Obstetrical Rituals and Cultural Anomaly: Part I

A constant reminder that babies come from women and nature, not from
technology and culture, childbirth calls into question our attempts at technological dominance of nature,
confronting American society with a series of conceptual dilemmas with practical, procedural ramifications: how
to create a sense of cultural control over birth, a natural process resistant to such control? How to make a birth,
a powerfully female phenomenon, reinforce, instead of undermine, the patriarchal system upon which American
society is still based? In the absence of universal baptism, how to enculturate a non-cultural baby? Some of
these dilemmas are universal problems presented by the birth process to all human societies; others are
specific to American culture. Each contains within it a fundamental paradox, an opposition which must be
culturally reconciled lest the anomaly of its existence undermine the fragile technology-based conceptual
system in terms of which American society understands itself. After a brief discussion of the history of this
technological paradigm, analysis of eight of these dilemmas will demonstrate how they have been neatly
resolved by obstetrical rituals specifically designed to remove birth’s conceptual threat to the technological
model by making birth appear to confirm instead of challenge the basic tenets of that model.