My first thought was: "How would we know there's an anterior lip?" Not that i particularly want to feel that experience (for the record, i had one in my last labor ~ and why i know is another whole theme we can explore another day...)... It made me realize that it would mean that we'd have to be checking down there, intruding fingers in a sacred place, in a very intimate gesture.
My second thought brought me back to Claire Hall's amazing blog on birth and the male mindset, and how childbirth and the mere thought of checking a cervix is a very masculine concept, one that doesn't particularly pertain to women's reality of childbirth, or the act of labor (which is more than the addition of all its components.)
This reliably brings me back to those *#@% vaginal exams: those exams that most women fear, yet that they indulge into. perhaps that was not the right word... Perhaps i should rephrase this, and say that our birth culture imposes on women a certain set of "rules", which includes the vaginal exam. However, if we think about how vaginal exams got introduced in this birth culture, we realize that it is history, and the medicalization of childbirth, with twilight sleep and babies being pulled out with forceps that first introduced vaginal exams. And that the realization that pulling on a baby before the cervix was opened at 10 cm made the forceps tore the cervix.
However, the totally irrelevance of vaginal exams is is a hard reality to face, when in labor. As we've been socialized in believing that birth is about a cervix dilating, even a well-versed homebirthing woman may be caught in the trap. When will we learn to leave well alone, as Sarah Buckley says?
It just starts at education ~ at the very culture that we live in, and changing its paradigm. Long journey ~ but there are many working at it...
Namaste on those birthing mothers...
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