Maternal Death Quotes

More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.

I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.

...as he finally sheds his body's suit, ------ finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.

Yes, babies in the womb are human beings, but so what?

Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

The death rate for that is 8.8 women per 100,000.12 As I’ve mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman. (And getting more so, because the maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.)

Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations,” according to The New York Times.

The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home. Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.

every mother deserves reproductive justice. How a society treats pregnant women is a metaphor for how a society raises its children. Every year, about seven hundred American women die from pregnancy, the highest maternal mortality rate among rich countries in the world. Two-thirds of the annual deaths from pregnancy are considered preventable.

A woman's sexual desire must be filtered through a careful appraisal of potential risks. During human prehistory, women who blindly gave in to every sexual urge likely faced a host of daunting challenges, including - in the extreme cases - death. Most important, from an evolutionary point of view, her children would have a harder time surviving than the children of a woman who limited the expression of her sexual urges to a strong and decent man willing to invest in a stable, long-term, child-rearing relationship. All modern women are the fruit of feminine caution. The result of this whittling away of the impulsive branches of our ancestral maternal tree is a female brain equipped with the most sophisticated neural software on Earth. A system designed to uncover, scrutinize, and evaluate a dazzling range of informative clues.

My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.

But does it mean that everything-everything-that is in us can go on to the Mountains? Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard coma red with a stallion? Lust is poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when list has been killed….Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty. I do not know how her affair will end. But it may well be that at this moment she's demanding to have him down with her in Hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it. No, no. Ye must draw another lesson. Ye must ask, if the risen body even of appetite is as a grand a horse as ye saw, what would the risen body of maternal love or friendship be?

A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse de Berri with l’Enfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc du Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers’ monthly nannies. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.

Beneath the haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell or paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, as a torture chamber- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: dread of the superego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched.

world economic growth) and might even do something to improve health care, maternity leave, and other family friendly policies. Of course, my hope is a little more audacious – that one day there might just be a President of the US who doesn’t feel they have to denigrate their mother’s secular humanism as their only hope of being elected. That the US might one day consider someone’s worth not as being measured purely by the size of their bank account and that paying taxes will be seen as something proudly done because it is the price one pays to live in a civilisation. 〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 텔 - KrTop "코리아탑" 〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓〓 But Obama does look like he might try to help the poor, that he might seek to finally do something to address the shame that is racism, that he might do something to reduce the US deficit (which is increasingly a threat to I can’t help but feel that while the US cuts taxes to the bone, prefers its citizens to beg in the humiliation that is charity rather than turn when in need to the dignity of social welfare, while the US gleefully punishes the poor and the working class with unliveable wages, while the US talks of placing the ten commandments in the courtrooms that sentence people to death in contradiction of the ‘thou shalt not kill’ they would hypocritically engrave into the walls, it will always be hard for me to understand the US. juul 대마,juul 떨,lsd판매,떨 구매,떨 구매매,떨 액상,떨 판매,떨 판매매,떨판매,떨판매매

The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men clutch their newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death. But we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal.

What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breath. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.

At first Christ was a man – nothing more. Mary was his mother, Joseph his father. The genealogy of his father, Joseph, was given to show that he was of the blood of David. Then the claim was made that he was the son of God, and that his mother was a virgin, and that she remained a virgin until her death. The claim was made that Christ rose from the dead and ascended bodily to heaven. It required many years for these absurdities to take possession of the minds of men. If he really ascended, why did he not do so in public, in the presence of his persecutors? Why should this, the greatest of miracles, be done in secret, in a corner? Is Christ our example? He never said a word in favor of education. He never even hinted at the existence of any science. He never uttered a word in favor of industry, economy or of any effort to better our condition in this world. He was the enemy of the successful, of the wealthy. Dives was sent to hell, not because he was bad, but because he was rich. Lazarus went to heaven, not because he was good, but because he was poor. Christ cared nothing for painting, for sculpture, for music – nothing for any art. He said nothing about the duties of nation to nation, of king to subject; nothing about the rights of man; nothing about intellectual liberty or the freedom of speech. He said nothing about the sacredness of home; not one word for the fireside; not a word in favor of marriage, in honor of maternity. He never married. He wandered homeless from place to place with a few disciples. None of them seem to have been engaged in any useful business, and they seem to have lived on alms. All human ties were held in contempt; this world was sacrificed for the next; all human effort was discouraged. God would support and protect. At last, in the dusk of death, Christ, finding that he was mistaken, cried out: “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? We have found that man must depend on himself. He must clear the land; he must build the home; he must plow and plant; he must invent; he must work with hand and brain; he must overcome the difficulties and obstructions; he must conquer and enslave the forces of nature to the end that they may do the work of the world.

