Diana gave birth to Wills standing up as Charles held her
From her own chaotic sex life to intimate secrets of the royals — the delightfully zany memoirs of SHEILA KITZINGER, who taught Britain how to give birth
WHen I was born in 1929 — in Taunton, Somerset — birth was a natural affair. Women gave birth at home so they were on their own territory, even though a family doctor and nurse were normally in attendance.
nor were women expected to remain on a bed. My own mother recalled looping a towel over the corner of her bedroom door so she could pull on it while standing during the second stage of what proved to be a difficult labour.
Then everything changed. In the Sixties, the American way of birth — dominated by obstetricians who expect women to behave like obedient children — started to colonise the rest of the world. By the eighties, most women were expected to give birth on a bed and accept any drugs on offer.
As a result, childbirth today is too often treated as a medical crisis. Obstetricians actively manage labour with sophisticated technology and, perhaps, an elective Caesarean section.
I believe that for all but a tiny minority of women, birth need not and should not be like this; and that to turn the process of bringing new life into the world into one in which the woman is a passive patient, rather than an active birth-giver, not only degrades her but makes childbirth more dangerous.
The late Diana, Princess of Wales, may have been much criticised by some, but her contribution to reclaiming birth for women actually kick-started radical changes in hospitals.
When she was pregnant with Prince William, I was asked to advise the private Lindo wing of St Mary’s in Paddington, London, on what equipment it should provide so that she could give birth in an upright position.
I said that Charles looked strong enough to hold her. And that is what happened. It was the first active royal birth — a complete contrast to the Queen’s reflection that, with modern anaesthesia, birth had become ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In 2013, Prince William and his wife chose to go to the same hospital. By using self- hypnosis, Kate experienced the birth of Prince George as the spontaneous process for which a woman’s body is perfectly equipped.
Half a century ago, men were often not with their partners in childbirth, and women had neither the right, nor the knowledge, to make informed choices. Birth was a domestic subject, while men ran the world.
In the past 40 years, it has burst those confines and become a political issue that affects us all. This came about because of the energetic action of women, and some exceptional men, who committed themselves to positive change in childbirth. I am one of those women. I had a rather unusual upbringing. My mother, Clare, was a remarkable woman — a midwife, pioneer feminist, pacifist and firm believer in racial equality. She also worked to establish one of the earliest free birth- control clinics in the South-West.
My father, Alec, loved and admired her, so he simply went along with what she believed.
She’d become a committed pacifist after her brother was killed in World War I, so many of my early memories are of going to peace rallies. On Remembrance Sunday, we honoured those who’d given their lives for their country — but wore white poppies to signal that we were against all wars.
Mother was keen on me developing any talents I might have. From an early age, I was lifted onto the wide sitting room window-sill — my own private stage — to recite poems.
This led to me studying voice production and drama, along with my schoolwork, and then teaching both subjects part-time.
In 1949, I won a place at Ruskin College, Oxford, to study social anthropology — a subject I chose because I wanted to understand human behaviour.
I rented a room from a Quaker landlady, Mrs Weatherhead. I once found her making cakes in the kitchen, and milking her breasts very efficiently straight into the mixing bowl. She had plenty, she explained, and didn’t want to waste it. The cakes tasted very sweet.
In my first year, I discovered sex. Yatti was a Buddhist from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). We had sex and curry in his digs on the corner of St John’s Street. With stars in my eyes, I never thought about contraception.
But although there was physical intimacy, I don’t think we ever achieved any emotional closeness. We didn’t really talk: we just bounced around together while the curry was heating up on the gas ring.
When I found I was pregnant, I took it for granted that Yatti would marry me. He didn’t. His Brahmin high- caste family would have rejected me as grossly inferior. And since his loyalty to family was paramount, he cold- shouldered me. I returned home at the end of term to tell Mother, fantasising that I’d go off and live in a caravan in the middle of a field with my baby.
After we’d discussed this realistically, she sorted out an illegal abortion that was performed with skill, tact and understanding in my own bedroom by an obstetrician friend of hers. My father, who sold tweeds for a living, assisted.
I felt incredibly guilty at what I’d done to my parents. And Yatti? He took a part-time job with the railway, so every time I bought a
‘We’d have sex and curry. I never thought about contraception’
I read all I could about birth — I couldn’t wait!
Why can’t all women feel this exhilaration?
ticket to london, i had to confront him through the booking- office hatch. We never spoke again, except about tickets.
i met the man who was to become my husband on a plane. i was still a student and had decided to spend a summer working in America. the man seated next to me, i learned, was the president of the Oxford students’ debating union.
We talked a lot, but the motion of the plane soon made him feel sick. From then on, he vomited on and off — fortunately fairly quietly — until we reached New York.
All the same, he managed to do a pretty good job of relaxed wooing. that was my first encounter, in 1950, with Uwe Kitzinger.
he had blond hair that flopped over his broad brow, and the nicest smile i’d ever seen. he was also that rare student — an intellectual who was charming and who delighted in female company.
Back in Oxford, he asked me out to dinner. Apparently, i spoke so enthusiastically about my experiences in America, waving my arms about, that he was hooked. i was hooked, too. the months after i met Uwe were days of wine and roses. We walked along the river isis, made nests in the long grass and explored the finer arts of petting.
