Giving birth (shhhh, silently!) in Scientology: What is that really like?
[Today’s guest post is by Valerie Ross]
One of the accepted beliefs in Scientology is that founder L. Ron Hubbard knew everything about everything, no exceptions. Honestly, I’m not sure why that was accepted. I don’t call my orthopedic surgeon’s office or my attorney’s office and ask questions about why my eye hurts, I don’t call my attorney to ask him what to do if my foot hurts, I don’t call the water department to fix my TV or furnace nor do I call Dell to fix my iPhone.
But Hubbard had an answer for any question on any subject no matter how mundane, or how invasive in your life. He told you how to wash your windows, how to run your business. How to save your marriage. How to have a baby, how to raise the baby, and how to feed it as well. And we all followed his instructions blindly or pretended publicly to do so.
My daughter was born at home with a Scientology doctor and Scientology nurse in attendance. Hubbard teachings say that it had to be a silent birth because birth was painful for the baby and if you made noises, the noise would become part of the “birth engram.”
He addresses this at length (51 pages worth) in Dianetics: The Original Thesis, but basically he led people to believe that if words were said while you were in pain, they would be remembered in your “reactive mind,” and if those words were repeated again ever, it would bring back that original pain and you would act irrationally as a result.
I planned for my baby’s birth to be a calm thing. Way back then we didn’t know the baby’s sex before the child was born, but we were positive our child was going to be a boy. So positive that we didn’t even choose girls’ names.
I was one of those yippie hippie mamas of the 1970s. I didn’t touch a drop of caffeine after I got pregnant (yikes! how did I survive?), nor did I touch sugar. Only the healthiest and best for my child. I lived in LA, so our meals consisted of mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, although we weren’t by any means vegetarian. I read every possible book I could on pregnancy, labor and “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding” and we bought everything we could: cribs, bumper pads, sheets, clothing (in neutral greens and yellows). We decorated the baby’s room with large animal stickers on the walls, had a diaper service, had a high chair, the whole thing. No binkys or bottles for this mama.
The baby was due the end of October. My mom flew out to be with me. I had morning sickness all day long all nine months, so we had to stop on the way home from the airport so I could throw up. I had quit my job the end of October and we were just waiting out the days. I got to spend some quality time with my mom. Mary Sue gave me the time with her. Unlike Hubbard, his wife Mary Sue was a strong advocate of family time. I was lucky to have been in the position I was. Or, maybe if I hadn’t been, I would have left sooner because my mother would have showed up to be with me and I would have not been with her (…hmmm).
Waiting out the days being past due really played a number on my head. By then I had had so many doubts about so many things in Scientology, I was really starting to believe that maybe I wasn’t pregnant and I was just faking being pregnant. Seriously.
On November 23, I took my mom back to the airport to catch her plane and went home and my labor started. Yes, my mom had to fly out the day I had the baby. Because I was having my child at home and because someone else I knew had been in labor 23 hours at that point, I didn’t even bother calling my husband Mark who was on course at CC. He got home and I told him I was in labor. He asked if I had timed the contractions, I said a couple of hours ago they were 45 minutes apart. We timed them they were 25 minutes apart.
His mother was in town and staying at the Manor. We went over there with plans of going to dinner in the restaurant there then going out to a movie. Yeah, those were the plans. I decided to stay in the room because I wasn’t feeling too hot and they walked down the hall to the restaurant. I laid down on her bed and then got up to go to the bathroom. My water broke and I immediately went into transition.
There was no phone in the room, so my choices were to walk down the hall with water flowing gushing down my legs with each step or just wait for them to come back. I waited. Luckily, the restaurant was closed and they came back pretty rapidly. Once again, we were in the dark ages, so there were no cell phones. We raced to our house where we called our doctor from our land line (at least it was a touch tone phone, we weren’t barbarians!). We got his answering service. It was rush hour, 4:50 p.m. the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. His office was in the San Fernando Valley, we were in North Hollywood.
We changed the sheets on the bed and I laid down on the bed and my mother-in-law was really freaked out. She had seven children and had never seen one born. She was about to experience the miracle of birth for the first time by watching me, a person who she barely knew, have her son’s baby.
So, of course, she did what any OT 7 Scientologist with a knowledge of engrams would do, she started vacuuming! Vacuuming! My response: Sorry, not going to apologize for this I screamed “turn that fucking thing off.” I laid on the bed doing my best to practice labor techniques (I had chosen the Bradley Method) which just weren’t the same when it was actually happening, and wondered if I was going to have this baby before the doctor got there. Mark kept calling the answering service who told him the doctor was on the way.
Finally, the doctor and his nurse rushed in, doctor said “are you ready to push?” I said “yes” and 25 minutes later I had a baby girl. Seven hours from first contraction to
birth. He asked us what name to put on the birth certificate and Mark and I just looked at each other quizzically. With all the preparations, we hadn’t planned one thing – what would we call the baby if it was a girl.
