I’d heard my own birth story many times. I was born in hospital, and my mother’s memories of the experience are bleak and dystopian. Eighteen months later, she gave birth to my brother at home, with a professional midwife in attendance. Her lasting impression of my birth is of being cold, lonely, exposed and frightened. Her lasting impression of my brother’s birth is of comfort and kindness. To this day she lights up when she describes the warm breeze through the open window, and the scent of roses from her garden. So, even though I’d already had my own three children in hospital, my personal bias had long been skewed in favour of midwife assisted home birth.

Maryanne’s mother had been able to tell her very little. Like a great many women of our mother’s generation, she’d been given an anesthetic that dulled her memories along with the pain (likely Scopolamine, referred to as Twilight Sleep back then). Both of her grandmothers had died years before. One of them had given birth to nine babies at home. “What had she known about childbirth before she got pregnant the first time?” Maryanne wondered in an email to me. “How did she feel as the day approached? Was she nervous? Confident? Somewhere in between? Where did she get her information? She couldn’t ask for an epidural; how did she cope with the pain? Who helped during those births? How did they cut the cord? I have so many questions.”

The internet was in its infancy; Google hadn’t been invented. Maryanne went to the public library and began borrowing all the historical books she could find that contained any text at all about women’s experiences.[1] She turned page after page after page, looking for birth stories.

She couldn’t find any.

The majority of the memoirs, biographies, and other non-fiction accounts focused on the experiences of the men of the home and community. Any discussion of women’s everyday life tended to focus on their hefty workload in the home and in the fields.

If childbirth was mentioned at all, it was covered in a sentence or two, a paragraph at most. “Maude gave birth to a son in 1899, and went on to have 11 more children.” Or, “Hannah had 14 children, three of whom died in infancy.” It was an impersonal, purely quantitative way of documenting an intensely emotional, intensely physical, uniquely female experience. To relegate all these life and family altering accomplishments to a couple of short sentences didn’t seem fair.

[ Link to The Last Best West here.]

Birth stories told by women of our own generation were becoming plentiful on the Internet. In forums and on listservs women told their birth stories. They discussed, compared and analyzed all the different circumstances under which a baby could be born, all the medical practices, all the expectations, all the outcomes, both positive and negative. Those narratives were quickly linking us together all over the English-speaking world but, as far as Maryanne and I could tell, only in the present.

It dawned on us that the narrative threads that linked all those new mothers to their own mothers, to their grandmothers, to their family and cultural history, to their community’s past, were unravelling just as quickly. Working as closely as we had been on the drive to legalize midwifery–a more personal, more family-oriented, more intimate way of having a baby–we were both acutely conscious of what a tragedy that was.

All of a sudden, we wanted to hear some of those stories before they were gone forever. But we also knew that if we were going to hear the kind of detail we wanted, we would need to find women who had not had an anesthetized birth in the in hospital.

We knew, from our midwifery advocacy work, that in the cities of eastern Canada, and in large parts of the United States, women were routinely having their babies in hospitals by the late 19th century. Women in those parts of the country who’d had home births would be long dead.

But out here, on the prairies, hospital birth didn’t become the norm until about the mid-1940s. One afternoon, we sat down and did the math. Women who had been having babies at home in Saskatchewan were still alive. (Remember, this was the late 1990s.) They’d be in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. If we could find them, maybe they’d tell us their stories.

And so right there, in between baby and child care, in between volunteering at the preschool and chaperoning field trips, in between launching a freelance business and lobbying government to get midwifery legalized in our province, we put the “Home Birth Stories” project together. And we began looking for elderly women who might be willing to tell a couple of complete strangers some of the most intimate details of their lives.