Birth in the Squatting Position
Eve Marx
Word Count 475
In the final trimester of my first pregnancy, I developed an outsized faith in myself and the power of my body. Throughout my pregnancy, my New Mother friends regaled/tortured me with their stories about their gruesome long labor stories and how they’d cursed out their husbands and peed and shat themselves. Despite this plethora of unwanted information, I anticipated my own birth experience as a spectacular example of my personal Olympian-level feats, an amazing act of self -deception considering that my obstetrician, a short, balding man with kind eyes, ominously repeated at every visit while eyeballing my pelvis, “You’re small and your baby is big.”
I signed us up for the recommended six classes of Lamaze held at a hospital annex despite my partner’s misgivings. He wasn’t convinced he wanted to be in the delivery room and verbalized his longing for the days when expectant fathers paced back and forth in an adjacent waiting room and passed out cigars later. He only agreed to participate in the Lamaze classes because they took place down the street from a hole in the wall Indian restaurant he liked where afterwards we would get some dinner. At Lamaze they taught us how to breathe slowly in and out and also to pant like a dog. The most impressive thing to me was their screening of a grainy documentary film made in Brazil called “Birth in the Squatting Position.” It captures five Brazilian women giving natural unassisted birth while in a deep squatting pose. I was inspired and thought I could be like those Brazilian women. After all, I was in great shape and had amazingly strong thighs. My husband said watching the film nauseated him and nearly wrecked his appetite for rogan josh and pakora.
We were living in West Haven, CT; I was on schedule to give birth at Yale New Haven Hospital which was sixteen minutes away. Two full weeks before my due date, my water suddenly broke and we were catapulted into action. We’d been at the movies earlier watching a film called “No Way Out” starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner and when we got home and collected the mail, there was a letter containing my partner’s divorce degree . We drove to the hospital around 10 p.m. where they measured my cervical dilation at 3 centimeters. They kept me at the hospital instead of sending me home, and despite continuous doses of pitocin, I never progressed and wound up having an emergency C-section after over 24 hours of labor. I never got a chance to give birth in a squat let alone engage in the multiple techniques for a successful vaginal birth I’d been taught in six weeks of Lamaze classes. But I did have a healthy baby, born 7 lbs. 1.3 oz and 20 ½” long. And that was good enough.
In those days they kept you in the hospital for five days after a C-section. My only visitor besides my baby’s father (who became my husband two weeks later in a rapid-fire civil ceremony performed at the West Haven courthouse) was the Lamaze coach who came to console me that I didn’t have a vaginal birth.
“Don’t feel like a failure,” she said.
I bristled.
“Failure? Are you kidding? The cemeteries are littered with the tombstones of women who died in childbirth because they didn’t have the option of a C-section,” I said hotly. My anger drove her from the room and I never saw her again.
Eve is a national journalist and book author. Her most recent novel, "How's Your Day Going So Far?" was released in 2026. She is also the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum. She is also a writer of police reports and the author of Call The Police: Flash Fiction Based on Real Police Reports can be found at eve.marx.Substack.com. She lives near Portland, Oregon with her husband, a jazz saxophonist.
