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I meet an American in Rome who delivered her baby in an Italian wine vat (filled with water, not Pinot Grigio). A friend in Miami read that the pain of childbirth is a cultural construct, so she trained to birth her twins using only yoga breaths. In our Message-sponsored parenting class, one woman planned to fly home to Sydney for an authentic Australian delivery.
    Birth, like most everything else, is something we try to customize. My obstetrician says she once received a four-page birth plan from an American patient, instructing her to massage the woman’s clitoris after the delivery. The uterine contractions from the woman’s orgasm were supposed to help expel the placenta. Interestingly, this wo Knglericaman’s birth plan also specified that both of her parents should be allowed in the delivery room. (“I said ‘no way.’ I didn’t want to be arrested,” my doctor recalls.)
    In all this talk about giving birth, I never hear anyone mention that the last time the World Health Organization ranked national health-care systems, France’s was first, while America’s was thirty-seventh. Instead, we Anglos focus on how the French system is overmedicalized and hostile to the “natural.” Pregnant Message members fret that French doctors will induce labor, force them to have epidurals, then secretly bottle-feed their newborns so they won’t be able to breast-feed. We’ve all been reading the English-language pregnancy press, which emphasizes the minute risks of epidurals. Those among us who deliver “naturally” strut around like war heroes.
    Despite beingthe birthplace of Dr. Fernand Lamaze, epidurals are now extremely common in France. In Paris’s top maternity hospitals and clinics, about 87 percent of women have epidurals, on average 2 (not counting C-sections). In some hospitals it’s 98 or 99 percent.
    Very few women make a fuss about this. French moms often ask me where I plan to deliver, but never how. They don’t seem to care. In France, the way you give birth doesn’t situate you within a value system or define the sort of parent you’ll be. It is, for the most part, a way of getting your baby safely from your uterus into your arms.
    In French, giving birth without an epidural isn’t called “natural” childbirth. It’s called “giving birth without an epidural” (
accouchement sans péridurale).
A few French hospitals and maternity clinics now have birthing pools and giant rubber balls for laboring women to hug. But few Frenchwomen use these. That 1 or 2 percent of nonepidural births in Paris are, I’m told, either crazy Americans like me or Frenchwomen who didn’t get to the hospital in time.
    The absolute earthiest Frenchwoman I know is Hélène. She takes her three kids on camping trips and breast-fed them all past age two. Hélène also had an epidural at each delivery. For her, there’s no contradiction. She likes some things
au naturel and some with a giant dose of drugs.
    The difference
between France and America crystallizes for me when, through mutual friends, I meet Jennifer and Eric, a couple in their thirties. She’s an American who works for a multinational company in Paris. He’s a Frenchman with a job in advertising. They live just outside Paris with their two daughters. When Jennifer got pregnant for the first time, Eric assumed that they would find a doctor, choose a hospital, and have the baby. But Jennifer brought home a stack of baby books and pressed Eric to study them with her.
    Eric still can’t believe how Jennifer wanted to script the delivery. “She wanted to give birth on a balloon, give birth in a bath,” he recalls. He says the doctor told her, “It’s not a zoo here, or a circus. Basically you will give birth like everyone, on your back, legs open. And the reason is that if there is a problem, then I can do something.”
    Jennifer also wanted to deliver Kd theiwithout anesthesia, so that she could feel what it was like to give birth. “I’ve never heard