Tag: Caesarean Section

A Very Mixed Bag

Angelina Jolie with all 6 of her children

I recently saw LINK>Angelina Jolie in the movie The Bone Collector. I was fascinated by what has been defined as her “bee-stung lips.” I remembered she had adopted children from several countries. So I thought, as I had never written in this blog with her circumstances in mind, I would give it a go. I wondered about her ethnicity and did a deep dive down the rabbit hole of her parentage. It is no wonder she is a humanitarian because her mother, LINK>Marcheline Bertrand was. Her mother was involved with the activist John Trudell at the end of her life. It is worth spending some time looking into the Wikipedias for both Jolie and Bertrand for more insight. I was never a huge fan, though I have seen more than one movie that she acted in.

Today, I will focus on her children and an intersection with her humanitarian work – Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt who was born in Cambodia, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt who was born in Vietnam, and Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt who was born in Ethiopia, are all adopted. Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt was born in Namibia. Her twins – Knox Léon Jolie-Pitt and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt were born in France. Her twins were conceived via in-vitro fertilization and she gave birth to them via caesarean section at the age of 33.

In an article at LINK>Harper’s Bazaar, Angelina Jolie discusses her adopted children. There is more at the link but here are a few quotes attributed to her – “All adopted children come with a beautiful mystery of a world that is meeting yours. When they are from another race and foreign land, that mystery, that gift, is so full.” She has also been quoted as saying – “They are not entering your world, you are entering each other’s worlds.”

Regarding Maddox, she has said “Cambodia was the country that made me aware of refugees. It made me engage in foreign affairs in a way I never had, and join UNHCR. Above all, it made me a mom.” Jolie has said that “Each (adoption) is a beautiful way of becoming family. What is important is to speak with openness about all of it and to share. ‘Adoption’ and ‘orphanage’ are positive words in our home. With my adopted children, I can’t speak of pregnancy, but I speak with much detail and love about the journey to find them and what it was like to look in their eyes for the first time.”

She has been heavily involved in humanitarian work, something her mother was known for. She has created with her wealth various foundations – the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation which created Millennium Villages in Cambodia and Kenya as well as funding schools, roads, and a soy milk factory in Kenya. Some of the employees in Kenya were former poachers who are now employed as rangers. She is also a patron of the Harnas Wildlife Foundation, a wildlife orphanage and medical center in the Kalahari desert. She established the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt Foundation to support conservation work by the Naankuse Wildlife Sanctuary, a nature reserve also located in the Kalahari. She has also funded large-animal conservation projects as well as a free health clinic, housing, and a school for the San Bushmen community at Naankuse.

I have read more than one op-ed by Jolie in Time magazine related to her United Nations work for refugees and the welfare of people living in conflict zones. I don’t intend to judge her for anything related to her very public life, including her marriage to and divorce from Brad Pitt. Whatever one thinks of her and her life, they also cannot deny she has made a difference in the world.

Labor Day

Globally, today is known as Labor Day (although celebrated later in the year in the United States).  I know that usually, Labor Day, relates to paid work but women do the work of Labor all the time.

Every child at this time in human evolution comes into the world through a woman’s womb.  Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World anticipated huge scientific developments in reproductive technology.  And in fact, in my lifetime such developments made it possible for me to give birth at ages 47 and 50.  In Huxley’s novel, citizens are engineered through artificial wombs (which I am happy we have not evolved to yet) and childhood indoctrination programs that sort them into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labor demands.

I found pregnancy mostly delightful.  Not everyone does.  And always my labor was not unfortunately memorable.  With my first pregnancy at age 19, my water broke and I was taken to the hospital quickly.  My doctors were busy in surgery at a different hospital.  I was managing my labor just fine but they knocked me out.  I woke up in the delivery room briefly to see my doctor putting on his gloves.  The next thing I knew, I was being wheeled down a corridor and a nurse was showing me a baby and telling me that I had a daughter.  I was so certain I was having a son, she had to tell me three times.  I did see my family’s resemblance in the tiny infant.

Because the experience I had with my daughter was unsatisfying, with my oldest son’s pregnancy I took Bradley classes, wanted to give birth naturally at home with a midwife (which at the time was illegal in my state of Missouri).  It was not to be because just before he was conceived, I also learned I was positive for the hepatitis C virus.  Research had determined we could prevent transmission with a caesarean section.  With both boys, that is what we did and they both tested negative at 18 months old.  A mother does what a mother has to do for her child, not for her own gratification.

For some mothers, going into labor ends their relationship with their child – either because the baby is stillborn (a real tragedy but nature’s way in some cases) – or because the mother is surrendering her child to someone else to raise (also a tragedy but of a different sort).

There are many adoptive parents who celebrate receiving a child in this manner and they would not agree with my perspectives but every adoption begins with a loss for someone else.