But we decided on a name on the spur of the moment, and I’m glad we chose the one we did. I really believe it fits her. And our boy got his name just short of three years later.
That night at 2:00 a.m. my daughter started crying. That’s when it all hit. That’s when I realized the enormity of the whole situation. This little crying being was my responsibility for the rest of my life. I was overwhelmed. I was scared. I had no idea what to do and was sure I had brought someone into this world who I would scar for life.
Being a good little Scientologist, I didn’t ever tell anyone about that. Luckily when my daughter experienced those feelings after the birth of her much wanted and very highly anticipated son, she was able to verbalize them and work through why she felt that way. I tamped them down. I got to work through them by getting up the next morning and cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
I loved my daughter in a way I didn’t know existed, but I didn’t get to rejoice over her birth or cry over the feelings I felt. I was pushed right back into the world of “saving the planet.” I got to have her with me most days, which was more than I would have been able to do if I had even been allowed to keep her if I had been in Sea Org, and I spent time with her in a way most Sea Org mothers back in those days didn’t get to experience.
I was one of the lucky ones because Mary Sue loved her children. Her husband didn’t understand how or why children worked and thus referred to them as adults in a child’s body, not allowing them to be educated properly in the ways of life. My daughter was breastfed until she was on solid food because when we tried to give her LRH’s Barley Formula… (Not even going to give you the formula ingredients; if you feel the need to look it up, please do not use it, it is a thin watery thing with karo syrup in it and, it causes malnutrition, don’t give it to your baby) …she would bite the nipple off the bottle and throw the bottle across the room, smart girl.
She also has her Scientology christening certificate. She keeps it as a party starter. She loves to show off the fact that she was christened in Scientology and has godparents even her mom couldn’t pick out in a lineup – haven’t seen them since she was 3 months old. Thank goodness, she had so little Scientology indoctrination that she doesn’t remember it, it’s just a fun fact in her history that she was born into it and never did anything in it.
Skipping forward, as this is only about Scientology births, we are in Salt Lake City now. My husband and I are living in a dark ugly fixer upper house (and that’s giving it a lot more credit than it deserves) that we bought with his mother. My husband and his mother stay home all day and work on the house, getting it ready to resell and I am pregnant and taking the bus downtown to go to work every day at a typing service in a large building.
We are still sort of doing Scientology – showing up occasionally at the Salt Lake Mission, signing up for the Sweat Program back in the day, we even had a hard-wired car phone in our Peugeot which we didn’t use because of the cost. (Oh, the pretentions.) But mostly, I am earning the money and Mark and his mom are working on the house. Mark’s mom went to Flag the day before I went into labor so she wasn’t around for this birth.
We had a midwife for our second child as well. We lived in Utah where it was illegal for doctors to deliver a baby at home. I knew from my first birth that I was going to go fast, so when I had a contraction at 3:00 a.m. I called the midwife, by the time she got there at 4:30 I was in transition. Here’s where Scientology comes in. I was pushing and I grunted, yes grunted. Mark looked at me and said through clenched teeth “get your fucking TRs in.”
When our son was coming out, he had the cord wrapped around his neck so I had to NOT push – not fun, the midwife talked, telling me to pant not push. Mark at least had the decency to not yell at her. We got the cord off his neck and he started screaming. My daughter wandered in the room and said “why’s my baby brother crying?” Again, stone ages, we didn’t know the sex of the child, but it was a boy. Because my daughter asked why her baby brother was crying, we attributed OT powers to her. I kid you not. As for the name, we had a name from almost three years prior.
But you get the idea. Even in the home, even in childbirth, Hubbard was present. You didn’t go to course or auditing and come home and shed the trappings of Scientology. You were a Scientologist 24-7. You lived Scientology every hour of every day.
As for Hubbard’s method of silent birth? Two thumbs down, would not recommend.
— Valerie Ross
Could the Chicago Ideal Org be coming March 2?
While we wait to see if David Miscavige really does come to Austin for a February 24 “Ideal Org” grand opening, we can now see that there is also a filming permit for the city of Chicago that suggests Dave will be hitting the Windy City the following week.
The permit is for February 26 to March 5, and Saturday March 2 is sandwiched in that time. And here’s the description of the event on the permit: “This will be a Hollywood production filming of the Grand Opening for the church of Scientology in Chicago.”
Oh, you don’t say.
Well, we have seen Dave take out these permits and then not use them, but at this point it’s looking like we might have back-to-back weekends with grand openings, February 24 in Austin and March 2 in Chicago!
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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
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Terrific writing, Valerie!
" (at least it was a touch tone phone, we weren’t barbarians!)" -- I feel pretty confident in saying there is probably more than one reader who understood the land-line reference and then read this and was like 'huh?'. :)