As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

Your short understanding, your clipped mind, your hollow heart, will make more of mankind than it has the power to become. Make of a man what you will, yet he cannot be more than this I say to you, with the leave of all pure women: a human is conceived in sin, nourished with impure, unspeakable feculence in the maternal body, born naked and smeared like a beehive; a mass of refuse, a churn of filth, a dish for worms, a stinkhouse, a repulsive washtub, a rancid carcass, a mildewed crate, a bottomless sack, a perforated pocket, a bellows, a rapacious maw, a reeking flagon of urine, a malodorous pail, a deceptive marionette-show, a loamy robber’s den, an insatiably slaking trough, a painted delusion. Let recognise who will: every human created to completion has nine holes in his body; out of all these there flows such repellent filth that nothing could be more impure. You would never see human beauty, if you had the eyes of a lynx, and your gaze could penetrate to the innards; you would shudder at the sight. Strip the dressmaker’s colouring from the loveliest of ladies, and you will see a shameful puppet, a hastily withering flower, a sparkle of little durance and a soon decomposing clod of earth! Show me a handful of beauty of all the belles who lived a hundred years ago, excluding those painted on the wall, and you shall have the Kaiser’s crown! Let love flow away, let grief flow away! Let the Rhine run its course like other waters, you wise lad from Assville!

My maternal grandmother died on December 21st, and her only concern was that we wouldn't find the Christmas gifts that she'd hidden away for the family. Right then, I understood why my mother was such a kind woman - she followed her mother's example and passed that compassion on to her children. My grandmother's example in life became her shining example of a noble death - selfless and caring until the end. While some choose the path unilaterally, for me, kindness is a learned behaviour: teach your children humility by your words and actions, and they will give something to this world and not just take from it.

Human beings tend to forget what is painful or dangerous. Like sons, daughters were once completely dependent on a female caretaker. Perhaps remembering any conflict with another woman might remind a woman of a primary dependence so total that to have even once contemplated losing it was to contemplate death. Perhaps an infant or a child imagines—or has actually experienced—terror and deprivation at female hands. Perhaps one’s mother or female caregiver was largely absent or malevolently present, over-critical, subject to rages. According to some psychoanalytic theorists, daughters, perhaps even more than sons, respond to perceived and real maternal anger with “guilt.

I also took care of a four year-old that was in the dying process. Both of his parents were already dead. His maternal grandparents were caring for him. In the weeks before he died he told everyone he was taking a trip, that he was going to live with his “parents.” In the hours before his death, he began looking around the room as if searching for something or someone. We asked him what he was doing, and he told us he was looking for his mother. It was as if the room was filled with people we couldn’t see. Just before he died, he raised his arm, pointed to the corner of his room and called his mother by name. He stayed focused on that corner until his last breath. You can’t convince me his mother wasn’t there to help him make the change from this world to the next. We do not die alone!

- Molly Noptkins tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the apres-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza's lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera's apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film's camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother.

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.

about society buying itself a slave. Who from? From destitution. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from dire poverty. A painful bargain. A soul for a bit of bread. Destitution makes an offer, society gives the nod. The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it has not yet managed to permeate it. They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution. It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets. At the point we have reached in this doleful drama, there is nothing left of the Fantine of the past. In becoming trash she turned to marble. Whoever touches her feels cold. She wafts into view, she goes along with you yet knows nothing about you; she is the face of dishonor and severity. Life and the social order have had their final say. All that can happen has happened to her. She has felt everything, accepted everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, cried over everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference just as death resembles sleep. Nothing is too awful for her now. She fears nothing. Let the sky fall on her head, let the whole ocean crash over her! What does she care? She is a sponge already completely soaked. That, at least, is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that you can exhaust fate or that you ever hit rock bottom—in anything. Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God.

lake level: 4204.75' What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breathe. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.

Beginning with maternal, fetal, and infant malnutrition, it’s hardly surprising that the enslaved were more susceptible than free people to most infirmities, including crib death, infant mortality of all kinds (including infanticide), death in childbirth, and injuries and deterioration to the mother from repeated childbirth, along with typhoid, cholera, smallpox, tetanus, worms, pellagra, scurvy, beriberi, kwashiorkor, rickets, diphtheria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dental-related ailments, dysentery, bloody flux, and other bowel complaints. The health conditions of the enslaved were aggravated by overwork, accidents, and work-related illnesses such as “green tobacco sickness,” today known as nicotine poisoning, which plagued tobacco workers.22 The heavy work regimes they endured wore down their bodies and aged them prematurely, with childbirth-related fatalities limiting women’s life spans even more than the men’s.

