Academic fought for natural birth
As Sheila Kitzinger was giving birth to her first baby at home she suddenly felt, ‘‘This is a sport that I can do!’’
At school she had never been any good at gym or games. ‘‘Now I found my body functioning perfectly,’’ she wrote later. Her labour lasted 21⁄ hours and she spent much of it grasping at the legs of a Victorian drawing table that she had recently restored. ‘‘It never entered my head to hand over my body to doctors to deliver my baby.’’
A social anthropologist by training, Kitzinger spent the next six decades persuading Britain of the benefits of natural births. Swiftly dubbed ‘‘the birth mother of the nation’’, she was determined to take labour and motherhood out of the control of obstetricians and hospitals and give them back to women and nature. She championed breastfeeding and homebirths and argued that it was quite normal for partners to be present during labour.
‘‘People now take many of these things for granted,’’ said her husband, Uwe Kitzinger, who was at the births of their five daughters, including twins. ‘‘And in a way it is the best tribute to her that she is almost forgotten for the battles she fought – because she won them.’’
Her first book, The Experience of Childbirth, caused a sensation when it was published in 1962. Then a woman in labour still regularly had her perineum shaved and her legs strapped into stirrups to prevent her moving; getting up from the hospital bed was frowned on and episiotomy – cutting of the perineum – was routine. ‘‘Women were supposed to be ‘good patients’ and do what they were told,’’ Kitzinger wrote.
She suggested that obstetricians viewed the vagina as a padlocked door, resisting all attempts to be opened. ‘‘Yet the vagina is really not like a padlocked door,’’ she said. ‘‘It blossoms. It opens. Far from being a barrier to birth, in the right environment, with sensitive midwife care, a woman can give birth with joy.’’
Hospitals had instead turned women into ‘‘products on a factory conveyor belt’’ – stripped of their own clothes, separated from their families and referred to by room numbers. Painkilling drugs and electronic machines were a ‘‘medical straitjacket’’ causing trauma.
All this prohibited ‘‘the orchestra of hormones’’ and breathing rhythms which Kitzinger said not only made natural birth smooth and safe but something akin to sexual climax: ‘‘It’s totally involuntary, overwhelming and passionate.’’
Having once thought she might have made a good comic actress, she didn’t think twice about voicing her ideas. She demonstrated natural breathing patterns whether in a packed cafe or live on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
She began travelling, meeting midwives and women all over the world. No stone went unturned – she researched rituals, superstitions, diets, exercises and aftercare past and present, from Victorian England to the modern-day Pacific.
On her first trip in Jamaica she was horrified to find that the pillow in each of the delivery rooms was used only to muffle screaming women. However, it was the importance of female companionship that often struck her most – from women in Yemen kissing and stroking a mother-to-be to Fijian hipswinging ceremonies.
By the 1970s her pioneering research had helped to reduce the number of episiotomies by encouraging midwives to question whether the practice could be prevented, for instance, by breathing techniques. ‘‘Something like 60 to 70 per cent of women were having episiotomies, and many of them had suffered terrible perineal trauma, and their sex lives had gone to pot,’’ she recalled.
In the 1980s she helped to introduce the concept of ‘‘birthplans’’, encouraging mothersto-be to prepare.
Although she was against increasingly intrusive modern scans and tests, she simply wanted women to make informed choices: ‘‘But obviously, if Caesarean sections can be done safely for women who really need them when there is truly obstructed labour, then that is a very good thing.’’
She urged fathers to take their place in the birthing room, having observed their ‘‘important spiritual function’’ in other cultures. In Mexico’s Huichol tribe, for instance, the man was required to tie a string around his testicles and yank at each contraction. A ‘‘practical feminist’’, Kitzinger suggested that in Britain they came prepared with a sandwich to prevent them getting hungry and irritable.
Kitzinger’s great influence was her own mother Clare Webster, a midwife who set up an early family planning clinic in Taunton, where Sheila Helena Elizabeth Webster was born in 1929 – one of seven sisters. Her father Alex was a tailor.
‘‘I can’t remember a time I didn’t know what contraception was,’’ she once said. ‘‘Women would come to our home to talk and, as a girl, I often sat in the corner and listened in to their marriage, sex and pregnancy problems. It was the best education I ever got.’’
All this led her to apply to read social anthropology at Oxford. Dismayed to find textbooks examining only men’s lives, she set about researching a group of prostitutes. ‘‘Mainly I learned how to listen and how to record in detail even things that seemed insignificant at the time,’’ she wrote.
She met her husband Uwe Kitzinger on an aeroplane when they were both travelling to the United States to take up student fellowships.
She said she had no medical theories on childbirth, only instinct: ‘‘I didn’t trust hospitals.’’
The British diplomatic community in Strasbourg in the 1950s were appalled when she decided to give birth at home, accompanied by Uwe and a midwife. ‘‘The diplomatic wives all went to the best obstetricians. I was behaving like a peasant – I actually heard that said.’’
She then began working voluntarily for the National Childbirth Trust, setting up classes for couples.
After hearing many tales of hospital trauma, she founded the Birth Crisis Network phone service. She turned to new issues – such as prisoners giving birth in handcuffs – and was in demand as a lecturer at midwifery colleges and universities until shortly before her death.
After she was diagnosed with cancer, she insisted on a home death – drinking champagne and eating chocolates from her bed.