How I learned to love childbirth and stop fearing the human body

Helping out in labor and delivery here in Gabon gives me hope and faith for my own eventual personal childbirth as well as in the capabilities and resilience of the human body. The mothers here arrive at the hospital with their cervices well dilated, often anemic, and give birth with nary a sound. It happens so much more quickly and without trouble than the deliveries that I helped out with back in Chicago. There women were usually some combination of obese, (pre)eclamptic, diabetic, and under epidural anesthesia. Their deliveries went on and on and nearly half of the time ended in C-section. Here, maybe 5 or 10% of the deliveries are C-sections. And that is at a hospital where it is possible; the majority of women still give birth at home. If a woman starts yelling, when the head is crowning, for example, a nurse will slap her abdomen or her cheek and say “tu cri pourquoi” which translates to why are you yelling. The woman will usually quickly get herself under control, stop making noise, and finish delivering the baby in seconds. Amazing. And they are up and walking minutes within delivering the placenta !?! And within a few hours you would never know that they had just recently passed a human being through their vagina. American women are horribly out-of-shape weenies by comparison. I hope to take a page from the African woman playbook and endure my pregnancy and delivery with stoicism and resilience. The one aspect of delivery in America that I would like to keep is that there delivery is a momentous event, whereas here it is viewed as common and no cause for celebration or congratulations. I would like to guard that sense of wonder and grand importance during my children's birth, while keeping it quick and stoic like African women. Are those two extremes unreconcilable?


What do in a polygamous society about HIV tests?
As I have written about dilemmas that I see at the hospital in terms of payment, choices of when to seek care, how to respond when your child dies, and physical abuse, I wanted to add another wrenching thought to our burbling cauldron: as a woman in a polygamous relationship and/or household, how do you stay HIV negative? When I give the results of the mandatory HIV tests to pregnant women (the result of a recent and I think, very beneficial, Gabonese law), I often comment that they should try to get their partners tested too. Often a woman will reply that he refuses, as in his eyes, her negative test means that his must be negative as well, or they sigh that it won't matter if he gets tested as he also sleeps with numerous other women. Can you imagine if you were trying to protect yourself, which is hard in a society that views condoms with suspicion and HIV testing as a sign that you think you might be positive, and your partner were holding you back so significantly? People here have problems that I would have a wretched time dealing with, as I have a hard enough time counseling them about their dilemmas.