Karen Brody | Live on Sound Authors

March 2, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! My next guest on the show today is birth activist Karen Brody. Her latest book called Birth is based on her play and it deals with all sorts of issues with being born. Welcome to the show Karen Brody.

Karen Brody: Thanks so much, happy to be here.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about this whole movement that you’ve got.

Karen Brody: Well I wrote a play about birth in America because I thought I noticed a lot of low risk pregnant women were going in the hospital and coming out having what I would term bad birth experiences. They suddenly went from low risk to high risk and there didn’t seem to be any clear reason. So I interviewed over 100 women and afterwards I thought I’d write a book. I ended up writing a play and then I wrote the book. What came out of the play was a movement of people in their communities who also saw this happening in maternity care where there weren’t satisfactory birth options for women in communities and people felt that we needed to raise awareness and money for better birth options for mothers and that’s what came out of my play was a movement called Bold and its an organization that is a theater for social change, using my play as a catalyst in communities. The book is not only the play but its also stories from the Bold Movement, really understanding what people in their communities are doing to make maternity be more mother friendly.

Dr. Kent: For those that aren’t as familiar with the issues you’re talking about, tell us the issues surrounding birth these days.

Karen Brody: Well I think that most people when a woman gets pregnant they just ask them after the birth how’s the baby, the question I wanted to ask is how’s the mother? When you start to ask that question, you start to find that today in childbirth there’s over, if you look at statistics alone, over 30 percent cesarean rate and many of those cesareans are not necessary. You hear the stories to that and you know just looking at the statistics alone you see that the world health organization says for an industrialized country a 16% or less cesarean rate is what they deem appropriate. To have something over 30% we know we have a crisis.

There’s a problem; most women are going into the hospital and while drugs are wonderful when used properly, unfortunately women get into the hospital and they’re on a clock; meaning within 12 hours if you don’t have the baby, they start using drugs and usually way before 12 hours; they want you to have the baby in less than 12 hours. So there’s a crisis in maternity care today. There’s also just the general philosophy in the United States. If you look at other countries, it’s very clear in England, they say immediately we use midwives because they’re cheaper and out comes our excellent bid for low risk pregnancies. The US doesn’t use that model of care that is more in view with those models of care where low risk women should be getting midwives and women who are higher risk should be getting obstetricians who are the trained surgeons, the people who you want when your high risk and there are women who are high risk.

Dr. Kent: You must discover this in your work in this genre but people must always go back to their own birth so now of course I want to tell the story that my mother when she had me she was in labor for more than 24 hours and I had a big head and they had to pull me out and I think I was on my face instead of my back and all sorts of mishaps. Every birth is different, right?

Karen Brody: Absolutely every birth is different. I think we have to the model now unfortunately is birth is an illness and its treated that way in the US where if we saw birth as normal I think it would revolutionize how we treat maternity care and the mothers having the babies, but yes, every story is different and there are many factors that go into a woman’s birth story.

Dr. Kent: How did you get into this field?

Karen Brody: Surprisingly I had two kids! I actually never thought I’d write about maternity care but I was really astounded after I had my first son. I had him with midwives and had him at home, not because I knew much about birth I just instinctively felt I didn’t want to medicalize my birth. I didn’t know anything about the politics of birth but I found after I had my son I had a wonderful supportive compassionate birth experience and then I went to the playground with both my sons as they were getting older and I heard horror stories from women, traumatic stories which I’m really happy to hear now just this past year in 2008 The Wall Street Journal had a piece about birth trauma and motherhood.

You wouldn’t have seen that when I wrote my play, now you’re starting to see people saying actually due to medical intervention there are a significant number of women experiencing birth trauma. I heard it again and again in the trenches with mothers on the playground and I thought something is wrong. These are intelligent women, these are women who are educated and have access to good options. They should have access to good options. They have the money it takes empowering child birth class or whatever it is and yes, you’re hearing some horrible stories and its too many women I thought had these stories so I wanted to write about it.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a hot political topic talking about mother’s rights in situations of rape or with talk about abortion and the rights of the mother versus the rights of the child. It seems like its been an issue since the day the world started.

Karen Brody: Well reproductive rights absolutely has been, unfortunately for some reason childbirth doesn’t get up there in ranking. Everyone will go rally Washington on abortion issues but whose rallying Obama and Washington right now about childbirth? There’s a big push for midwives. They are finally doing a really wonderful job at mobilizing people to start speaking out and we’ve got to start changing the model of care of how we treat maternity care but for the most part reproductive rights have been big buzzwords, but childbirth doesn’t rank up there.

Dr. Kent: Huh; what’s your goal with your company, which is Bold Action?

