ABSTRACT
Throughout my travels and in the course of collecting this information I could not help comparing the experiences of the mothers and midwives to whom I had spoken with my own experience of birth. Perhaps the first thing I was always aware of was the extent to which I had been able to choose, not only when I would have a child but also whether I would ever have any children or not. For many of the women in these traditional societies, bearing and rearing children was as inevitable as the sun rising and setting each day. It was part of their unquestioned identity as a woman even when, like the Orang Asli, they felt they had some control over the matter. I became pregnant after a considerable amount of thought and agonizing about whether this was what I wanted to do and whether I could cope with the changes it would bring in my life. The women I spoke to became pregnant in the fullness of time as part of what they considered to be the natural order of things over which, on the whole, they felt they had very little control.