After that came more injections, pills, low-quality eggs, toilets and screens with naked women on them and the pressure to fill the plastic cup, baptisms they didn’t attend, the question “So when’s the first child coming along?” repeated ad nauseum, operating rooms he wasn’t allowed to enter so that he could hold her hand and she wouldn’t feel so alone, more debt, other people’s babies, the babies of those who could, fluid retention, mood swings, conversations about the possibility of adopting, phone calls to the bank, children’s birthday parties they wanted to escape, more hormones, chronic fatigue and more unfertilized eggs, tears, hurtful words, Mother’s Days in silence, the hope for an embryo, the list of possible names, Leonardo if it was a boy, Aria if it was a girl, pregnancy tests thrown helplessly into the trash can, fights, the search for an egg donor, questions about genetic identity, letters from the bank, the waiting, the fears, the acceptance that maternity isn’t a question of chromosomes, the mortgage, the pregnancy, the birth, the euphoria, the happiness, the death.

Hiawatha’s father is Mudjekeewis, the West Wind: the battle therefore is fought in the West. From that quarter came life (fertilization of Wenonah) and death (Wenonah’s). Hence Hiawatha is fighting the typical battle of the hero for rebirth in the Western Sea. The fight is with the father, who is the obstacle barring the way to the goal. In other cases the fight in the West is a battle with the devouring mother. As we have seen, the danger comes from both parents: from the father, because he apparently makes regression impossible, and from the mother, because she absorbs the regressing libido and keeps it to herself, so that he who sought rebirth finds only death. Mudjekeewis, who had acquired his godlike nature by overcoming the maternal bear, is himself overcome by his son: Back retreated Mudjekeewis, Rushing westward o’er the mountains, Stumbling westward down the mountains, Three whole days retreated fighting, Still pursued by Hiawatha To the doorways of the West Wind, To the portals of the Sunset, To the earth’s remotest border, Where into the empty spaces Sinks the sun, as a flamingo Drops into her nest at nightfall.

Here are pictures of the sources for Daoist mijue "master to disciple" oral teachings, as shown in the manuals used by Daoist masters themselves. The manuals are insufficient for the casual reader to use, the oral koujue explanations given on a personal one-to-one basis are essential. After seeing how Daoists from Longhu Shan,as well as foreign ("american") Dao for $$$ have falsified their use, I am reluctant to share them in full, until a true Qingwei or Zhengyi Grade five and above master ask to see them. The Qingwei (5 thunder-vajra") Daoist seen performing the purification mudra in image #5 below (a mudra shared by Daoists, Tendai Tantric Buddhists in Japan, and Tibetan masters) said when he had seen the manuals shown in pictures 1-4. "Where is the other half of the Thunder-Vajra manual?" Then I knew that it was OK to give it to him! He gave me his address in Jiangxi province; I intend to bring the mijue manual to him on my next trip to China, as Master Zhuang asked me to do, (before his death in 1976, an order given to his maternal great grandfather by the 61st Longhu Shan master, in 1868)! [Saso facebook post, May 7 2015]

Joël describes here, in unmistakable symbolism, the merging of subject and object as the reunion of mother and child. The symbols agree with those of mythology even in their details. There is a distinct allusion to the encircling and devouring motif. The sea that devours the sun and gives birth to it again is an old acquaintance. The moment of the rise of consciousness, of the separation of subject and object, is indeed a birth. It is as though philosophical speculation hung with lame wings on a few primordial figures of human speech, beyond whose simple grandeur no thought can fly. The image of the jelly-fish is far from accidental. Once when I was explaining to a patient the maternal significance of water, she experienced a very disagreeable sensation at this contact with the mother-complex. “It makes me squirm,” she said, “as if I’d touched a jelly-fish.” The blessed state of sleep before birth and after death is, as Joël observes, rather like an old shadowy memory of that unsuspecting state of early childhood, when there is as yet no opposition to disturb the peaceful flow of slumbering life. Again and again an inner longing draws us back, but always the life of action must struggle in deadly fear to break free lest it fall into a state of sleep. Long before Joël, an Indian chieftain had expressed the same thing in the same words to one of the restless white men: “Ah, my brother, you will never know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing. This is the most delightful thing there is, next to sleep. So we were before birth, and so we shall be after death.”34

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

The World Health Organization estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years. Child mortality has plunged, longevity has increased, but childbirth remains almost as deadly as ever, with one maternal death every minute. Some 99 percent of these deaths occur in poor countries.

