Love is The Work

My daughter was born in the middle of an impossibly hot summer, three weeks after I stopped work to go on maternity leave. I’m an organiser and strategist in the climate movement, so I’m familiar with the truism that we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Many of our resources are limited, but not all of them. Care and freedom are infinitely available to us…

Having a baby made me realise there is a whole other world that's barely seen until we go through a stage of life where we come to depend on the professional care of this predominantly female workforce. What if this world of people who care for a living was fundamental to how we understand the workings of society? What could we change about the way we live and what the future looks like?

—

On a Friday morning in late March, I called the mobile number I’d been given by my doula and a hoarse female voice whispered, “Hello?” She sounded like I’d woken her up after a heavy night out. I explained that I was four months pregnant and was hoping to transfer hospitals, to have my baby under the care of her home birth team. “Can I ask you to call me back in a couple of hours?” she said, still whispering, “I’ve been at a birth all night and I’ve got another lady brewing. I need to get some sleep.”

The woman on the end of the phone was the lead midwife and founder of a dedicated home birth team at a North London NHS hospital, a group of five specialised home birth midwives. Her team’s reputation precedes them and she told me on the phone: “What we do is the gold standard.” Looking back, it was amongst the most pivotal phone calls of my life, certainly of my daughter’s. 

That pride in their work was obvious in every interaction I had with the team over the next five months. My midwife regularly spent upwards of 45 minutes at my house for our appointments, all of which took place at home, doing all the necessary checks, but also getting to know me, because we were going to do this big, important thing together. Their team had been set up to give each midwife the necessary freedom to care for the women they were assigned to. 

Care is an underestimated power in the world. It’s treated as a nice-to-have or something that keeps us alive in the most basic way, but it might be the source of our very life force as human beings. There is a practice in neonatal pediatrics called kangaroo mother care. It was popularized by a public health physician who worked as a mission doctor caring for premature babies in rural Zimbabwe. Working without access to incubators, they discovered that outcomes are far better for premature babies whose care is delivered whilst they are in skin-to-skin contact with their mothers. It turns out that this physical contact provides a foundational safety babies need for fundamental parts of their neurological development. 

—

Before his death David Graeber (celebrated anthropologist and friend to many here at Absurd Towers) was trying to understand how the world could escape the cycle of endless production and consumption. He saw degrowth as a difficult concept – as it kept us in a “growth” paradigm. What he came up with instead has been fundamental to our work at Absurd Intelligence. 

David, in his wisdom, said that you can’t just take something away from people; you have to offer them something to replace it. His suggestion was that if anything could replace production and consumption as the cogs which keep the world turning, it would be care and freedom. They are resources with infinite potential, one replenishing the other in a productive, relational cycle. 

So what would be different about a world powered by care and freedom? Well, everything. 

The quality of everything, the texture of life would be affected in every interaction, at every level. The need to be productive is so deeply ingrained in our culture in the UK, especially the Protestant parts of these nations. It’s hard to imagine a world in which the quality of our relationships comes before getting things done. But it is up to us how we choose to live and what we prioritise. As Hannah Arendt said, “We are free to change the world”. Experiments with shorter working weeks show us that when given the freedom to do so, our instinct is to spend our time caring for our relatives and our communities. 

—

The homebirth midwives arrived at about 3pm. I had been “breathing through” steadily stronger and more frequent contractions, with the support of my partner and our doula, since midnight. I didn’t hear them come in, I just looked up to see two women sitting on the sofa beaming at me. They are experts in this kind of quiet, undisruptive entrance. They did a few checks to make sure me and the baby were both doing okay. We all laughed every time the midwife found my daughter's heartbeat with her handheld doppler – it was decidedly strong and steady throughout.

Maternity services in the UK are plagued by a seemingly inescapable problem often referred to as the ‘cascade of interventions’. Managerialism has taken root in every aspect of the birth process, resulting in an obsession with measuring everything, which then leads to a series of interventions whenever the measurements don’t match the model. If labour doesn’t start soon after the due date, an induction is performed to artificially kick start the process; the synthetic hormones used to set contractions going bring them on far stronger and faster than our bodies would, left to their own devices. The uterus doesn’t have time to soften and stretch and so labour often stalls and the baby gets stuck. Before you know it, forceps or a C-section are needed to get the stuck baby out. All of these interventions can be lifesaving; the problem is that in an effort to mitigate risk they are used far too often. Recent figures show that numbers of C-sections, especially unplanned C-sections, are rising faster than ever in the UK, but outcomes for mothers and babies are not improving. It’s the classic definition of madness. 

The cascade of interventions so common on our maternity wards has myriad unintended consequences, providing fertile ground for reactionary groups that encourage women to give birth without the presence of medical professionals. The Guardian is currently running a multi-part investigation into one of the most lucrative and extreme examples, the Free Birth Society.

My daughter was big, in the 98.9th percentile it turned out, and her head was slightly tilted as she was born, making it even harder to get her out. Had the birth taken place in hospital she would likely have been pulled out with forceps. In some cases this is a necessary, lifesaving intervention. In my case it turned out not to be needed, but twenty one hours in I did not have the confidence in my own ability to give birth to her without intervention. For that I needed to rely on my midwives – on their confidence I was up to the task, and on their ability to check the baby was safe and well as I tried. 

—

I was recently introduced to the ideas of German social theorist Theodor Adorno. If I understand him right, Adorno was saying that there are no ends that justify the means, no great utopias waiting for us in some abstract future. It was a position that brought him into conflict with his Marxist peers. Yet my experience of childbirth has me in agreement with Adorno: the modern world often instrumentalises us as means to justify an external end, one of economic profit or administrative efficiency; in the case of childbirth, medical efficiency. I’m glad I could make a  different choice for myself and my daughter. And I wonder what this can teach us about how we live our future lives together.

—

Through pregnancy and childbirth I happened upon a world of (mostly) women who understand something that our society marginalises, but is totally dependent on – care, birth, transition and transformation. How hidden this world of midwives and doulas is unless you work in it or until you depend upon its care. 

So perhaps care and freedom would be better engines for this world than production and consumption have been. The bigger and more knotty question is how you get from A to B. It seems that our work is to act now to bring about a world powered not by economic profit or administrative efficiency, but by care and freedom, in many small and big ways. In our day to day interactions, and in our organising and activism. 

The work, it turns out, is love. 

*Please forgive any typos or formatting errors. This week’s newsletter was written on a phone whilst holding a baby.  

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

On Saturday Alex attended the Stories. Dreams. Seeds. workshop at Swansea's amazing community space Collaboration Station, working with local people to imagine old and new stories of Britain, Wales and Abertawe.

Alanna headed to Bristol for Meeting the Moment at the Watershed – a brilliant day for cultural organisations who want to speak up.

Charlie helped facilitate a deep dive into what safer social media and tech might look like with the brilliant folk at People Vs Big Tech, hosted by Lush – who have fearlessly taken themselves off social media channels.

Charlie, Gen, Daze and loads of the Hard Art crew and Earth/Percent went to the National Emergency Briefing in Westminster.

Looking ahead, we’ll all also be heading to the brilliant In Case of Emergency, a verbatim play based on the trial of some of our dear friends in the climate movement. It’s on at the Southbank in January. Book now!