58

Piera Maghella

How Children See Birth: A Mirror held up to our Culture

Our beliefs about childbirth come from our bodily sensations, emotions, images, andthoughts, and they start being formed at a very early age. Our imagery comes frommany sources: our own birth, what we hear from our mother or relatives and inschool, what we see in books, cartoons, and films, what our culture in general trans-mits to us about the roles of women and children, and from our own sexual and emo-tional experiences in relationships. This forms our birth preparation. Drawing is oneway we express both what we feel( perceptions) and what we know( cognition), andsince 1986 I have been collecting the birth drawings of 10- year old children( parentalobjections prevented us from asking younger children) who live in various northernItalian cities( Bologna, Modena, Genova, Brescia). The children were not prepared inadvance, and were instead asked to spontaneously draw how they imagined birth.They responded immediately, and when they gave us their drawings we asked themto tell us what the drawings represented; we tape- recorded what they said. It wassoon clear that these drawings were very traumatic, so for comparison( and startingwith my own children, who have seen childbirth) I decided to also collect drawingsfrom children born at home or in familiar settings. The differences are remarkable.Very few children use symbolic depictions, such as of a seed, a flower, a stork, or acabbage. All of them know about the process of conception, but few drawings illus-trated that aspect. Most were of actual birth, and in the use of space, the sizes of thepeople depicted, the colours, and the imagery, it is clear that for these children,women giving birth are very passive, supine, alone, and in very mechanical and coldscenarios that show scales, knives, lamps, screens. One can even see the hierarchybetween doctors and midwives in these drawings, and the newborn is always a boy.The only drawings where one sees the father are those showing home births, thoughthere are three hospital birth drawings where he is present( though in one he hasfainted away on the floor!) These drawings are mirrors of our birth culture, and whatwe see is dramatic. They urge us to change our attitudes about childbirth at everylevel.