137 million women who want to space or limit their pregnancies use no contraception, usually because they have no access to family planning services; 68,000 women a year die from unsafe abortions. Preventing unplanned pregnancies would save a quarter of maternal deaths.18

between 1915 and 1930, US maternal mortality did not decline and deaths of babies from birth injuries actually increased. Hospitals advertised widely, urging mothers to ‘go for the best’, and women believed they were getting just that when they paid the high fees.

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor. Ten young men had terrorized one of the world’s biggest cities for three days—a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn’t know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital—a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.

lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.

Maternity is a totally ungracious thing, beneath the sentimentality heaped upon it. Only once have I seen it made beautiful for an instant, by a chance grouping of a woman's thick white thigh, statuesque in its rigidity, and the new-born child lying in the arch made by her raised knee, with its arm thrown back above its head, and the strangest expression of peace that I have ever seen on the face of a living child. The cord was not yet cut, stretching in an arc between them. For a second I was staggered by such unexpected loveliness as they showed together, and then I bent over them to help her, and the scene changed back instantly to a normal birth, which is generally uglier than death, only so much pleasanter to witness than one rarely realizes it.

In the nineteenth century, poor urban women could give birth in charity hospitals for free, though wealthier women still gave birth at home. As childbirth moved into hospitals, the maternal death rate rose dramatically. Childbed fever, as puerperal sepsis was called, was spread by doctors who did not wash their hands between exams. But doctors blamed it on tight petticoats, fretting, and bad morals.

it’s tragic that up to 40 percent of all pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted—and that almost half of those result in induced abortions. By some measures, more than one quarter of all maternal deaths could be avoided if there were no unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

In that moment, Lara was more than simply a vampire of the White Court, a succubus, pale and deadly. She was a reminder of days gone by, when mankind paid homage to blood-soaked goddesses of war and death, revered the dark side of the protective maternal spirit, the savage core of the strength that still allowed tiny women to lift cars off of their children, or to turn upon their tormentors with newfound power.

eyeing him with the maternal anxiety of a boa-constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey.

And you, great soul, are you hoping for a dream Who won't have these colors of lie anymore What in the eyes of flesh are the wave and gold doing here? Will you sing when you're a vaporous? Come on! Everything is running away! My presence is porous, Holy impatience dies too! Skinny black and gold immortality, Consolator fearfully laured, Who of death makes a maternal breast, The beautiful lie and the pious trick! Who does not know, and who does not refuse them, This empty skull and eternal laugh!

International Socialist Review Issue 24, July–August 2002 Stephen Jay Gould: Dialectical Biologist by Phil Gasper Every major newspaper carried an obituary of Gould after his death, praising his scientific accomplishments. But most said nothing about another important aspect of Gould’s life–his radical politics. Gould was a red diaper baby. His maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants who worked in Manhattan’s garment sweatshops in the early years of the last century, just blocks from the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 workers in 1911. "I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers," Gould wrote, "and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning)…set their views and helped to define their futures."4 Gould’s parents were New York leftists, probably in or around the Communist Party in the 1930s, and he once boasted that he had learned his Marxism "literally at [my] daddy’s knee.

Malaria is a major complication during pregnancy, leading to high rates of miscarriage, of maternal death through hemorrhage and severe anemia, and of all the sequelae that follow from severely low birth weight. Since malaria can be transmitted from mother to fetus, it can also lead to the birth of infants who are already infected.

A figure who was much reviled in his own time but whose speculations and medical practice also paved the way for the germ theory was the Hungarian gynecologist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818–1865). In the 1840s, working at the Vienna General Hospital, Semmelweis was appalled by the rate of maternal mortality from puerperal fever, now known to be a severe bacterial blood infection and then the leading cause of death in lying-in hospitals.

In Section 1 deliveries were carried out by physicians and medical students, who also conducted autopsies as a central part of their medical and scientific work. In Section 2, however, deliveries were entrusted to midwives, who did not take part in dissections. In Section 1 the maternal death rate was 20 percent, but it was only 2 percent in Section 2.

