Belabored by Lyz Lenz

Author:Lyz Lenz [Lenz, Lyz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Depths

On September 27, 1726, Mary Toft gave birth to a rabbit. She pushed it out of her vaginal canal, damp with her fluid. It was dead when it emerged, disemboweled and heavy—a strange lifeless mystery. It must have been a small rabbit, because some sources describe it as looking like a liverless cat.1

Mary was twenty-five and worked in a hops field. She couldn’t read or write. Neither could her husband, who was a cloth worker, his job imperiled by industrialization. They were poor. They had had three children, though one had died as a baby. And Mary had had a miscarriage just the month before. But her womb was still swollen. She could still stroke the curve of her belly. Still imagine life within.

And then the rabbit came.

The next day, the town obstetrician examined Mary. When he arrived, her mother-in-law, Anne Toft, who had witnessed the birth, handed him the mutilated body parts of rabbits, which she said had been born during the night. That day, he watched as Mary birthed a rabbit’s head, the legs of a cat, and nine dead baby rabbits. The accounts are shockingly detached. They note that the doctor “delivered” these parts or that Mary “procured” them. Soft verbs that obscure the process of birth. The screaming and the straining. The cries and the blood. The paw emerging from the red and raw lips of the vaginal canal. Fur mixing with hair mixing with blood. Her uterus contracted. The bed shook. The obstetrician was in awe. He wrote to everyone.

Mary went to London, where she birthed more skin, legs, ears, heads—raw flesh that added up to a whole rabbit. Sir R. Manningham, who witnessed one of the births, wrote that in the birth he observed her belly shook with the motions of the rabbit. The rabbits were leaping inside of her. But when they were birthed, they were dead.

It was a scam. She was found out mostly because a porter was caught bringing a dead rabbit to her room in London, where she lay, letting men pull rabbits out of her vagina. It didn’t help that bits of hay were found in the fur of the rabbits she birthed. She went to jail but didn’t stay there long. She’d fooled so many doctors and man-midwives, and they were ashamed. They sent her back to her home in Surrey, where she died decades later at sixty-two.

At the time Mary began having children, England was in the middle of a battle between midwives and the men who would supplant them—male midwives and doctors. Acceptance of male midwives was spread by Louis XIV’s mistress Louise de la Vallière, who used a man midwife for all her births, and their social cachet grew. This was the start of the slow creep of patriarchal medicine into the process of birth. Male physicians and surgeons argued that midwives were provincial and unclean. Midwives argued men knew nothing about women and their inner workings. Male midwives were the in-between. They had gleaned the knowledge of midwives but exuded an air of science and that specific ethos of maleness.

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