ABSTRACT
No-one looking at most future mothers – who have in any case had little nutritious food, or rest, or space to explore or relax in, or time to spare – sitting on the rows of straight-backed seats in the ante-natal clinic where they are regularly surrounded by reminders of catastrophe and evidence of touchy staff hierarchies, afraid to put a foot wrong or speak out of turn, waiting literally for hours for their name to be called from an impersonal pile of cards, sometimes with another child they’ve had to bring with them whom somehow they must keep quiet, still, and frustrated for these same hours on end, would claim this periodic experience gives the mother a sense of glowing and exciting well-being. No-one, listening to young mothers recently home from hospital, where they had been given drugs (even when they’d asked not to be given them) and forceps deliveries and caesarians and inductions, could claim they got exhilarating self-confidence from their co-operation at birth with their baby, or a proud delight in the capability, strength, tenderness, and achievement of their own body that would last through this baby’s childhood.
