Childbirth

Rosenstock-Huessy notes the difference between animal birth and human childbirth, the main difference being that human parents remain with children after the birth: "marriage means to go from the blind act of the moment, through the whole life cycle to its most opposite point the childbirth," and this shows "that the problem of marriage was to alter the course of nature. In nature, animals mate and their young forget who their parents were. They cannot go beyond their individual life cycle, for they do no know what happened before their birth, and they do not know what is going to happen after their death. That we do know this is the essence of history." That is to say, parents communicate history and religion, a past before birth and a hope after death.

He points out that in certain tribes, the husband gets into bed with his wife during labor "to share her suffering symbolically. To me, that is one of the sublime rituals of the human race. It is an attempt to convey to the world outside the fact that the father feels as much responsible for the birth of the child as the mother."

When Rosenstock-Huessy was writing, this mutual involvement of father and mother had eroded in hospital births. He points out that in tribal societies, a deformed child's fate lay with the parents. At the time of his lecture, he said, the decision rests with doctors or nurses; parents "never knowing anything because they are treated like children. It is all over when they come. The wife is in a coma and the husband is having whiskey."

Two comments: One, that the movement since Rosenstock-Huessy wrote that gives the father a role in the birth recovers some of the wisdom of ancient and tribal societies; second, that Rosenstock-Huessy's comments show how desperate is a society, like ours, where many children are born to single women whose husbands/boyfriends have abandoned them. This unravels what ERH says is the very purpose of marriage - to alter the course of nature - and turns mating and birth into something that is quite literally animalistic.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 28, 2006 at 05:01 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.