One of my most cherished heroes died yesterday: Professor Howard Zinn. I feel such a sense of loss over his passing and, at the same time, feel grateful that I got to be alive for a good long time while he was. I so wanted to meet him in person. The way I’ll honor his memory for the rest of my life is that I will urge people—especially young people—to read his books.
I became aware of his People’s History of the United States in the early 1980s, around the time that I was already beginning to get an education in the real US history from Native Americans. Howard Zinn was the first historian who had the courage to tell the stories of people who before him had never received the attention of historians, who taught us about the “countless small actions of unknown people” whose acts of resistance to social injustice inspired others and created movements that change conditions for the better.
I had heard of other World War II veterans, whose lives had been saved by French villagers, who went back to that village after the war to thank people, but Howard Zinn was the first veteran from that war I knew of, who went to see the village that he and his crew had been ordered to bomb around the time the European war was ending, to find out what happened to them. That’s an unusual and admirable thing to do.
The way he carried himself throughout his life, his sweetness, his kindness, and his humorous and memorable ways of telling stories can serve as lessons for us all. He was passionate, but he was never bitter, and he never let us forget that we have more power than we think we do. But we do have to speak up—as he did, right to the end of his life.
I forgot to mention in my earlier post the study published by the National Institutes of Health in 1999 about the nearly 100,000 fatalities in the U. S. that happen every year because of medical mistakes. According to the report, “the panel found that more than 7000 Americans died each year as a result of ‘medication errors,’ which included the prescribing or dispensing of the wrong drugs. For example, the panel said, pharmacists often had difficulty deciphering the illegible handwriting of doctors who prescribe drugs.”
Is it just Tennessee, or have boards of education across the country decided that it is no longer important for kids to learn how to write (and read) cursive? I was in primary school in the late 1940s and knew how to read and write cursive very well by age nine. No one then thought that a hardship for kids. Back then, you learned how to type in high school—that was optional. Boys usually didn’t take that course, even when they planned to go to college. There, they were expected to hand in typed term papers, which wasn’t easy for them to do unless they had a girlfriend to type it for them.
I only noticed that things had changed a few months ago, knowing a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old (both very bright kids) who couldn’t read or write cursive. They can touch-type, but cursive is a skill that has come to be considered passé. Is this short-sighted or what? It seems to me that they should be able to learn cursive and touch-typing.
Greetings on the first day of winter! I love it when we start to have longer days and shorter nights.
Thanks for all your comments and for the compliments and encouragement.
My neighbor lost her fluffy orange cat, El Gato, several nights ago. When he didn’t come home for supper (we live in the woods, so he does go vole-hunting during the day-time), she began to worry. We all looked around for him, but no one found any sign of him. This went on for three days. On the 4th day, a friend came by our house, having just climbed up the hill from the creek below. It turns out that while wandering through the woods, he began to hear an animal calling. When he got close enough and looked up, he found the orange cat about 40 feet up in the crotch of a tree (with no lower branches).
Four days and four nights in a tree, with temperatures well below freezing, this hungry, dehydrated cat was strong and smart enough to call for help when he heard a human in the woods, but he was far too scared to climb down this tall tree that was far too big for anyone to shinny up. We ended up calling Steve, a neighbor who is a woodsman, to come and help us rescue him. “I can’t even count how many cats I’ve got out of trees,” he told her. We waited a couple of hours, with the afternoon sun getting low for him and my neighbor worrying so much that I finally gave her my hula hoop so she could reduce her anxiety. When Steve finally arrived in his electric golf cart, I asked what his plan was. He held up his paintball gun. He was going to fire above the terrorized cat, in an effort to give him an even more immediate scare that would trick him into learning how to get down the tree. It took a while, and this fluffy cat took a couple of hits on his butt to scare him, but he finally did begin to back down the tree.
Watching that whole scenario unfold got me thinking about fear and how it can make creatures—humans included—unable to think of obvious solutions to scary problems. Since we humans are currently facing all kinds of scary problems, this may be relevant to us, too. I found it quite interesting that an even higher dose of fear was what it took to break the spell of fear that was paralyzing this cat from knowing how to save himself. He had to get more terrified than he already had been to solve his problem. He’s a wiser cat now, and I’m still thinking about what I learned from participating in his rescue.
I’ll write later on about what I’m thinking about how “health care reform” is progressing, or not.
Yay! After a long time of just considering it, I’m finally blogging. Such a relief.
As we approach the longest night of the year here in the northern hemisphere, I’m celebrating a couple of big events in my life, which I’ll mention in chronological order. On October 1, my new book, Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding, was released by two publishers: the US version by Bantam/Dell and the UK version by Pinter & Martin Ltd. I am thrilled to have this book out there at last, and I hope that people (men, too) will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Breastfeeding has always been one of the arts of survival that belong to a sustainable way of life. We all know that breastfeeding has been so invisible in US society for so many generations that ignorance about how to prepare for breastfeeding and how to go about it has made this natural way of infant feeding more difficult than it needs to be.