In 1847 Semmelweis therefore persuaded colleagues, midwives, and students to cleanse their hands with a chlorine solution before entering the maternity ward. The results were immediate and impressive as mortality plunged to 1.3 percent in both sections. Semmelweis

He set his wine goblet on the table, knelt by Bridget’s feet, and took her hands in his, pressing a kiss upon each small, soft palm before looking at her. “What ye saw happen to those thieves and what ye saw tonight is a part of me. I cannae deny it. I cannae deny that there have been MacNachtons who have behaved verra much like the creatures of some nightmare. There is a feral part of me, of us. It comes out in the hunt, in battle, in anger. It has been a verra long time, however, since MacNachtons were a threat to innocent Outsiders, although I fear Scymynd would like to be so again. They used to call us the Nightriders because we raced out of these hills at night and death always followed, though nay in the ways and numbers the tales would have ye believe. I think Scymynd wants those days to return.” “What of the sun, Cathal? Can that kill ye?” “Aye, eventually. Tis as if the sun feeds upon us, steals the life right out of us. It burns us up. A Pureblood can die rather quickly if caught out in the sun. I can endure it for a while, but it does leave me feeling weak and ill.” “And what of whatever children we may be blessed with?” “I cannae say. There isnae any way to ken what traits will weaken, which will linger, and which will disappear. My cousin Connall is of the same paternal and maternal bloodline as I am, but is different. James is born of a halfblood and an Outsider. He can endure quite a lot of daylight, but he still suffers a wee bit.” Bridget slipped her hands free of his grasp and took his face in her hands. “It matters not. I chose ye. I have said vows afore God. Tis good to ken that I deal with people, nay demons, but it still doesnae matter. Ye are my husband.” There

Although he was considered to be a dictatorial boss by his enemies, Mayor Hague was thought of as a hero and benefactor by most of his constituents. Serving as the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey 30 years, from 1917 to 1947, he was adored by his constituents and feared by his enemies. Known as the boss he served as the mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey from 1917 to 1947. If anyone in the city had a problem, they could go to one of his Ward Heelers to get help. Hospitalization at the Medical Center, the art deco hospital complex, built on the center slope of the city, was free to any Jersey City resident, lacking the money for the care they received. My sister was treated there prior to her death, and my brother was born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. By the same token, contractors judiciously selected to do work for the city, knew that they would have to give the mayor a hefty kick back. That’s just the way it was.… ‘Nuf said!

There's something about dealing in death that brings out the maternal in me.

The dusty facts are that; Ferdinand II, the Regent of Castile, was 63 years old when he died on January 23, 1516; his wife Queen Isabella was 53 years old when she died on November 26, 1504; and Columbus had passed away almost 10 years prior on May 20, 1506. The earlier death of Isabella and the death of her children changed the normal succession of heirs, forcing Ferdinand to yield the government of Castile to Philip of Habsburg, the husband of his second daughter Joanna. The son of Joanna and her husband Philip I of Castile was Charles I, who would inherit Spain from his maternal grandparents as well as the Habsburg and Burgundian Empires of his paternal family. Thus, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella became the most powerful ruler in Europe and by 1516 King Charles I of Spain also ruled the Netherlands. In 1519 as Charles V, he became the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Germany, as well as the King of Italy.

US hospitals may be excellent, but there must be something profoundly wrong with our health care system if we fall near the bottom of the heap among developed nations on life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, self-reported health, obesity, drug overdoses, suicide, homicides, disability rates, traffic deaths, almost any indicator you can think of. Lack of access to medical care deserves much of the blame, but even educated, insured, well-off Americans are less healthy than their peers in other rich nations

What American Healthcare Can Learn from Italy: Three Lessons It’s easy. First, learn to live like Italians. Eat their famous Mediterranean diet, drink alcohol regularly but in moderation, use feet instead of cars, stop packing pistols and dropping drugs. Second, flatten out the class structure. Shrink the gap between high and low incomes, raise pensions and minimum wages to subsistence level, fix the tax structure to favor the ninety-nine percent. And why not redistribute lifestyle too? Give working stiffs the same freedom to have kids (maternity leave), convalesce (sick leave), and relax (proper vacations) as the rich. Finally, give everybody access to health care. Not just insurance, but actual doctors, medications, and hospitals. As I write, the future of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain, but surely the country will not fall into the abyss that came before. Once they’ve had a taste of what it’s like not to be one heart attack away from bankruptcy, Americans won’t turn back the clock. Even what is lately being called Medicare for All, considered to be on the fringe left a decade ago and slammed as “socialized medicine,” is now supported by a majority of Americans, according to some polls. In practice, there’s little hope for Italian lessons one and two—the United States is making only baby steps toward improving its lifestyle, and its income inequality is worse every year. But the third lesson is more feasible. Like Italy, we can provide universal access to treatment and medications with minimal point-of-service payments and with prices kept down by government negotiation. Financial arrangements could be single-payer like Medicare or use private insurance companies as intermediaries like Switzerland, without copying the full Italian model of doctors on government salaries. Despite the death by a thousand cuts currently being inflicted on the Affordable Care Act, I am convinced that Americans will no longer stand for leaving vast numbers of the population uninsured, or denying medical coverage to people whose only sin is to be sick. The health care genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

