Chapter 1

Why I Am the One to Write This Book

The two momentsare much alike: birth and death are made of thesame fabric.

—Isabel Allende

Tokothanatology: During my career in medicine, I learned that people facing terminal illness need many of the same things that women giving birth need.

My father is a delivery man.

Actually, he was an obstetrician, and a rather renowned one at that. But I heard him say “I’m off to do a delivery” many times, so I told my Grade 1 classmates that’s what he did.

Murray W. Enkin—MD FRCSC FACOG LLD (hon) D (hon) CM to the rest of the world, Daddy to me—was passionate about his work in maternal care. He talked about his love of women—pregnant women in particular. He said he made a commitment to himself very early on to do something about the way women in labour were treated. He vowed to change the status quo of the doctor being in charge and the woman having no involvement other than just being there. He was an early advocate of Dr. Grantly Dick-Read’s philosophy that a woman’s mental and emotional involvement in the delivery of her child improved the experience, and of Dr. Fernand Lamaze’s method for reducing pain in labour without medication by teaching exercises and breathing techniques.

Even before my father finished his internship in the late 1940s, he was teaching prenatal classes to his patients. His plan had been to become a general practitioner who did good obstetrics, but after a few years in rural Saskatchewan, he moved our family to New York to study and specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. Then we moved to Hamilton, Ontario, a city with a large immigrant population. Daddy saw the need for an Italian-speaking obstetrician in the city, so he hired a tutor, and he and Mommy learned Italian at our dining room table. My sister, Nomi, four or five at the time, became quite fluent in the language. Sitting near that table, I learned only two things in Italian. One was how to count to ten, “uno duo tre…” The other was how to say “spingi” (“push”). Hmm.

After my father attended an international conference in Paris in 1962, featuring Dr. Lamaze’s principles of psychoprophylaxis in obstetrics, he and my mother began teaching prenatal classes in our basement, promoting prepared childbirth as an alternative way of giving birth. I remember pregnant ladies streaming into our home with their husbands and their pillows for their weekly classes. I sometimes came home from school to find a pregnant couple in our living room. Daddy would invite his patients to our home for part of their labour—because we had a bathtub, and the hospital didn’t; and because my mother would give the women something to eat, and the hospital wouldn’t. It was a quick trip across the road when it was time to deliver.

Daddy was the first obstetrician in Canada to have fathers in the delivery room. On one occasion, he dressed a father up in scrubs, gown, mask, and shoe cove