Randi Hutter Epstein

Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”

The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anaesthetics were discovered in the middle of the 19th century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.

Eve, of course, had a lot more to think about than labour pains. She was the only woman in the history of the planet to go through pregnancy without any advice, solicited or otherwise. We don’t know whether Adam was nagging her to eat certain things or avoid others, but given how easily she manipulated him into eating an apple, it doesn’t seem like he was the one wearing the pants in the relationship. Eve had no one. No mother. No guidebook. No friends with their own birth stories. Instead, she suffered the punishment. Despite the dire consequences she populated the earth, launching one of the greatest traditions of womanhood: feminine determination. She got to have her apple and her babies, too.

As soon as her daughters and her daughters’ daughters reached childbearing age, none of them would ever experience pregnancy without a bombardment of words of wisdom. We seek them. They seek us. Who did Eve’s children turn to? Our ancestors did what women have been doing all along. They turned to each other and self-proclaimed birthing gurus. They turned to medical men, the presumed pillars of knowledge. The literate few could read guidebooks — rather, guide papyri. You may think life was easier for our great-great-great-grandmothers, given the narrow range of advice. But from their perspective, it was a dizzying whirligig of do-this-don’t-do-that.

Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition.

If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes”. Friends of the labouring woman were called gossips, as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for close-to-God morphed into a term for behind-the-back chatter.

For the first millennia or so, women relied on the same traditions written and rewritten, told and retold, with very little change. Centuries after Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen were long dead, doctors were rewriting their words of ancient wisdom with little thought to the fact that the wisdom may be outdated. Medical authors were scribes, not enlightened experts, and certainly not investigators. Pregnancy advice in antiquity was virtually the same as the advice doled out generations later to medieval women. Sometimes experienced midwives learned a thing or two to tweak the process, but the books did not change.

Women were told how to speed labour (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.

One guidebook prescribed his and hers cocktails to up the odds of having a boy: red wine tainted with pulverised rabbit’s womb for him; red wine with desiccated rabbit’s testicles for her. Were couples truly doing shots of this stuff? We’ll never know. But couples who wanted children — or preferred one sex to another — were willing to try anything. Think about the hormones we’re shooting ourselves up with today. Maybe dried testicles wasn’t so weird after all.

(This extract has been taken from Get Me Out by Randi Hutter Epstein)

Randi Hutter Epstein is a medical journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other notable papers