UNNATURAL CHILDBIRTH
SIR,—Monica Furlong on childbirth takes some nice pot-shots at the theorists (most of them men), but, like every other mother on the subject, is talking from a very narrow experience—her own. All this talk about childbirth being 'a function,' 'a dull chore,' 'a clever little bit of mechanism': it applies, after all, only to what she has known of it. In talking of some- thing as commonly experienced and as variously responded to, all you can say is: 'To me this hap- pened,' What I felt was . . How can you know what it is. or isn't, or has been or may be, to other women? The let's-get-this-straight commonsensical attitude is a bit too sweeping and dismissive, some- thing like the 'glass of water' attitude to sex. You could, after all, just as truly call the sexual act, if that was how you felt about it, 'one of those little things that human beings do all the time.' The 'beautiful event' clap-trap of the women's magazines may be absurdly phrased, but to some women it does turn out (surprising though this sounds to everyone else) a highly beautiful event! They may be few and far between, but you can't say they don't exist or that childbirth isn't, for them, very much more than a clever mechanism. Isn't it perhaps (my own experi- ence is obviously narrow too) just as varied as people are, and doesn't it depend on the woman's tempera- ment, attitudes, feeling for the arriving child and its father, background, health, physique, etc. etc., and a lot more etceteras?—yours faithfully,
ISABEL QUIGLY Tower Cottage, Flew/ring, Sussex
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