Sure, There's Lots of Sex Scenes in Literature. But Where Are the Birth Scenes?

That's the question recently posed by the Guardian.

From the piece...

But birth is more often gracefully elided, occurring between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, or even between one paragraph and the next. We might have overcome our inhibitions about following characters into the bedroom, but we want a birth over with in a neat-and-tidy jump cut. (Many mothers might wish that life imitated art in this respect.)

When I started work on my debut novel, one of the first scenes I wrote was a meeting between a heavily pregnant woman and her slim, career-driven friend, who has never wanted children. I wanted to write about the way relationships between women can be both competitive and supportive, and what happens to a friendship when one woman has a baby. I knew birth had to be part of that; I didn't want to skirt around it.

But there were a number of difficulties to overcome: how much detail to go into, and what to leave out? How to describe pain? How to make it as dramatic and compelling as the real thing? The key would be to see what happened through my characters' eyes – but whose eyes did I choose? Pain reduces women in labour to wordlessness; others are only partially helpful bystanders. How could I do justice to both perspectives?