Sunday Book Review: The Birth House

The Birth House, by Ami McKay

The Birth House was the November selection for the book club I participate in. I selected it based on a review I had seen online. The author, a Canadian, is a mother and apparently an unschooler. I just had to throw that in--two worthy reasons to support this author. The book, however, proved to worthy enough on its own. It was a well-written story about a character who manages to grow into her own power when the world seemed set against her.

The story takes place in a small village in Canada in the early 1900s. The heart of the story was timeless, however. Dora Rare, the only girl (in several generations) in a family with a slew of boys, becomes an apprentice to the local midwife, or witch as many think of her. A male physician comes to a nearby town and the women are faced with the “modernization” of their world.

This is a fiction book, of course, but the heart of the story is pure truth as far as I’m concerned. I have no doubt that male advance and eventual take-over on matters that had previously been left to women (specifically pregnancy and birth) happened in this manner and it was happening all over this country (and apparently in Canada, as well). More than just a supposed matter of health and safety, women were so little respected by the community of men that they were even being stripped of having that knowledge for themselves. Imagine living in a time when birth control, in any form, was illegal, when women didn’t have rights to their own bodies, and the very intellectual abilities of women were questioned and considered inferior.

I’d like to believe so much has changed.

As someone who opted for a home birth with a midwife as recently as 1996, however, I can tell you that the attitudes, in many instances, are not all that different. Doctors and hospitals have taken on a near-godly role in our world. Though I see pockets of community where this is changing, as a whole, we continue to have little faith in the power of knowledge, heart, and intuition.

But more than the story of birth itself, I found myself longing, through the story, for that community of women that Dora, in the end, manages to support and uphold. The Birth House—Dora’s house—becomes a retreat for women, a place to simply be in the company of other women. When they need time away, time alone, time to labor, space to birth… it is a place to just be women among women.

It seems a romantic notion and perhaps not fitting with our modern, equality-loving ways, but I’m drawn to it, none-the-less.

From the website:

Ami McKay started her writing career as a freelance writer for CBC Radio. Her work has aired on Maritime Magazine, Out Front, This Morning, and The Sunday Edition. Her documentary, "Daughter of Family G" won an Excellence in Journalism Medallion at the 2003 Atlantic Journalism Awards. She has been a finalist in the Writers' Union of Canada's Short Prose Competition as well as the recipient of a grant from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage. Born in rural Indiana, she now lives with her husband and two sons in an old birth house on the Bay of Fundy.