After getting a First, he was offered a diplomatic post in strasbourg. We wrote to each other all winter. Finally, we married on October 4, 1952, in a simple ceremony at the Quaker Meeting house in st Giles, Oxford.
the whole morning was a rush. the gynaecologist i’d consulted about contraception had refused to give it to me until the day of my wedding, so i had to dash across Oxford in my finery to collect it before the ceremony.
Uwe and i didn’t exchange rings — i suppose because they hold a hint of bondage, and it seems to me that if you’re indissolubly linked with another human being, it’s not necessary to demonstrate it formally.
then Uwe went back to strasbourg and i returned to edinburgh, where i was doing academic research. At the end of every term, i travelled to strasbourg, where we made love intensively.
two years later, i had a miscarriage. the only thing to do was accept it and nestle in bed for a while with detective novels.
Uwe was now often off to other countries, leaving me wherever i was based at the time, so the relationship was kept fresh. We were never a couple to ‘settle down’.
i was in strasbourg when i was preparing to give birth for the first time in 1956. As a ‘diplomatic wife’, i felt under pressure to conform. But when i looked round the two possible hospitals, i was horrified to discover that mothers had to follow instructions and accept whatever was proposed.
the catholic hospital even had a high, flat, delivery table opposite an enormous painting of christ on the cross, with blood pouring out of his wounds. the message for the mother was: ‘ You’re suffering incredible pain, but christ was in greater agony. endure your pain in a christ-like spirit. there’s no escape. this is your cross.’
the answer, i decided, was to give birth at home with a midwife who knew how to help women labour as spontaneously as possible. Friends, however, told me i was behaving ‘like a peasant’.
i read everything i could find about birth. i was convinced that i could do it in my own way, in my own time. i couldn’t wait!
As it was, when i went into labour, i made straight for the bath and soaked happily in warm water. this was long before the vogue for water births. i was exultant. it was like jumping into a river and finding that i could swim after all. i could do it! there was nothing unfamiliar; nothing that i couldn’t handle.
Once out of the bath, i helped Uwe get the room ready. We made the bed, boiled the water and rang the midwife. then, holding on to a bulbous table leg, i bent my knees, rocking and tilting my hips as each contraction built up.
i’d never been any good at games at school, yet working with my body i was able to dance my way through labour. i suddenly thought: ‘Wow! this is a sport i can do!’
When the midwife came in, she told me to push. push? i didn’t want to push, but she threatened to cut me if i didn’t, so i took a deep breath. the baby, whom we called celia, was gorgeous. the birth had taken three hours.
that was the beginning of my commitment to understand the spontaneous and unforced rhythms of the second stage of labour; and to learning how women could give birth without fighting their bodies — and do so without injury.
the amount of ignorance surrounding childbirth was extraordinary. Back in the UK, when celia was about nine weeks old, the health visitor called round and asked what i was feeding her. Breast milk, i said.
‘You need to give her mashed brains,’ she said. i told her that i was a vegetarian. she was horrified. ‘if you don’t give her any brains, she won’t develop any,’ she said authoritatively. My daughter is now a professor of sociology at York University.
When celia was nine months old, i discovered i was pregnant again. One day, six weeks before the baby was due, my Gp carefully palpated my abdomen and commented: ‘i think i feel two heads.’
My first thought was i was having a two-headed baby, but then i realised what she was saying. it took a week or so to get over the shock.
Now that i was having twins, i knew i’d be expected to give birth at a big teaching hospital. But when i went to its antenatal clinic, the women were all laid out on examining tables in open cubicles like carcasses of meat. i wasn’t going to have my babies there if i could help it. this was my body, my birth, my babies.
By then, i was already teaching childbirth classes for what later became the National childbirth trust. if i didn’t organise my own babies’ birth, how could i expect other women to do so?
i went into labour at home one night. As i waited for the midwife to arrive, i focused on the easy, rhythmic tightening in my body; like ocean waves. the first baby was caught by the midwife in a roll of cotton wool as she hadn’t had time to open her bag. then i felt a thud in the small of my back as the next baby dropped down. it had been just one-and-ahalf hours since i’d awoken.
Uwe took pictures of everything. this was at a time when women in birth photographs were commonly shown with their faces blacked out.
the twins, tess and Nell, were born on a sunday, and on thursday my Nct class turned up to find the bump gone and two babies waiting to greet them.
two years later, i had a fourth daughter, polly, in a painful, triumphant 40-minute labour.
Afterwards, i decided to write about the joy of birth, and how to work with the contractions that sweep through the body. though painful, they’re exciting: a bit like surfing. Why can’t all other women feel this exhilaration, too, i thought. Why do they approach birth as if it were a road accident?
six weeks later, with polly at my breast in the early mornings, i began writing the experience Of childbirth. i had no agent but had heard of the publisher Victor Gollancz — so i sent it off to him, along with several photographs of me giving birth.
As it happened, our brother-inlaw, hilary Rubinstein, who was married to Uwe’s younger sister, had a job at Gollancz and was summoned to the boss’s office.
Victor Gollancz was looking at him with apparent shocked disbelief. ‘i have photographs of your sister-in-law’s private parts on my desk,’ he told hilary.
i’m grateful to them both for their courage. they decided to go ahead and publish, and the book sold well over a million copies.
the whole experience was astonishing. the only thing that compares with having your first baby is giving birth to your first book.
A PASSION For Birth by Sheila Kitzinger is published by Pinter & Martin, £20. © 2015 Sheila Kitzinger. To buy a copy for £16, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer available until May 9. P&P is free for a limited time only.