I sat under my cedar tree. My mate, the mother of them, was taken- I sat under my cedar tree, Till ninety years were tolled. O maternal Earth, which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!

Part 1 A Woman is a Fate? Or a Bless? When a baby is girl is born, to some is a blessing. She will grow as wonderful woman, beautiful, with nice features and showers love as a daughter, a sister, as a wife, as a friend and as a mother. It is also luck, or a Mahalakshmi to the house. Some centuries back, and to some people when she is born, she is a fate. An ill fated to some in orthodox families and believe that she brings bad luck. So, there is this ritual in some places or villages where, when a new born baby girl will be poisoned to death upon her arrival on earth. It is brutal and devastating. Yes it is still happening till today. Where did this ritual came from? Who started it? Where was it written that the baby must be killed if it is a girl. And WHY? Has anyone thought, that it was a woman who carried her for 9 months, loved her from the day she is created in her womb, and the moment when she is born, the tear of a joy and her happiness the moment she sees her little tiny human girl arrived, and her dreams as mother and to love her all her life… will be no longer alive in the next few minutes? I have always respected woman, for uncountable reasons. As much as I am happy to see them successful, but it also worries me most of the time. 99.9% of it I am worried for them! The one who gave birth to us, is a woman. We also worship to a female God and beg her to show mercy on us. It is also a woman, who becomes a wife and satisfies a husband’s needs. But still, there are no respect shown to them despite knowing these basics. In some houses while her parents off to work, or being abandoned, or lets just say the parents passed. It is her responsibility to take care the rest of her family as the family head. When it comes to education, she is not safe to study among the boys, neither in higher education. Same goes to a woman at work. As she will have those wild eyes on her, she has to take care of her virginity, her womb, and her dignity. Beyond these, there are also some beasts, who is talented in sweet talking and flirtatious towards her. When she is too naïve and fall for the trap, it happens to be a one night stand. Once a woman marriage is fixed, she gets married and goes off to her in laws. Her life changes in the moment the knots tied by the man. In todays millennia, womens are still carrying the burden of the responsibility of her maternal side, together with her new in-laws. Every morning she wakes up, she serves the husband, deal the day with by preparing him for his day, every day. As well taking care of her new in-laws all of her life. Then, comes the pregnancy moment, again, she carries her child her womb, making sure he is safe in there, and taking care of her world on the outside. She loses all her beauty, her happiness, her wishes, her ambitions, and it is all sacrificed for the sake of her marriage. And then the cycle never stops. She raises her children, become beautiful, and then one day they too get married. But as mother, she never stopped caring and provide them all the love, the needs, etc. It never stops. There are some man and in laws who support their daughter in law and I have a big salute to them. They are an example for today’s woman millennia, don’t stop her for what she is capable of, and don’t clip her wings..

Maternal death during childbirth is not unique to humans, although it has long been accepted that humans have a somewhat unique situation of having to fit a large-headed infant through a narrow pelvis. This biological constraint, along with socio-economic and political issues, makes childbirth (except in the case of surrogacy) a potentially dangerous event that women must face if they wish to be evolutionarily successful.

