The Gateway of Pain
As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and firs
The mother looks upon the newborn child,
Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled
When her soul knew at length the Love it nurs’d.
Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst
And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay
Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day
Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst.
D. G. ROSSETTI.
The price of every beauty in this world is in proportion to its
quality, even although the payment of the price exacted may be long
deferred or may be made in such an intricate and remote form that its
connection with the result is overlooked.
As the greatest thing which lovers can give each other is a child,
and as none in the world are so great as lovers, the price exacted by
Nature for the child of loving and sensitive people is correspondingly
heavy.
This statement may apparently conflict with the idea that the joy of
bearing a child to the beloved is a woman’s consummation of happiness;
yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper truth that the
supremest happiness is mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice.
A young woman whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensitive
to know the highest joys of motherhood--the full delights of human
existence and love--will also be sensitive to the varied pains which
motherhood will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet’s saying that
“the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to
be pricked by the thorn” is essentially true.
The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the
transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured,
transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self.
For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has
shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings,[2] Nature has
essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. All
the woodland and jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit
or the squirrel, grow up through their brief adolescence into a
partial consciousness of delight in themselves and reach the phase of
their development in which their own desires urge them to unite with
each other. One can scarcely believe that they are conscious of the
resulting parenthood which will become a physical fact at a later date,
although the training of her cubs by a woodland mother undoubtedly
does include handing on, through some speechless communication, of
some actual instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but in addition
_coerced_, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a
large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often
blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own
body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful
and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men
place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight
into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen
mate; and the later consequences of motherhood are then faced either in
amazed astonishment or in open revolt.
[2] By this I mean the motherhood which carries and protects the
developed young within the mother’s body, unlike that of the lower
animals, such as fishes, which leave the eggs to their fate.
Earlier civilizations often dealt with the excessive births resulting
from blind or coerced parenthood by destroying the children as infants
after birth. This was done directly, and often by her leading citizens,
in Greece (one of the highest forms of civilization ever attained) and
_still_ infanticide direct or indirect goes on among all the populous
races of the world. Where the value placed on the mother’s mental and
physical suffering is low, one may still see motherhood, not as a fine,
voluntary and glorious act of self-sacrifice from the highest possible
motives of love and service directly to the beloved, and indirectly to
the race, but as the exploitation of a trapped and helpless sacrifice.
Mothers will say that their babies are their greatest joys; one may
ask, therefore, how I can use the word “sacrifice” in connection with
motherhood. The use of the word is just, and based on truths too
generally concealed by those who know them, and far too generally
unknown by those who ought to know them. Ignorance of their extent has
made men callous, indifferent or ribald towards the profound sacrifices
of motherhood.
Few there be, however, who do not know of the agonizing torments of
actual birth. The Bible is read aloud in churches, and in its wording
there is some recognition of the existence of this agony, although
based upon earlier and simpler civilizations in which the women were
probably better cared for and better fitted for motherhood than the
majority of women are to-day. Following biblical tradition, the memory
of the agony of birth is generally portrayed as being wiped out by
the supreme joy in the child which follows. To-day, however, this
effacement of the anguish is by no means universal, and the abiding
horror of the birth is so great that not a few women refuse to bear
another child. Then men, who cannot even imagine the experience of
child-bearing, denounce such a mother, rate her and hold her up to
derision. How little do they realize that in her they may see Nature’s
working of the laws of evolution (see p. 24).
The torturing agony of birth might so easily have been averted by
Nature had the construction of our bodies differed but very slightly
from those which we to-day possess in common with most of the higher
animals. The human baby when the hour comes for it to sever its
connection from its mother, and as an independent individual to venture
into the open air of the world, has to make its way through the arched
gateway of bone fixed and set by the mother’s own requirements as a
frame to her own structure. The encircling archway of bone through
which the infant has to pass is but three or four inches in diameter.
