THE ASSAULT OF NATURALISM
After World War II, culture entered a twenty-year period of distinctive triumphalism. The era was marked by a rejection of social and natural determinism. Like Descartes, people hoped that humankind would prove “master and possessor of nature” as well as of its own destiny. They believed that progress in the sciences and technology would grant freedom and well-being, if not actual happiness. Women took advantage of the triumphalist mood to reexamine their status, identity, and relationships with men.
Throughout history, the march to progress has been impeded by wars and economic and ecological crises. In this case, the 1973 fuel crisis ended the glorious postwar years. The ensuing economic reversal and the backlash that followed prompted the resurgence of a forgotten ideology: naturalism,
which had at its core a belief that the world is governed by natural principles.
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Although its influence gradually extended to all spheres of the industrial world, it first appealed to women, who were immediately affected by unemployment and the disappearance of job security. The most vulnerable went back into the home; othersâjust like men in the workforceâfelt disillusioned and resentful toward companies that could dispose of them at will, according to the whims of the market.
Among this new generation, many women also had scores to settle with their feminist mothers, and they were quick to answer the siren call of the natural. If the world of work lets one down, if it fails to offer the position one deserves, if it provides neither social status nor financial independence, then why give it priority? Financial necessity is inescapable, but some women started to think that the position of wife and mother was as good as any other, and that their crowning achievement could just as well be the care and upbringing of their children. Unlike their mothers, who were always rushed off their feet and struggled to juggle the demands of work and family, these daughters were receptive to the new order of the day: children first.
Meanwhile, there was more and more talk of the laws of nature and of biology, of maternal “essence” and “instinct,” which imposed increasingly demanding responsibilities on mothers. Pediatricians and countless parenting “specialists” denounced their predecessors' wisdomâand sometimes,
with a few years' hindsight, their own
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âreverting to arguments put forward by the Plutarchs and Rousseaus who knew exactly how to make women feel guilty for turning a deaf ear to the call of nature.
An underground war is now being fought between naturalist and culturalist proponents of motherhood and, more significantly, between people who claim to act as “advocates”
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for the defense of children (against mothers' ignorance? negligence?) and women who refuse to see their hard-won freedoms eroded. We do not know what the outcome will be.
THE SACRED ALLIANCE OF REACTIONARIES
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Three very different fields emerged from the 1970s and 1980s, each in critical response to a dominant cultural ethos of material and technological preeminence: ecology, behavioral sciences drawing on ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior), and a new essentialist feminismâall promising human well-being. Claiming to provide happiness and wisdom to women, mothers, families, and society, each in its different way advocated some sort of return to nature. Having tried to dominate nature and failed, we had apparently lost our bearings and were lurching headlong toward disaster. It was about time we acknowledged our error and collectively and individually took the blame. It turned out that what we thought was liberating and progressive was as
illusory as it was dangerous. We had been warned: wisdom lay elsewhere, in the past.
Political and Moral Breakdown
Ecology has been defined as a doctrine that aims to see human beings better adapted to their environment.
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Beneath the apparent banality of these words lurks a complete reversal of values: rather than mastering and using nature to address human needs and wants, humans are instead called to submit to the laws of nature. This new doctrine rapidly sparked political debate, both in northern Europe and in the United States, where countercultural movements have flourished since the 1970s. Despite quite different societies, both continents happen to be rife with the rampant consumerism typical of triumphant capitalism. Shifting the spotlight from man's exploitation of man, the counterculture began to focus on the capitalist system's exploitation of nature, exhorting man to respect it. Some even advocated an alliance with nature in the form of a “contract.”
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This call to love and respect the natural environment came hand in hand with warnings of catastrophe and revenge: if we damaged the earth, we would pay dearly. Sooner or later, Mother Nature would severely punish her children.
As early as the 1980s, intellectuals, artists, and numerous organizations raised the alarm. We were reminded of our close connection to the many primates threatened with extinction;
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the writer J. M. G. Le Clézio bemoaned our lost paradise, and the philosopher Félix Guattari suggested the idea of “
ecosophy
, an ethico-political synthesis for a new form of ecology that is environmental, social, and cerebral.”
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Everywhere we were urged to restore the lost harmony between man and nature. Imperceptibly, nature had gained the stature of a moral authority universally admired for its simplicity and wisdom. No longer did nature oppress man; instead, with its violation, we were courting suicide. It was therefore imperative that we stop our aberrant behavior as selfish, amoral, pleasure-seeking consumers. Industrialization, along with science and technology in its service, stood in the dock, the accused. We railed against the false well-being they supposedly brought us, and the more radical among us remembered only the pernicious effects of our abuse.
First in the firing line was chemistry, accused of every evil, given its embodiment of all things “artificial,” which, by definition, is the enemy of the “natural.” Apart from poisoning our food (is there anything more ruinous than the chemicals in our drinks and candies?), chemicals came under suspicion of changing our genes and working behind every scourge. We have forgotten everything we owe to chemistryânotably longer life expectancyâpreferring to believe the worst of it. Of all the sciences, chemistry is the one most
directly implicated in increased industrial global productivity and is therefore stripped of any shred of morality. And we all know that pharmaceutical laboratories, along with producers of pesticides and genetically modified organisms, only think of money. This might be a caricature, notwithstanding, but we do all feel some mistrust toward the use of chemicals, which leads us to rely on the precautionary principle.
