The BibleHow else to introduce the subject of childbirth in literature than with its first mention in the Bible? Among the punishments God dispensed to Adam and (especially) Eve for tasting of the Tree of Knowledge was this unhappy pronouncement: “I will make most severe/ Your pangs in childbearing;/ In pain you shall bear children.” Birthing pangs are a metaphor for wretchedness throughout the Old Testament (from Jeremiah: “Damascus has grown weak,/ She has turned around to flee;/ trembling has seized her,/ Pain and anguish have taken hold of her,/ Like a woman in childbirth”) and again in the Gospels, though there the Scripture turns its eyes forward to the joy that follows sorrow (from John: “A woman in childbirth suffers,/ because her time has come;/ but when she has given birth to the child she forgets the suffering,/ in her joy that a man has been born into the world”). But whatever redemptions may come, from the start the experience is cursed with travail.The Journals of Lewis and ClarkBut perhaps there have been people free of such Biblical agonies? During their famous westward expedition, William Clark wrote that

one of the women who had been leading two of our pack-horses halted at a rivulet about a mile behind, and sent on the two horses by a female friend; on enquiring of Cameahwait the cause of her detention, he answered, with great appearance of unconcern, that she had just stopped to lie in, but would soon overtake us. In fact, we were astonished to see her in about an hour's time come on with her newborn infant, and pass us on her way to the camp, apparently in perfect health.

Clark airily speculated that the “wonderful facility with which the Indian women bring forth their children, seems rather some benevolent gift of nature”; though, when later in the travels Sacagawea gave birth, it was noted that “her labor was tedious and the pain violent.”The Orchardist, by Amanda CoplinThe visceral horrors of an improvised frontier birth are depicted in Coplin’s 2012 novel set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. Here a solitary farmer is forced to play obstetrician when two pregnant teenage runaways appear on his land. The scene, with its “purple and red mess” and nauseating “odor of sickness and birth” is graphic and hauntingly bestial.A Proper Marriage, by Doris LessingThe painkilling miracles of modern medicine may have reduced some of the gory traumas of childbirth, but, if literature is the judge, they have rendered the experience empty and estranging. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin writes of her heroine Edna’s heavily drugged delivery that,

Her own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go.

In the second of her Children of Violence novels (this from 1964), Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest experiences a similar sense of degrading alienation amid the coldly impersonal doctors and surgical apparatus. She is shunted off into a side room until she is ready to deliver. Once the baby is born it is promptly taken away from her. The birth itself, during which she wails like an animal, leaves her feeling hopelessly divided from her previous self: “There were two states of being, utterly disconnected, without a bridge, and Martha found herself in a condition of anxious but exasperated anger that she could not remember the agony fifteen seconds after it had ended.”Dune Messiah, by Frank HerbertSurely even more psychically harrowing would be the experience of Chani, wife of the titular messiah Paul Atreides, and mother of his powerful twin children Ghanima and Leto. The twins, like their evil aunt Alia, are pre-born, meaning they have acquired full consciousness while still in the womb. In the climax of the 1969 second volume of Herbert’s classic series, Chani dies while giving birth to them. Yet her spirit is kept alive in the limitless memories of her children, and, considering the difficulties her family will face for the next few thousand years, it is generally agreed that Chani got off easy dying when she did.Breaking Dawn, by Stephanie MeyerWho are we kidding—all-knowing pre-born babies are a dream compared to a ravening vampire fetus. An entire generation of girls has formed its conceptions of childbirth from this scene, in the 2008 finale to the Twilight saga:

“Get her breathing! I’ve got to get him out before—”Another shattering crack inside her body, the loudest yet, so loud that we both froze in shock waiting for her answering shriek. Nothing. Her legs, which had been curled up in agony, now went limp, sprawling out in an unnatural way.“Her spine,” he choked in horror.“Get it out of her!” I snarled, flinging the scalpel at him. “She won’t feel anything now!”And then I bent over her head. Her mouth looked clear, so I pressed mine to hers and blew a lungful of air into it. I felt her twitching body expand, so there was nothing blocking her throat.Her lips tasted like blood.I could hear her heart, thumping unevenly. Keep it going, I thought fiercely at her, blowing another gust of air into her body. You promised. Keep your heart beating.I heard the soft, wet sound of the scalpel across her stomach. More blood dripping to the floor.The next sound jolted through me, unexpected, terrifying. Like metal being shredded apart. The sound brought back the fight in the clearing so many months ago, the tearing sound of the newborns being ripped apart.

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael ChabonThis 2012 novel features a character known as the “Alice Waters of Midwives,” and a home birth she performs for a progressive California couple brings out the best of Chabon’s wide-eyed rhapsodizing. The abrupt moment of birth is particularly vivid:

There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted face-up into Gwen's wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks [the midwife’s partner]. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said "oh" and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him.

Yet this seemingly smooth and all-natural delivery is beset by complications, as the mother suffers a postpartum hemorrhage and goes into shock. Sorrow lurks even among specialists.A Beautiful Truth, by Colin McAdamAlthough the punishments in Eden were levied only against humans, both pain and joy accompany the remarkable birthing scene with Mama the chimpanzee in McAdam’s 2013 novel. Mama is a captive in a controlled research habitat, but the observing scientists are unaware of her pregnancy; we enter her point of view as she instinctually carries out the birth alone, from her state of “silent agony” to the “hot wet rush” of the newborn’s arrival:

Mama bit the yellow string, ate some of it, and the cincture was undone from the new one’s chest. Mama removed it and put her lips to her tiny lips and snut and sucked out the salt and the new one became more lively. Mama hugged her and she pleeped tiny grief and Mama made noises quiet and soft and rarely made. She kept sucking and licking the salt and red spit from this vivid apparition and felt stunned and short of breath.

When the chapter ends the baby chimp sleeps on her mother’s belly, offering a glimpse of peace and security seldom found in the literature of childbirth: “Nothing ever slept so small and still on an earth so heaving with want and satisfaction.”