I love the irony that you highlight about the fetishizing of pre-industrial practices. It’s good that as technology progresses, we remain skeptical of the purported advances we make, but it’s also kind of ridiculous when we put old ways on a pedestal so casually.

The line about children “breastfeeding until they’re seven” in the “developing world” had me checking my own reaction, which was, “wow, if that were actually true, that would actually account for slower economic development.” After all, one of the challenges in the developing world is sufficient education and opportunity for women. The range of “breast-feeding for seven years”-friendly careers isn’t big on variety. It’s noteworthy that breastfeeding can have a contraceptive role, too, but we have a lot more options now.

And when you think about how dying in childbirth was such a common fear before the age of the cesarian, the real story is that we’re truly lucky to have a medical establishment with solutions to rare but real dangers in birth. As much as the Western subcultural backlash against medical birth is good in terms of re-humanizing it, birth in many ways is one of the things medicine is most reliable for. With all the diseases we don’t know how to cure, and how uncertain we are about which foods are killing us and which ones keep us healthy, it’s kind of amazing how drastically we’ve reduced the risks to mothers and babies?

What you describe around childbirth also highlights how as a society, we’re struggling to resolve two attitudes about mothers: how can we respect and honour motherhood, without forcing women to be relegated only to the pregnancy-childrearing cycle? A lot of feminist dialogue tends to emphasize the external forces in that challenge, the history and socialization, and that it “shouldn’t” be a problem. But we also need to understand that it’s a difficult duality to resolve, because humans have trouble with things that fit in more than one box. If you’re an actor-singer, are you really an actor who also sings, or a singer who sometimes stars in movies? If you’re an artist and an mechanical engineer, are you a gearhead who sometimes paints, or an artist who also has to make a living?

We struggle with the idea that there’s more than one great way to be a mom, because we have trouble imagining more than one best way to be anything. It’s easier for us to imagine that chicken soup and aprons is motherhood, because it’s iconic and sometimes that’s the best way for a mom to be a mom. Just not for everyone. It’s harder to recognize that for some individuals, being a busy executive, with daycare, nannies, personal assistants, tutors, and a cleaning service is the best mommy she can be. Because there are a lot of things you can offer your kid, and being true to yourself as an inspiring role model can be just as amazing as attending all the recitals and games. And kids have been turning out right despite tons of parenting mistakes, for many thousands of years, since our survival as a species was predicated on reacting well to imperfect parenting.

If that’s true for the whole parenting process, how much more for the medical details of birth? As far as birth-style-shaming, not only is it a low blow for mom-vs-mom competition and a troubling attitude for any birth-related professional, but speaking as someone whose mother almost died because she tried a natural birth against doctors’ insistence, it’s reckless to encourage unnecessary risks. Respecting natural processes is important, but as soon as there’s a medical case for a cesarian, nobody has a right to pressure the mom against it, or make her feel bad about it. It’s much harder to be a great mom when you or your kid is dead.

I hope you continue sharing more of these cross-cultural insights because I think the juxtaposition of North American ideas of motherhood with Indian perspectives really sheds a lot of light on the expectations we’re creating, based partly on a fictionalized history of what motherhood was like back when pregnancy was too often a deadly disease.