The reception of the contraceptive pill since its invention illustrates our distrust of all things chemical.
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Although millions of women have embraced this method of birth control, others, even today, dislike the use of an artificial substance that inhibits a natural process. Between 2003 and 2006, sales in France dropped from 65 to 63 million packs: “fear of weight gain, rejection of chemical products, are the main grievances” of women in their thirties. The risk of cancer, possible hormonal imbalance, and the fear of sterility are also among the reasons given. According to a recent survey,
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22 percent of French women think the contraceptive pill will lead to sterility.
Two writers, Ãliette Abécassis and Caroline Bongrand, have taken on the role of anti-pill spokeswomen. “The difference between condoms and the pill is that the pill is harmful,” they claimed. Their evidence was a 2007 report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which established a link between the contraceptive pill and breast, cervical, and liver cancer, and classed the estro-progestative contraceptive pill as a group 1 carcinogenic product. The
conclusions of this report, which noted a slightly increased risk among
current
users (the risk disappears five to ten years after stopping use), and which were challenged by a systematic review published in 2010, inevitably fueled eco-biological prejudices.
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We might remember that the IARC's declaration of alcohol as highly carcinogenic
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was followed by an alarmist statement from the French National Cancer Institute recommending complete abstinenceânot even a single glass of wine. In this instance, the policy of abstinence was forcefully challenged by France's High Council of Public Health, which rejected such absolutism as unfounded for low consumption of alcohol.
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There are also strong suspicions that chemical pollution is a threat to male fertility.
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In 2008, in an interview between the French minister of the environment and a specialist in reproductive biology entitled “Is Man an Endangered Species?”
Madame Figaro
asked, “How do we preserve our future when the environment is hitting man in the most intimate of places?” The writer sought to dispel apocalyptic visions by quoting Alfred Spira, head of the Institute of Research into Public Health: “Men aren't suddenly all going to become sterile and the human race is not going to disappear,” but that didn't help. The impression remained that man might well kill himself with chemicals over which he had no control. Thus the vilification of chemicals, linked as they are to poison and death, should come as no surprise. Any mother worthy of the name will keep them away from her children.
The Good Ecological Mother
The elevation of the ecological mother originated with the rejection of hospital procedures by women who felt these alienated them from their bodies and therefore from motherhood. Unhappy with inflexible hospital regulations, exasperated by authoritarian doctors who infantilized them, these women, beginning in the seventies, embraced birth as a natural phenomenon, not a medical procedure. Dispensing with doctors, they underwent home births with a midwife and sometimes a new participant, a doula.
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The midwife oversees the delivery while the doula helps the future mother throughout her pregnancy, childbirth, and afterward. The doula's role, which is not medical, is essentially to give physical and psychological support. The co-presidents of the French Doulas Association explained that a doula “builds an atmosphere of trust and security with the parents, [she] helps them find information and reach decisions.” During labor, “she focuses on her support role while still actively helping,” offering “suggestions for comfortable positions, words of encouragement, massages during contractions.”
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After the baby is born, she offers support with “breastfeeding and day-to-day care of the newborn.” What is a doula's training? Essentially, her personal experience as a mother, enhanced by an understanding of physiology, pregnancy, the birth process, the newborn, and breast-feeding. An American study loudly sang the praises
of the profession: easier labor; a 50 percent drop in the rate of Caesarean births; a 25 percent reduction in the length of labor; 60 percent fewer epidurals; and 34 percent fewer instances of forceps deliveries.
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In the United States and Canada, where doulas have been available for at least twenty years, 5 percent of pregnant women used their services in 2002. There are no figures for the number of French women enticed by this little-known service, but we do know that between 3 and 5 percent have home births with a midwife.
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The number is much smaller in Australia, with around only 0.3 percent of women opting for assisted home births in 2006.
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In the Netherlands up to 30 percent of women opt for “natural” childbirth. That of course excludes epidurals and Caesarean sections, which, it has been argued, obstetricians overuse. Both procedures are accused of robbing women of the awareness of their baby's birth.
The epidural, which put an end to the extreme pain of labor and delivery,
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came into wide use in the 1970s and quickly gained ground. Yet birthing mothers are anything but unanimous on their value. Some see the epidural as women's greatest victory, ending the foundational curse of painful childbirth; others see it is a product of a “degenerate Western civilization”
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that flies in the face of the universal ideal that is natural childbirth; yet others feel that epidurals dispossess women of an incomparable experience.
