book review: Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife

I really enjoyed–and recommend–Peggy Vincent’s 2002 memoir Baby Catcher.

Vincent’s narrative voice feels strong, empathetic, and funny. She tells many birth stories, spanning decades and multiple birth settings: we see babies born in three quite different hospitals, an ‘alternative birth center’ in one of those hospitals, and many different sorts of homes … including a sailboat in a tempest. There are lots of very funny stories, inspiring stories, quietly happy stories, and also a handful of very sad stories, which Vincent treats sensitively. We see Vincent’s own children born, with particular attention to her last birth, which occurred in the midst of her career as a homebirth midwife. I love the range of behaviors and reactions we see in laboring/birthing people and their partners and families here.

So, if you’re interested in what birth is like, this is one fun place to go for more examples.

Baby Catcher also serves well as an illustration of the medical and midwifery models of birth, and why the difference matters to so many of us.

Two small complaints:

1) Occasionally the quoted voices feel a bit off here; it’s hard to write dialogue, let alone dialect, and sometimes I have trouble hearing the voices she’s trying to pass along to me.

2) One moment made me cringe–when Vincent writes:

And time after time I had the honor and privilege of looking into the astonished faces of first-time moms as I laid slippery newborns in their arms. They gazed back at me, awed by the intensity of this thing called childbirth, this rite of passage they had just completed. Having made that journey, having tapped depths of strength they never knew they possessed, they crossed a lone and never looked back. Right before my eyes, they left girlhood far behind as they stepped with both feet into womanhood, into the world of Women Who Have Given Birth. (217)

Although this is its most explicit and universalizing articulation, this image recurs a few times in the text: the image of birthing as the rite of passage that separates women from girls. This is obviously problematic, so obviously that it seems odd to explain it, but just in case: a female person doesn’t have to be a mother to be a real adult; not all mothers give birth; not all women have bodies that can grow and birth babies even if they want to (and surely they’re not damned to permanent childishness or unwomanliness); women can and do face tests of strength and endurance and self-realization that have absolutely nothing to do with our reproductive organs. Birth is one experience with the potential to tap into a person’s own deep and surprising strength, not the only one, lady-bits or no lady-bits.

However, the book generally avoids the gender essentialism and one-size-fits-all approach to birth that so often crops up in the ‘natural birth’ literature. These moments are a very, very small (though upsetting) part of the larger project, and I suspect they communicate judgments that Vincent herself would not embrace.

Also, it seems necessary to mention that the midwife gets attacked (repeatedly) by a large housecat, has a fight with a goose, refuses to perform an at-home cesarean for a very determined and brave woman, nearly drowns in the San Francisco Bay, makes it possible for a sixteen-year-old and her nineteen-year-old partner to birth their baby on their own terms and with privacy and love (he catches the baby, as do many of the fathers in these stories), attends one birth at which hands-down the most useful assistant was the baby’s toddler sibling, and rethinks a lot of her own snap judgments of the rather unusual folks attending some of these Berkeley births. Many adventures and characters here, and well-worth reading.