Virgin and Child, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1609
Equally serious, this invisibility has contributed to what I would call a surprisingly great degree of ignorance about the capacities of the human female body to make food! Here’s just one example of what I mean. If a woman (or adolescent) suddenly finds herself lactating without being pregnant (yes, this does happen sometimes), it may not be necessary to submit to an immediate scan for a brain tumor. (Doctors are taught that the only reason for this happening would be such a tumor). In fact, the woman may be experiencing what can happen when oxytocin levels in the body rise above what it is usual for that woman (as can happen when intense feelings of love arise). My book includes stories from several women who had this experience.
Whereas American puritans, during the first two centuries of their existence here, used to argue—often from the pulpit—that mothers ought to breastfeed their babies (instead of giving their babies over to be fed by wet-nurses), they now try to keep breastfeeding to a minimum and definitely out of sight. I want to see breastfeeding happening wherever mothers want to be (as we did here in The Farm community). In my opinion, this is the best way for our country to get over the ridiculous, destructive, (and entirely curable) mental disorder that I call “nipplephobia,” so rampant here.
I hope that my book will inform mothers-to-be how much a rather simple change in a common birth practice (the routine immediate clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord) can help to get more babies off to a good start in breastfeeding. Later cord clamping is evidence-based and the most practical way of keeping the baby from being separated from mother (when relatively few babies actually require this separation).
Big Event #2 for 2009 was being awarded an honorary doctorate by Thames Valley University at a ceremony in London. (See the press release below). Several people have asked if I got to keep the “Hogwarts” costume that you see me wearing. The answer is No; the outfit that I wore was returned to the costume department for the next fortunate awardee.
Midwife Ina May Gaskin shows panels from the Safe Motherhood Quilt, which honors women who have died of pregnancy-related causes; the huge majority of those deaths were preventable. She contrasts the UK’s excellent maternal mortality program with the US’s almost nonexistent one and suggests the US follow the UK’s lead. She says the first thing that needs to happen is for every state in the US to use the standard death certificate, so that maternal deaths can be properly counted and understood, and prevented.
FOR DEMONSTRATING EFFECTIVENESS AND SAFETY OF MIDWIFERY
LONDON—Ina May Gaskin, of Summertown, Tennessee, was awarded the title “Honorary Doctor” by the Thames Valley University, London, England, on November 24, 2009. The award was presented by the faculty of the Health and Human Sciences division of the University in recognition of her work in demonstrating through midwifery and natural childbirth that women’s bodies still work as they were designed. Gaskin accepted the award in the Grand Auditorium of Wembley Stadium before an audience of 600.
Gaskin, who will turn 70 in March, thanked her mother for not scaring her about childbirth; Dr. Grantly Dick-Read (author of the classic Childbirth Without Fear); her high school biology teacher for teaching her to keep an open mind; her husband, Stephen Gaskin, for allowing 270 young people to accompany him on a lecture tour in the winter of 1970-71; and several physicians for mentoring her during the early years of her career as midwife.
Gaskin also thanked “the little Capuchin monkey who, in 1970, held my hand with an electrifying touch, thereby teaching me in an instant that I could also have touch that powerful if I lived as much in the moment as she did.”
With the honorary degree, Gaskin is now a PhD(Hon.), as well as a CPM, Certified Professional Midwife. She is Executive Director of the Farm Midwifery Center, which she helped found in 1971; the center has handled more than 2600 births, with statistics showing much better than average outcomes. Gaskin herself has attended more than 1200 births. She is author of Spiritual Midwifery, now in its fourth edition, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, and a new book, Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding.
Gaskin lectures internationally at midwifery conferences, at medical schools and hospitals, both to students and to faculty. She was President of Midwives’ Alliance of North America from 1996 to 2002. In 1997, she received the ASPO/Lamaze Irwin Chabon Award and the Tennessee Perinatal Association Recognition Award. She was featured in Salon magazine’s “Brilliant Careers” in 1999. In 2003 she was chosen as Visiting Fellow of Morse College, Yale University.
Gaskin transformed her observation of increasing maternal mortality in the United States into The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project, a national effort to honor women who have died of pregnancy-related causes and to draw public attention to the high maternal death rate in the U.S.
Her promotion of a low-intervention but extremely effective method for dealing with one of the most-feared birth complications, shoulder dystocia, has resulted in that method being adopted by a growing number of practitioners. The Gaskin maneuver is the first obstetrical procedure to be named for a midwife. Gaskin learned it from a Belizean midwife, who had learned it from indigenous midwives in Guatemala.
"A dear friend of mine excitedly lent me Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, and I read it in about 2 days. It helped me to deal with the trauma and scars of the first experience and prepare for a better one."
—Amazon Reviewer
Announcing Ina May's Latest Book!
Learn about the Safe Motherhood Quilt, which honors women who have died of pregnancy-related causes.
Here is a replica from a statue that is venerated at the Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche, St. Augustine, Florida:
LONDON—Ina May Gaskin, of Summertown, Tennessee, was awarded the title “Honorary Doctor” by the Thames Valley University, London, England, on November 24, 2009. The award was presented by the faculty of the Health and Human Sciences division of the University in recognition of her work in demonstrating through midwifery and natural childbirth that women’s bodies still work as they were designed. Gaskin accepted the award in the Grand Auditorium of Wembley Stadium before an audience of 600.
