HW 35- Other People's Perspectives 1

For this blog post I interviewed my friend Alina, Sarah and Gabriel, who are all 16. I conversed with Alina while we were sitting by the east river in the sunshine; she and I talked about our thoughts on if birth is beautiful. She said that she didn’t think it was because it’s a lot of pain. I mentioned that just because something is painful doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful and she told me that the bad things outweighed the good. I had briefly discussed with Sarah about her thoughts on having kids and she thought it was selfish that people keep making new babies when there are plenty of already produced children in foster homes. I assumed that genetics wasn’t very important to her, but having a child is mainly about taking care of another human and giving them room to grow. Children shouldn’t be considered as reflections of the parents but rather as their own individuals.

I asked Gabriel if he thought birth was beautiful and he said “birth isn’t beautiful because the vagina is stretched out and lots of liquids are coming out of it and so is a crying baby” he based this experience off a video he saw at school in 7^th grade. He agreed that pregnant woman should be treated differently because they are carrying a baby, by being given seats on trains and buses for example. I guess this makes sense because back in the day when a women was to get pregnant in a small fishing village (where the villagers are dependent on one another) the woman would be put out of work for some time, therefore the village would need to make the sacrifice of losing a worker in order to bring a new baby village member in to the world. I’m sure that births were highly respected as a pure and natural process, but now a days it seems like a women who decides to have a baby is more like a martyr. Based on Gabriel’s explanations for his answers it seemed as if he had been more exposed to birth and pregnancy at school than anywhere else, except for when his nephew was born, Gabriel told me that when his sister in law was pregnant the whole family knew what was going on, expressly Gabriel, since he shared a room with his pregnant sister in law and brother.

Overall it seemed as though people’s opinions were created based on experiences and family values. I didn’t ask many questions that had to do with factual information because whenever I did the answers were questions themselves. So people have many strong opinions about labor and delivery but not much knowledge, which I found to be interesting, I probably fall into that group myself.