As Mother, the Goddess is the birther, caretaker and sustainer of all that She brings forth. She is the embodiment of maternal concern, protectiveness, nurturance, tenderness and love. She bestows her blessings, pours out Her nourishment, much as we expect Her human counterparts to do. But the Great Mother is not only benevolent and tender. She does not only pour forth the sustenance upon which the world depends. To see Her fully, to image this great a Mother, is also to see Her as depriver and destroyer. She is the gorgon who terrifies and petrifies the, earth who is fertilized by blood, the vulture who feeds on the dead. She gives birth to Her children but She also devours them. She is the Goddess of Life but also the Goddess of Death. The Great Mother is essentially bi-valent, embodying both a 'good' and a 'terrible' aspect. Even the most benevolent of Her images have a darker, more savage side or a destructive 'sister.' Yet this ambivalence is not a static either/or; it expresses one of the most profound and deeply held beliefs of the Old Religion—that life is essentially a process, 'becoming' instead of 'being,' and that this process follows a cyclical pattern that endlessly repeats itself. Just as autumn and winter inevitably follow summer and then give rise to a new spring, just as decaying fruit produces from its dying the medium that enables the hidden seeds within it to sprout, so it was a 'given' to the ancients that the Mother of All embodied this basic and implacable natural way. So the Goddess created life, sustained it, destroyed it, and took it back into Herself in death, only to recycle what She had killed back into new life once more.

I don’t want to give up my home, the garden where I can remember planting every flower, the circle of stones that marks Paolo’s resting place, where he lies in an endless embrace with his sex bunny. But it isn’t mine to keep. I want to be fertile. I never want to expire. But death comes for us. What first? What else? What next? As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope. 31 The night before I left, Africa was golden and pulsating in my mind. I emptied the wool socks and maternity jeans from my suitcase, which I had shoved under the bed when I got back from Mongolia. I

Washington, DC, for instance, has the nation’s highest MMR at 38.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. A graph in this study shows how the rate for African American women has remained consistently high for decades. White mothers in the District, however, have the nation’s lowest rate. Not a single white mother died in DC within forty-two days of childbirth from 2005 to 2014.

If you’re a pregnant woman living in a malaria-prone country, you have a very different relationship to risk. Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. Ever wonder why the Centers for Disease Control is located in Atlanta? Malaria. The entire reason the United States built the CDC is that malaria was rampant throughout the American South. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951. That wasn’t very long ago. Some argue that getting rid of malaria did more good for American women than universal suffrage. Some say it had a bigger effect than Roe v. Wade. Nowadays, in the United States, only 0.65 out of every 100,000 legal abortions will result in the woman’s death, while 26.4 American women still die for every 100,000 live births. Before Roe v. Wade, 17–18 percent of all maternal deaths in the United States were due to illegal abortions—that stat was as true in 1930 as it was in 1967. Meanwhile, as many as one in four maternal deaths in today’s malarial countries are directly tied to the disease. During our worst outbreaks, the same was true in the United States.

The sexuality and reproductive capacities of enslaved women were central to understanding the expanding legal conception of slavery and its inheritability. Slavery conscripted the womb, deciding the fate of the unborn and reproducing slave property by making the mark of the mother a death sentence for her child. The negation or disfigurement of maternity, writes Christina Sharpe, “turns the womb into a factory reproducing blackness as abjection and turning the birth canal into another domestic middle passage.” Partus sequitur ventrem—replicates the fate of the slave across generations. The belly is made a factory of production incommensurate with notions of the maternal, the conjugal or the domestic. In short, the slave exists out of the world and outside the house.

Who Were the Sutas The narrator of the Mahābhārata as we know it is Rishi Ugrashravā Sauti. He was the son of Rishi Lomaharshan and belonged to the Suta community. Hence, the appellation ‘Sauti’. The community was considered a ‘mixed jāti’8 of offsprings of a Brāhmin mother and Kshatriya father. Sutas were considered expert sārthis9. The role of the charioteer was significant in ancient India. Charioteers were usually those who were close friends and confidants of the person they worked with. Their role became even more important in a war. They were to not just steer the chariot but also ensure the warrior they were driving stayed safe and motivated. They acted as guides in the war. The importance of a charioteer becomes evident from the fact that Arjuna asked Krishna to be his charioteer. To match Krishna, Karna asked Shalya, the old king of Madra, to drive his chariot. In addition, Sutas were engaged as storytellers, history keepers and ministers in royal courts. Many were also warriors and commanders. Famous Sutas in the Mahābhārata are: 1. Sanjay, the narrator of the Bhagavad Gitā and the Kurukshetra war to Dhritarāshtra. He played the role of charioteer, friend, trusted messenger and mentor to Dhritarāshtra. 2. Sudeshnā, the queen of King Virāta of Matsya desh, Uttarā’s mother and Abhimanyu’s mother-in-law. She was the maternal grandmother of Parikshita. 3. Keechak, the commander of King Virāta of Matsya desh. He was the brother of Sudeshnā and amongst the most powerful men in Matsya. 4. Karna, though born to Kunti, was raised in a Suta family of Adhiratha and Rādhā. He married women from the Suta community and his children were brought up as Sutas. Duryodhana crowned him the King of Anga desh. A great warrior, considered equal to Arjuna in archery, he was the commander of the Kaurava army after the death of Dronāchārya. Not only Karna but the sons of his foster parents were also trained warriors. They had participated in the Mahābhārata war on the side of the Kauravas. 5. Rishi Bandi, a great sage whose story is narrated in the Vana Parva of the Mahābhārata. In the Rāmāyana, one of the closest confidants and an important minister of King Dashratha of Ayodhyā is Sumantra, who belonged to the Suta community.

