AlterNet: The Cult of Nature-Worship

I'm so offended by this article that I hardly know where to begin. First, I am a "nature-worshipper" and I take offense to the title. It takes quite a talent to offend Christians, Pagans, and Feminists in one fell swoop. I expect much better from AlterNet.

What Ms. Quan is really writing about is a trend for people to prefer natural birthing methods to surgery. Apparently, if you prefer to have a child naturally, you are superstitious and backward? That attitude is not only pretentious, it's dangerous. People are finally starting to appreciate that nature has her reasons in most cases, and here comes Ms. Sex in the City to set the women's movement back 50 years. Does Ms. Quan realize that the 1950's trend she refers to that idealized baby formula and drugged births has damaged generations of children? Has she heard of Thalidomide or DES? Does she know that so many of us now have asthma, allergies and weakened immune systems because we were given formula instead of mother's milk? That women have been made sterile with Dalkon shields? Developed cancer because their mothers took a drug to prevent miscarriage? Or worse-as they did when my mother was carrying me - the mother was x-rayed so the doctor could see if everything was alright?

There are good reasons to be cautious of the medical profession, especially where women are concerned. Women have been treated as guinea pigs. Birth control and weight loss pills are rushed to market with levels of danger that would never be tolerated in anything intended for use by men. Are there any statistics as to how a planned cesarean affects the mother? It may be convenient for the doctor, or even for a busy mother, but the body goes through hormonal changes that can go awry when a pregnancy is terminated suddenly. Did she bother to find out if these procedures have any special incidence of post partum depression? How about suicide? Or is she just assuming that the medical profession knows what's best for us? I notice some of these knee-jerk reactionaries she refers to are doctors. Did she ask why they are concerned with the number of cesareans when it is clearly to a physician's advantage to prefer them? Does she know that women have been fighting the medical profession for years to keep them from removing healthy breasts and uteruses from healthy women just to line their pockets?

I'm a firm believer in a woman's autonomy in all aspects of her sexual and reproductive life, and I'm all in favor of safe technologies that prevent disease and enhance our lives, but this snotty, sneering little diatribe makes me seriously question whether people like Ms. Quan are capable of making these decisions for themselves. Her twisted logic compares vaginal birth to sex without birth control. The first, like it or not, Ms. Quan, is the natural order of things. The second is childish and irresponsible. Am I to believe that it's more responsible to complicate a serious situation like pregnancy with a dangerous thing like surgery that might be wholly unnecessary? That is patently absurd.

Where is the line now, anyway? I remember a line from MASH where B.J. said "Cutting into a healthy body is mutilation." That always made sense to me, but now we live in a culture where supposedly intelligent women have bones removed from their feet so they can wear the latest fashions - in spite of knowing that footbinding was a violent oppression of women practiced for centuries. Are we now in the realm of defending our rights to torture ourselves? To demand surgeries that do nothing to improve our health or that of our children? We're beyond the idea of "abortion on demand" to "birth on my schedule". That sounds great, but I have serious doubts about it being that simple. It's like all of these couples going to fertility doctors, when all they really need to do is stop eating hormone-laden animal foods. All of that medicine and money to alleviate a problem caused by medicine and money.

We have the technology, and I believe we have the right, to choose an elective cesarean as one in a range of viable options in reproduction. I don't think we'll be seeing it as a virtue any time soon, though, nor do I think it will prove to be as healthy as natural child birth. Time has a way of showing that Nature knew what She was doing all along.