m a post-Soviet one, so there are areas in which we are the exact opposites.
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