Fuelled by rage at the way women in hospitals were isolated from partners and loved ones during lockdown, Maggie Shannon set out to document home births across the US
Despite the ubiquity and fundamental nature of giving birth, there’s still a great deal of mystery and misinformation surrounding the experience. Like many of us, LA-based photographer Maggie Shannon’s expectations were mostly anecdotal, pieced together from what she’d seen in films and television or heard from stories passed on from woman to woman.
In 2020, fuelled by rage at the way labouring women in hospitals were being isolated from partners and loved ones during lockdown, she began documenting midwife-led home births. Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy (published by Mother Tongue) brings together her unflinching portraits from this series, laying the experience bare in all its astonishing beauty and mundanity.
In a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed nations, where Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, you could argue that perpetuating the mystery around giving birth is part of a wider project of denying women their bodily autonomy – obfuscating the realities and risks of what labour entails only serves and supports a pro-life ideology. Shannon’s disarming portraits somehow manage to demystify birth while also holding the process aloft for us to marvel at how extraordinary it really is.
Theologians have long since contemplated a mystical connection between physical suffering and transcendence. Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy seems to capture women in the throes of ecstatic pain, but Shannon’s empathetic gaze keeps us Earth-bound with poignant, grounding details like sick bowls, bedspreads and detritus-laden bedside tables. What emerges is a profound story about care and the invisible labour of women – the birthing subjects of her portraits as well as the midwives tending to them.
Below, in her own words, Maggie Shannon talks about the misconceptions about giving birth and her outrage towards the systemic misogyny of the US healthcare system.
“I used to have a very romantic idea of birth and labour, so what I ended up seeing totally blew me away because it was so different. I went into this experience with what I’d learned from my high school class about reproductive health. Other than that, I feel like all my knowledge was from TV and movies or things I would beg my mum to tell me about what my and my sister’s births were like.
“In reality, there were these long periods of total boredom. I quickly learned to bring a book with me. There’d be times when the midwives were taking naps or doing paperwork and then, all of a sudden, they’d be like, ‘Alright, it’s time. She’s good to go. It’s happening.’ And then it would be chaotic, there’s suddenly a baby being born which is exciting, a huge adrenaline rush. The first baby I saw being born was probably one of the most incredible experiences of my life. That goes down in history for me.
“Yet there’s something about this work that is rooted in anger and rage, because it’s just so frustrating to me what’s been happening in the US. And the rage was amplified throughout as I kept finding more things to be angry about, the more I learned. Even before lockdown started, I was talking with a friend who is a doula, and we were discussing how the pandemic could affect women in particular. She had heard stories about new mothers being separated from their newborns, people being isolated in the hospital and partners not being allowed to go in, so women were pretty much labouring alone. I thought there were roots of misogyny in isolating women during this super traumatic time – not only the trauma of giving birth in the United States but also the trauma of giving birth during a global pandemic. Like, does a woman have to be giving birth alone because of Covid? Is that really helpful?
“A lot has changed since I started this project … I’m a mother now, I have a daughter – man, I’d love to photograph another birth now, after being through it myself. Also, Roe has been overturned and we have a president-elect who could pack the Supreme Court with conservative judges. So I just hope these pictures will move the line a bit on how birth is represented in our culture. I think it does such a disservice to women that we aren’t getting to see the reality. I think we need to talk about how hard it is and I hope that we can put some truth into this conversation. Women are hungry for that kind of experience, right? I think we want to see how powerful we are. For me, this has become so much more than a pandemic project. Now I feel like it’s really about the care that happens between these women, and I just find it so beautiful and inspiring.”
Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy by Maggie Shannon is published by Mother Tongue, and is out now.