Friday essay: our culture sees women’s bodies as faulty machines, but there are other birthing possibilities

By Holly High, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Deakin University

I did not think particularly deeply about birth until the prospect of my own labour was on the horizon. I asked my grandmother, then in her eighties, what to expect.

It was a family gathering in June 2013. We were sitting side-by-side at the long, polished dining table that fills almost the entire dining room of a wooden farmhouse outside a town in the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales, where we’d spent many Christmas lunches.

I was leaning toward Joan across my new and strange belly, and her smile seemed to say: no judgement that your pregnancy preceded any sort…

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