It would have been possible had our evolution taken a different
turn for the infant to have made its exit through the soft wall of
the mother’s body instead of through this fixed and hardened circle
of her bone. But for some causes too remote for us at present to
discover this was not so, and the essential fact faces us to-day
that every infant born naturally must be born through this circle of
bone. Moreover if the infant is a well-developed and healthy one,
as the ordinary baby of a healthy and beautiful young couple should
naturally and rightly be, that infant’s head is larger in diameter than
the circle of bone through which it has to pass. Its tissues have,
therefore, to be squeezed and pressed to mould their shape in order to
allow its exit through the orifice, and this must be a slow process,
and one which almost always entails great pressure and consequent agony
to the mother. Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in _The Welfare of the Expectant
Mother_:--
It is, however, scarcely possible that either the public or the
profession realizes that one woman dies in child birth for every
250 children born alive. In addition to this we have to remember
that the same accidents and diseases which kill the mothers and the
babies inevitably cause a still heavier percentage of crippling and
invaliding (p. 43).
Twenty-five per cent. and more of the babies conceived and borne die
before they reach normal birth. Often they find the journey through
the bony archway into the outer world so difficult and arduous a task
that they perish in the process of birth, although probably had they
been born by Cesarean section, they would have survived and grown into
healthy children.
We do not consider what the infant itself in birth may be enduring.
The infant is “unconscious,” that is to say it carries no memory of
these earlier months in its conscious memory as it grows up, but the
excessive moulding, particularly of its head, which often has to take
place and sometimes takes weeks to right itself, must, one thinks,
greatly disturb the little brain, and in my opinion may have a lifelong
effect.
I have never heard this aspect of our present problem duly considered.
The fact that the increasing brain capacity of civilized man tends ever
to give the new born infant a larger head, and tends proportionately
to increase the size of the head out of relation to the size of the
circle of its mother’s bone, has been commented on, and appears to some
far seeing thinkers as the possible cause of the ultimate extinction
of the human race. Because if we go on developing in the way we are at
present doing, ever depending more and more on our brains, and the head
of the new born infant tends to increase with the natural development
of the brain, the day will come when the birth of a child is absolutely
blocked by the relative diameter of its head and of its mother’s pelvic
bones. If the higher races maintain a dominant place in the world, the
day may come when with nearly all women such an incompatible relation
will arise. Of what avail then would be the ratings and peevish fury
of callous men? What scheme the race may have devised before that date
to relieve this cruel deadlock we cannot here discuss. The perfecting
of the method of birth by Cesarean section offers much promise. It may
become a racial necessity. This possibility, on which to-day we are
beginning to impinge, indicates one great cause of the torturing agony
of the actual hours of birth which the young mother and father-to-be
may have to face before they can see the child of their love.
Fortunate women are even still so constructed that the circle of bone
has a relatively large orifice which allows the infant comparatively
easily to pass through it, and the difficulty and danger of birth for
them is minimized. With them the birth pangs may be so trivial in
comparison with the result, that they are truly “almost negligible” as
most men would like to believe of most women.
Such women, when outward circumstances allow it, are those whom every
impulse should encourage to be the mothers of the large families, which
are, under proper conditions, still desirable for a portion of our
people.
Such a woman as the one who wrote me the following letter is indeed the
standard which all women and would-be mothers would gladly reach were
it possible in any degree to control the formation of a growing girl’s
body so that as a woman she might retain such a primitive adaptation to
motherhood:--
On the exact right day the babe arrived ... in a quarter of an hour
he was there, without nurse, doctor or any one and with no pain to
myself. This little party has grown into a splendid specimen, very
large (he was 8-1/2 lbs. at birth) and firm and muscular. He is the
whole day long laughing and kicking or sleeping.
Such women, however, so far as records go, are few. Much might be done
by science to discover what are the causes of the reverse condition,
and if possible to attempt to eliminate them.
In view of the agony which myriads of women throughout the ages of
civilization have endured, it seems strange indeed that no effort
should apparently have been made by the learned to understand the
causes which control the individual formation of the growing structure,
with a view possibly to securing some such development. In recent
years, however, a little has been done in the recognition of the
causes of the converse, that is to say the excessive narrowing of the
pelvis to the degree where child birth is not only torment but a life
and death agony. And it is now well known that this condition is
associated with malnutrition and rickets in infancy and early girlhood.