Karen Brody: The boldaction.org and the goal I mentioned is really to mobilize communities so that they will take action and educate their community members about maternity care and to tell the truth. We have to start telling the truth about the care so our cornerstones are education, truth and action. Do we really want people to start figuring out, learning what is happening today, and I in childbirth through my play the reason I didn’t initially write a book is because I felt who’s going to read it? Maybe a few birth activists would read it but I wanted to get these ideas out to a more mainstream audience and also wanted to take a different medium like theater which is much less threatening. My grandmother wouldn’t pick up a book about the childbirth crisis but she would go to the theater and see a play on birth if her granddaughter said hey come with me and that’s been a transformative experience for many people because story telling has a long history of people retaining that information and taking it with them. Stories can live on in people more so than statistics.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the success of the play, the whole process of putting this on and then also about your work with women’s groups around the world.

Karen Brody: Well the play has sort of an organic following, meaning I wrote the play and it initially had been reading the play in Washington DC where I had written it and really didn’t tell many people about the first reading and that night it was a very cold winter night in December over 100 people showed up to a space that seated 30-35 people. That showed me and that was without I mean there was no marketing or publicity; it was word of mouth, with the internet people can send an email saying hey why don’t you come?

Mothers, fathers, packed into a theater where we did a reading of the play, babies in swings, everything. In there really because they felt passionate about this; finally somebody’s written about this, finally something creative like a play is showing the truth about maternity care. So from there it really just took off because again the interest in it is unbelievable in terms of studying information and I started getting emails from all over the US at first saying that we want to do this in our community.

People started bringing it to their communities about six productions happened initially the first year and the second year I decided to start an organization called Bold; boldaction.org and that organization was from then on people did it under the auspices of bold which is to raise money and awareness about maternity care. Kind of what V-day does with the vagina monologues, it’s very similar. That’s the mission and from then on we had over 100 performances of the play and raised over $150,000 in the last couple of years.

Dr. Kent: Just flipping through the book it’s a lot about conversations, a lot about people and actual stories, how do you feel working within that medium?

Karen Brody: The book is eight stories. I did pick eight women who I had interviewed out of these 118 women total. So eight women I thought were typical of what’s happening in childbirth. I chose their stories with a little creative license to make it more for the stage. That’s the play; the play is these women telling their stories. The stories range from a woman who has a planned c-section to a woman who doesn’t want any drugs in the hospital and has a range of stories.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a fascinating topic. You list on your website among many other things one woman dies every minute worldwide in pregnancy and childbirth related causes and it’s something we don’t often think about. We heard a lot in elementary school talking about the old west but we don’t think about it happening these days.

Karen Brody: We have to be careful about those types of statistics because those types of statistics often scare women about childbirth. Its not risky, childbirth the problem with those statistics and everyone says oh when I have my baby, here’s this low risk woman, the likelihood you’re going to die is very low and if you go to the hospital the likelihood you have interventions and not a good experience is high because of the intervention medically. So people have to be aware. Women were dying in childbirth during the frontier days because there weren’t adequate supplies; there weren’t all these things that women are still dying of in third world countries. That’s why the statistic was so high.

Dr. Kent: So how about this in conclusion my father is a developmental pediatrician and deals with a lot of kids after birth, so I don’t know a whole lot about the birthing process but I do know he said that there’s certain things that happen the more children that women have and I recall in working in the middle east a couple of my young students said oh yeah I have 20 siblings or 15 siblings. Around the world there’s a big difference between having two or three kids than 20 or 25.

Karen Brody: That’s not really the point of my book but that is an issue and certainly I think in the US you’ve got to think of the 30% or higher cesarean rate; to have major abdominal surgery three times or more is extremely risky for women. The more surgeries you have the higher risk you become and its very serious for women to be having two, three, four cesareans and that’s what’s happening in this country because we have something called VBAC, vaginal birth after cesarean that is being denied to women in hospitals today, not every hospital, but the American College of Gynecologists and Hospitals put out guidelines that made it very hard for hospitals to adhere to those guidelines and therefore their not allowing women who had one cesarean to have a vaginal birth the second time.

We’re more or less forcing women to have major abdominal surgery if they want more than one child if the first one was cesarean. So if women want three children, they need three surgeries. We’ve got to think about that. That is a HUGE cost to women; or you just got to stop having babies. I mean it’s no joke it really isn’t and I think people who see the statistics and that’s why I wrote the play because you see 30% over 30%, no you want to hear the stories of how women are really being treated in maternity care and through that you see what needs to change.

Dr. Kent: Give me a sound byte about your work and I know we can find out more at boldaction.org. Tell me more.

Karen Brody: My work is the play and it started a global movement to make maternity care mother friendly so there are more communities that want to be involved and now we do red tents which is such an inspiration to many communities that we were finally telling women’s birth stories that the communities wanted to tell their own birth stories. So women are gathering all over the world to have gold-red tents and tell their birth stories.

Dr. Kent: It’s a beautiful book, it’s called Birth by Karen Brody and it’s available across the web or in the stores. Of course we should check out boldaction.org and go see a play nearby. Thank you so much for chatting with me Karen Brody.

Karen Brody: Thank you

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is a musician. He has a wonderful sound; sometimes strings, sometimes electronics. His name is Dan Goldman and I’m going to play a short little bit of his music before we talk to him live about it. This is a song called LeMetro. I’m sure I slaughtered that French pronunciation but this is a song by Dan Goldman.

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