Hands Off My Birth: Touch and Consent in Birth Films

As an experimental filmmaker, I’ve become obsessed with how birth is represented in visual media – particularly the emergence phase of labour, the moment when the baby’s body begins to appear.

Looking at birth films and photography, I noticed: until very recently, this moment was rarely represented without hands involved.

During a physiological birth, a possible response to the intense sensations of the baby’s body emerging is to slightly close one’s legs and to put a hand on the perineum, vulva, or baby’s head in an instinctive attempt to protect the tissues from tearing. But in these images we mostly don’t see the birth giver’s own hands. Instead, we see the hands of their care providers.

Hands on their perineum.

Hands inside their vagina.

Hands on their legs, on the baby’s head – stretching, pulling, massaging, pushing.

HANDS.

It makes my skin crawl.

I’m not saying that caregivers’ hands can’t be supportive during this moment, or that birth without manual assistance is “better” in the sense of more authentic, wild, or true. Sometimes hands are needed – very much so – and they can save lives. They can also warm, steady, support and comfort the birth giver and are sometimes exactly what is wanted and needed.

At the same time: the abundance of hands in representations of birth also reflects the external, often highly medicalised management of the birth process. It corresponds to prevalent notions of all births as dangerous emergencies that need to be managed by medical professionals. It evokes the objectification of birthing bodies and the excruciating history of early pain medications that immobilised birth givers and rendered them unconscious while babies were “delivered” from their bodies by gloved, sterile hands.

My aversion to hands “assisting” birth is also shaped by my own experience of giving birth to my child. During his emergence, my midwife began to stretch and massage my perineum without my consent. When I asked her what she was doing and said that it was painful, she simply said: “You don’t want to tear, do you?” and continued.

I froze and said nothing after that.

Even now, thinking back, I feel the profound urge to close my legs and tell her to get her HANDS OFF (!) me.

For people who have experienced sexual violence, unexpected touch during birth can be especially triggering. This is one reason why consent and communication around touch in birth spaces matter so much.

One of the earliest widely screened artistic films showing an actual birth is the experimental, silent short film Window Water Baby Moving (1959): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQAPUstZJc&t=198s. It shows the American artist and writer Jane Brakhage (later Mary Jane Wodening) giving birth to her daughter at home. The film was made by Jane’s then-husband Stan Brakhage, a well-known experimental filmmaker.

It’s a beautiful piece.

Brakhage is known for his experiments with manipulating the film strip by scratching and writing on it. In Window Water Baby Moving, the warm indoor lighting and color film stock, together with reflections of bath water and skin and possibly overexposure create a warm, womb-like atmosphere throughout that is deeply captivating.

But the images of the baby emerging are dominated by a care provider’s hands (we never see their face). These hands stretch her vagina with a white, soapy liquid and then create a dome over the baby’s head as she emerges, pulling apart Jane’s labia. They then begin to pull and guide the baby out, holding her up in the air head-down as she begins to cry.

The non-linearity of Window Water Baby Moving offers moments of respite from the violence of these hands by continually reverting back to images of Jane holding her belly.

Here we see HER hands, holding HERSELF.

With the rise of online birth vlogs, we now do have access to representations of hands-off birth – an emergence of the wild woman archetype in visual media. While these representations carry their own risks (such as reinforcing an essentialised image of women; more on that in later posts), they do powerfully resist the external management of birth.

This new visibility in moving images is radical.

The birth giver is no longer only the body through which the baby passes, but the person actively experiencing, responding to, and shaping the moment.

For me the question is not simply around an absence or presence of hands in visual representations of birth though.

What I long to see is a different choreography of touch around the birthing person. Hands that wait, stay away, signal consent, and emanate love.

And most importantly, the birth giver’s own hands holding themselves while their baby comes into the world.

If this reflection resonated with you and you’d like to learn more about my work as a doula and filmmaker, you can book a connection call here.