It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anne Strange Champs.

If you think of your life as a series of births, what changes?

The first birth is when you arrive as a wet, wiggling newborn,

but there may be other transitions in your life

that feel just as difficult and profound.

Some people actually call those passages rebirth.

So why does the birth metaphor matter?

Let's start with the real thing.

Childbirth.

It was the first time when I found that I had to be skeptical of what a doctor was telling me.

This is Ina Meg Askin.

When I told the doctor one week before I actually went into labor,

oh, by the way, I don't want any medication, he said, oh no, no, no, we're going to have

a forceps delivery.

It was the 1960s.

Delivery with anesthesia and forceps was standard practice.

Now, I had a master's degree in English, and that means you've read a lot of English novels,

and the forcips stories in those novels are not pretty.

My major strategy was, I'll be really quiet, and then they won't make me do it.

I was wrong about that. They did leave me alone for a long time.

Then they came in and they had masks on and they did what they wanted to do with me.

And I didn't have any fight in me. I hadn't realized that I would have had to, you know,

...