infant deaths decline from about 100 per 1,000 births in the year 1900 to about 0.1 per 1,000 today as maternal and neonatal care has improved.

If a place can hold the memory of death, surely the badlands of Montana retained it. Labienus peered from the window the Silverbolt as it bounced over bare rusty earth and rock, trying to imagine what it had been like on that hellacious Cretaceous day when the end had come for them all: the maiasaur with its touching maternal concern, the vicious tyrannosaur no less a good mother, the little sneaking egg thieves with no shred of moral respectability whatsoever, all the rumbling honking thundering life that had held sway since forever. Even if they'd had the brains to see it coming, how could any of them have understood the End? What, for us? Rulers of the earth for the last hundred and sixty million years? But the earth had understood, and remembered still, and offered up white bones still bedded in clay red as fresh meat for the edification of its present rulers, who utterly failed to take the hint.

[T]he contradiction in Catholicism, that at the same time marriage is holy and celibacy is holy. This simply realises as a practical contradiction, the dogmatic contradiction of the Virgin Mother. … [T]his wondrous union of virginity and maternity, contradicting Nature and reason, but in the highest degree accordant with the feelings and imagination, … The supranatural conception of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, … As death [was] repugnant to the Christians, and … set aside by them through the supposed agency of miraculous power; so, necessarily, they had an equal repugnance to the natural processes of generation, and superseded it by miracle. The Miraculous Conception is not less welcome than the Resurrection to all believers; for it was the first step towards the purification of mankind, polluted by sin and Nature.

--Birthday Star Atlas-- "Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our nightly stroll the color of silence and time.

But what’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the “natural” had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces up to the real harshness of nature can feel very benignly about its tyranny. Sure, we like nature when it’s a beautiful day on the beach; less so when a tidal wave kills your family or a shark bites off your arm. If it were up to nature, women would devote themselves to propagating the species, compliantly serving as life’s passive instruments, and pipe down on the social demands. It’s only modern technology’s role in overriding nature—lowering the maternal death rate, inventing decent birth control methods—that’s offered women some modicum of self-determination. If it comes down to a choice, my vote’s with technology and modernity, which have liberated women far more than getting the vote or any other feminist initiative (important as these have been), precisely by rescuing us from nature’s clutches.

The share of the world population that survives on fewer than 2,000 calories a day has dropped from 51% in 1965 to 3% in 2005.13 More than 2.1 billion people finally got access to clean drinking water between 1990 and 2012. In the same period, the number of children with stunted growth went down by a third, child mortality fell an incredible 41%, and maternal deaths were cut in half.

These include longer hospital stay; longer and more painful recovery; higher risk of infection, organ damage, adhesions, hemorrhage, embolism, and hysterectomy; more blood loss; higher chance of rehospitalization; higher chance of a complication with the next pregnancy; less initial contact with the baby; less success breastfeeding; higher risk of respiratory problems for the baby; and twice the risk of the most catastrophic complication of all: maternal death.51

Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn’t economic but ethical. What was horrifying about Prudence’s death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.

I gave her a brief account of the happenings since Helene’s death and ended by saying, “I freaked out yesterday and had a panic attack.” “I always knew you’d end up nuts.” I pushed her shoulder. “Shut up.

There was something tragic in that sloppy and immoderate fertility: the misery of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death; the strange heroism of a femininity triumphant in its fecundity over the deformity of nature and the insufficiency of man. Yet her progeny revealed the cause of that maternal panic, that frenzy of birthing that had exhausted itself in abortive foetuses and an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.

Perhaps the cultural obsession with ‘natural’ birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what ‘nature’ is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit and blood, ticks and cockroaches. ‘Natural childbirth’ in the ‘natural world’ often ends in infant or maternal death. ‘Natural’ childbirth can end in clitoral tears, sepsis, rectoceles, fistulas and psychosis.