Playwright conceived Birth, hearing ‘voices of the mothers’

Here's the piece about me, BOLD and the play in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette today.

Not surprisingly, he got a few things wrong, like that one of BOLD's major tenets is to just support low risk pregnancies doing homebirths with midwives. No, I said, we support low-risk women going to midwives who practice the midwifery model of care - whether that be in the home, hospital, or a birth center.

I also spent alot of time talking to him about how if Obama really wants to save money and reform health care he MUST consider training and using more midwifery care for low risk pregnancies. But I don't see that mentioned in the article!

Anyhow...it's nice to be back in Arkansas - it was a fabulous place to live.


Playwright conceived Birth, hearing ‘voices of the mothers’
BY ERIC E. HARRISON ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Karen Brody gave birth to two sons while living in Little Rock just before and just after the turn of the century.

Her experience helped her to eventually also give birth to a play.

Brody’s play, Birth, has drawn comparisons to The Vagina Monologues for its portrayal of women’s birth stories in their own voices and for the grass-roots movement that is moving the message from community to community one performance at a time.

A local cast of actresses will put on a staged reading of the play (in a slightly abridged 45-minute version) at 3 p.m. Sunday in the third-floor meeting room of the Cox Building, 120 Commerce St., next to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library in Little Rock.

The cast includes Angie Gilbert, Monica Clark-Robinson, Paige Renolds, Stephanie Ong, Verda Davenport-Booher and director Stacy Pendergraft.

The reading is part of the Arkansas Literary Festival, in conjunction with the Arkansas Childbirth Institute. The play includes adult language.

Brody will speak and sign copies of the play after the reading.

A fully staged version is on tap for May 21-22 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
HOME DELIVERIES

Brody found out she was pregnant shortly after moving to Arkansas in 1998 when her husband, Tim Ogborn, who works in international development, got a job with Heifer International.

She had her first son, Jacob, in 1999 and her second, Aden, in 2001. Both deliveries were at home with the help of midwives from Birth Works, a home-birth service.

“I didn’t expect to fi nd groovy home-birth midwives in Little Rock,” Brody says. “I felt instinctively that I didn’t want to have my babies in a hospital.”

Hospitals are where sick people go, sometimes to die (“My father passed away in a hospital and I was there,” she says) and Brody is a firm - one might even say fervent- believer that pregnancy is not an illness.

Brody, a freelance author, is the founder of Birth on Labor Day (BOLD), a global arts-based, theater-for-social-change movement that inspires communities around the world to create childbirth choices that work for mothers. Brody notes that neither Birth nor BOLD necessarily promotes any particular option, but that women should be able to choose how they want to deliver their children.

One of the movement’s tenets is that in most low-risk pregnancies, babies can be delivered safely at home with a certified professional midwife.

Complicating Brody’s second pregnancy was a case of amebic dysentery. “We thought it was morning sickness for six months,” she recalls. “It was a pretty rare amoeba. I thought it might risk me out of home birth.”
SECOND BIRTH

Once she had been diagnosed and partially treated for the condition, however, “my second birth was actually easier than my first.”

Her home births led her to consider writing about women’s birth experiences. There are plenty of books and plenty of statistics, but “I was interested in bringing women’s voices out,” she says. “I didn’t see any voices of the mothers.”

Just before she moved from Little Rock to Washington in 2003, she started interviewing women about their experiences. “I spent a good year doing that,” she says. After gathering more than 100 stories, “I realized, ‘Now I have to do something with this.’”

She decided it would speak better if she put it into play form.

“I realized that if I wrote what I was hearing as a book, no one would read it.”

She says she has always loved theater - as a child in New York, her mother took her to plays - but had never written a play before, and was surprised to discover she had a talent for writing dialogue.

The play features the stories of eight women who discuss their birth experiences, ranging from positive to frightening. A positive case is “Amanda,” who delivers a son in a hospital but without drugs with her husband and doula (from the ancient Greek, meaning “a woman who serves,” a doula provides physical, emotional and informational support to the mother before, during and just after birth) nearby. A less positive story is told by “Lisa,” who ended up having a Caesarean section without her full consent.

Brody worked on the script with a Washington-area playwriting group, and was surprised to discover that her colleagues didn’t believe the stories were true.
WHERE’S THE DOCTOR?

For example, “Most women don’t realize that the doctor doesn’t show up until the pushing starts.

“It stirred me to finish it once I saw the impact.”

A first staged reading in 2004 drew 75 people into a black-box space at George Washington University that had only 40 seats. “They all felt the energy and the passion,” the playwright recalls with a touch of pride.

The play had its official premiere in 2005. An early 2006 performance caught the attention of Dr. Christiane Northrup, a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who made the first comparison to Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Northrup also wrote the foreword to the book version of the play, which AuthorHouse published in paperback in 2008.

The play sparked the founding of BOLD - Labor Day 2006 was the kickoff - with the goal of raising childbirth awareness and providing education to as many as 10,000 people a year. On and around Labor Day 2008, the play had more than 100 performances around the United States.

For more information about Birth and BOLD, visit the Web site,
www.boldaction.org