Testimony abounds from women who wanted to feel to
the full the definitive female act of giving birth, as earlier generations did and as mothers still do in cultures considered closer to nature. One woman, speaking to
Marie Claire
magazine, expressed a commonly held view:
Giving birth to my first baby was terrible: sixteen hours of labor, seven hours of extreme pain, and two hours of pushing for a 9.9 pound baby. Those two hours of pushing were a real nightmare, an ocean of pain where nothing else in the world mattered, where you don't even think about the baby. But then there was this incredible slithering and when my baby surged out of me, when they laid him on me, when I saw his astonished little face, it was an amazing feeling. A moment of complete happiness. Would I have felt that with half my body deadened? ⦠I'm willing to go through the nightmare again just to experience that kind of birth. The hours of pain are lost in the past, but the moment of birth is so vivid that I get tears in my eyes just talking about it.
With my second child, I had a Dolosal injection ⦠. The labor was very cold. I nodded off between contractions, and when my baby was born, I was completely out of it. I was robbed of experiencing that birth. Women who give birth with an epidural talk about “serenity.” We'll have plenty of time for serenity when we're old ⦠. Do we have the right to sanitize birth, to diminish the joy by
removing the pain? Is it fair to offer women pain-free deliveries without telling them about the rewards they would have otherwise?
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Some women take things a step further by actively embracing the pain. We are apparently wrong to “see it only in a negative light; in some cultures it is an initiation. One of life's great rituals.”
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Pascale Pontoreau, a journalist, illustrated this point with an anecdote about the birth of her second child. While in labor she heard another woman on the ward “screaming as if her throat was being cut.” She asked whether the woman had complications. “Oh no, she just has a different way of expressing her suffering,” Pontoreau was told. She concluded with this comforting reflection: “For women who are used to being in control of themselves, their screams in labor are probably the first they have uttered since becoming âgrown up.' Those screams are an opportunity to release years of pent-up emotion. What if an epidural means those screams remain suppressed?”
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So there seems to be good suffering and bad. The first is natural, the second imposed by the medical establishment. In the 1970s, the followers of the new “birth without violence”
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movement spoke out against the brutal, humiliating treatment of pregnant women in hospitals and against Caesareans, episiotomies, and inductions being done excessively purely to suit obstetricians. At new birthing centers, the
obstetriciansâMichel Odent at Pithiviers hospital, Pierre Boutin at the Les Lilas maternity unit, Pierre Bertrand at Saint-Cloud hospitalâforwent traditional hospital methods to give women a different experience of labor. As French feminist and historian Yvonne Knibiehler described it:
At Pithiviers the aim is to return to man's “ecological” primitive, archaic state; women are encouraged to give birth naked, squatting in the “wild room” after a period in a birthing pool. At Les Lilas, “plant-therapy” is used to facilitate “regression” and “break the armor” that paralyzes women's bodies. Saint-Cloud advocates “relaxation therapy.” These militant ideologies are a reaction both to the rigidity of traditional medicine and to the recent rise of invasive technologies (such as monitoring) and the consequent decrease in midwives attending births. Some of these doctors denounce the arrogance of an approach based purely on scientific assumptions, comparing it to superstition. They call instead for a return to nature.
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Although the fashion for birthing centers fizzled out,
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the movement for all things natural was just beginning. It is now alive and well and in complete agreement with the medical profession on a number of fronts, particularly in promoting a return to breast-feeding.
Breast-feeding on demand and for as long as the child
wants is the new goal that everyone must pursue.
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Baby bottles are under attackâboth the containers and the contents. For several decades now there has been unrelenting criticism aimed at industrially produced, artificial formula. It seems to make little difference that there is now a wide variety of formula available, that it is more and more like breast milk, or that using it in the developed world is vastly different from its limited value in countries where there are shortages of water. Bottle-feeding is still condemned with increasing ferocity. Add to this the recent discovery of a chemical substance, bisphenol A (BPA), present in bottles made of polycarbonate (90 percent), which is suspected of disrupting hormonal development, causing cancer (breast and prostate), and increasing the risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease,
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and of course any true mother will throw them out. Breast-feeding militants, thus vindicated, have put these findings to full use.
Finally, now that we know disposable diapers wreak havoc on the environment, yet another new task awaits the ecologically minded mother. It has been calculated that in the first thirty months of life, a baby produces more than two tons of waste in the form of diapers, and each diaper takes an estimated five hundred years to degrade. Furthermore, the millions of tons of disposable diapers used every year in France alone are responsible for the destruction of 5.6 million trees. Altogether an ecological catastrophe. The ultimate argument
to convince mothers to change their ways came in the form of tests carried out by Greenpeace, which revealed that absorbent gels used in some diapers contain traces of dioxin.
So mothers are advised to use cloth diapers, which are economical and ecological and have the added advantage of encouraging early toilet-training (babies are more aware of the discomfort of being wet).
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In France, to tackle recalcitrant mothers, the secretary of state for ecology (a young mother herself) proposed a tax on disposable diapers,
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a suggestion that, mercifully, was not adopted. At least, not yet. But there is no knowing whether our concern with biodegradability and recycling will eventually defeat our reluctance. In London, during a recent convention of nursery products, it was revealed that an astonishing 20 percent of English babies regularly or occasionally wear cloth diapers.
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