ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the strands of critique through psychoanalytic thinking. She suggests that the Birth Rights Movement idealizes birth through the use of bio-essentialism and subjective accounts of birth in a way that does not thoroughly embrace the negative intrapsychic aspects, which may reproduce a controlling ideology of female reproduction. The author presents the philosophy of Birth Rights Movement. The Birth Rights Movement is one of the few forces in the world that sincerely and actively attempts to embrace, honor, and protect female reproductive life. The Birth Rights Movement grew from a critique of "industrialized labor". The counter-critique of the Birth Rights Movement that has developed centers around the idealization of birth. A perfect birth is certainly a central and needed fantasy in the female psyche, but it must be reconciled with reality, similar to the maternal task of reconciling the fantasy baby with the real.