The little baby girl who has rickety bones (which result from being
improperly fed as an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in
many cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic bones that
when her turn comes for motherhood, the birth of a living child may
be impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so
often is inevitable, in the course of any consideration of the profound
truths of mated existence, we impinge upon the treatment of the unsound
and the diseased. This _under_ development of the mother’s pelvic bones
is a different problem from that evolutionary one touched on in the
paragraphs above.
Alas, that it should be true that the great majority of city dwellers
come into the category of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or
another. But with the vision of true health and beauty as a standard
before our eyes, many might escape the incipient weaknesses by
consciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty and normality. It is
this standard, this ideal picture, which may yet be reproduced in the
lives of millions, which I desire to present in this book, so that in
telling young married people some of the great facts which are ahead of
them I will present only those difficulties which are inevitable, and
leave to others the handling of disease. As things are to-day among
British stock,[3] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an
entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly
due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as
a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the
young wife and her motherhood.
[3] In this, and in most of the generalisations found in this book,
I am speaking of things as they are in Great Britain. While to a
considerable extent the same is true of America and the Scandinavian
countries, it must be remembered all through that I am speaking of the
British, and primarily of our educated classes.
Before the hour of birth is reached, however, the young mother-to-be,
if she is neither instructed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders,
may have already endured much that it will distress and dismay her
lover and husband to observe, and much more which she, being a woman,
will endure without allowing him to perceive, although she may be so
frightened that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry out in her
bewildered pain. How much of this distress and pain is essentially
“natural,” how much is the artificial result of our mode of living and
our ignorance of Nature’s laws? What are the things which a healthy,
finely-built young woman mated to a healthy young man must endure,
those experiences which she _cannot_ escape and those which she may
with proper help avoid altogether or in part? It is the object of
several chapters in this book to answer these questions more truthfully
and I hope more helpfully than they have yet been answered. The things
I deal with specially, because they will face nearly every _healthy_
girl, are in most books ignored.
My chapters may appear superfluous to those who view the long list
of books purporting to give advice to the young wife and expectant
mother on how to treat herself and the coming child. I have read the
majority of those books, and I write this one because of their failure
to touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which will truly help
the healthy and sensitive type of young people. The healthy, normal
and happy in my mind’s vision are the standard of the race: those who
to-day to some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty of bodily and
mental equipment which will become a commonplace when all have risen
to their standard, and it is for them that I feel it imperative to add
this one more book to the long list of books advising the young mother.
With the young mother I also consider and try to help the young father
who has been so strangely neglected and ignored and who also needs help.
The majority of the writers on cognate subjects, like the majority
of the minds of those who are concerned at all with the problems of
the young mother, really though perhaps unconsciously present studies
in disease, pictures of aberrations from the normal, accounts or
innuendos dealing with illness and handicaps, with abnormal conditions
which should never arise, and the knowledge of which should not be
brought before the sensitive mind as if they were a usual and general
thing. The acquiescence in a low standard of health, the discussion
of diseased conditions as though they were normal, or even as though
they were unavoidable, are intensive in their result and harmful to all
who come under their influence. The race sickens ever more and more
profoundly because of such influences.
We have to-day in our community a new conception in the Government
Department of the Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry is
engrossed in the contemplation of disease. In the present state of
our civilization this is perhaps unavoidable, because there are not
enough people in the country of standing and experience in scientific
research who have concerned themselves with the problems of the
healthy and beautiful, and with the needs and requirements in the way
of instruction and outward conditions and environment of those who by
nature are healthy and normal, and who desire to remain healthy and
normal. Even these need instruction to compensate for that which Nature
cannot give to those who toil apart from her bosom in the cities, where
they cannot hear her voice for the roaring of the traffic. This is the
piteous plight of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many live
in towns.
Alas, that there are physical facts which all must face of a type
which makes one feel that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When
two young, beautiful and ardently happy beings are embarking upon the
greatest work for the community which they can do, with a desire to
create further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed an ironic and
wanton mistake that there should be distressing physical experiences
for both of them to endure. But “As gold is tried by the fire, so the
heart is tried by pain,” and if they are given a conscious knowledge of
what they must face and what they may avoid, there will then be a firm
foundation and a triumphant consummation to the visions and ideals of
splendour and perfection which they can secure unimpaired through the
trials which they conquer.