Midwives

#On the Profession

The midwife is usually the first official in the birth room, and she is rarely paid like one. Under the Natal Registration Act of A.S. 158 she attends the birth, observes the particulars the Bureau requires, completes the writ and answers for its filing. She keeps no ledger and no household file. Her obligation travels in a satchel, and the liability is entered under her own name.

The public confuses her with two other women. The confusion helps everyone except the midwife. The Womb Registrar is a parish deputy of the Bureau of Records. She watches pregnancy notice, reconciles blank forms, controls names, and checks whether the midwife has done what the Act commands. The Mothers of Plenty govern flour, pregnancy-linked allotments and Plenty Houses. Their membership includes midwives, so some midwives wear the ladle. Others answer to nothing beyond the licence and the clock. As surveyed in A.S. 201, the profession has no single house, no common habit and no chapter-room where its grievances are minuted. What its members share is the paperwork, and the Bureau considers that sufficient.

#On Notice and the Clocks

A midwife's exposure begins before the birth. The Registrar's pregnancy notice ledger draws on neighbours, ration-house observation, Mercy notes and midwife reports. The Act's parish implementation order suspended ration adjustments pending pregnancy notice, so a household that wants more flour must first be seen to need it. Suppose a midwife has visited a swelling belly for three months and her name stands nowhere against it in the Registrar's ledger. She has already become interesting.

Once the child arrives she keeps two clocks, wound by different hands.

The Nursery Levy Decrees were issued by the Bureau of Conscription in A.S. 152. They require preliminary birth notice within twelve hours from emergence. Their published account of present practice repeats the requirement, and nothing in the record before me repeals it.

The Natal Registration Act and its instrument, Form 7-NR, require the midwife to file within forty-eight hours of first breath.

The Decrees' present-practice account also still recites full registration within seventy-two hours.

I set the instruments side by side and decline to reconcile them, because there is no harmonising statute to quote. A midwife who reads the seventy-two-hour recital as leave to file Form 7-NR on the third day reads something the Act does not say. A midwife who drops the twelve-hour notice because the Act never mentions it forgets something the Decrees have never withdrawn. Prudence files early under both. Most midwives are prudent, and the penalties keep them so.

#On the Bedside Record

The Natal Registration Writ is completed where the child lies. The Writ's account of the bedside is the nearest thing the profession has to a liturgy. Like most liturgy, it was composed by men who were not in the room.

The satchel is leather. In the parishes the Mothers of Plenty issue it; in the bastions it comes from the Bureau of Mercy's field office. Inside are ink, blank writs, a measuring cord, the approved-name tables published by Records, and a seal-stamp bearing the midwife's own registration number. That stamp is her signature. It also works as a confession, because every impression traces back to one woman.

The writ asks for:

• the date and hour of delivery;
• the child's name, parish and sex;
• the weight, estimated by hand;
• the condition, as assessed;
• the parents' registration numbers.

The midwife is the witness to these facts. The Act requires no second witness, no priest at her elbow and no oath over the basin. She saw it, she writes it, and her stamp certifies that she saw.

The mother's thumbprint goes in the left margin and the father's in the right. If the father's identity is uncertain, his registration field carries Patris Incerti. If he is known but absent (deployed, imprisoned, dead, dissolved or merely elsewhere), the right margin is stamped Absens Per Causam.

Names come next. A name missing from the approved list requires a supplementary form. A name in a tongue outside the approved languages draws further paperwork still. The published accounts disagree on how many extra forms and letters are required, and I decline to choose between them. The midwife carries whatever the desk demands, and nobody asks her opinion of the discrepancy.

The sheet is eleven inches by fourteen, rag-bond, watermarked by Records in the upper left and by Tithes in the lower right. Its current revision dates from A.S. 188. At the foot sits PROJECTED OBLIGATIONS, which the midwife leaves blank. Tithes fills it in later from a formula she will never see. She delivers the child, and Tithes delivers the price.

The blanks are serial-numbered, and the Registrar reconciles them. A missing blank is an inquiry. A spoiled blank is an inquiry. A blank used for a birth the Registrar never heard of is an inquiry with a household attached.

#On Carrying the Writ

The midwife carries the completed form herself to the nearest Records parish office. The Writ mentions proxy, post and the helpful neighbour only to forbid them. A Receiving Clerk logs the form, stamps it and forwards it to the regional archive for transcription into the Great Ledger of Souls.

The archive sends a confirmation stub to Plenty, which adjusts the household ration for the new mouth. That adjustment notifies Tithes, which revises the household's obligation. If the child is male, Conscription receives its forward projection. Such is the documented procedure for Form 7-NR, and the midwife answers only for its first link. She never sees the Ledger page or the figure. What she knows is the walk: the tenement stair, the wet street, the parish counter and the clerk's stamp. In bad weather the walk is the longest part of the delivery.

Filing is not baptism. In A.S. 162 the Bureau of Doctrine ruled that a name entered in the Ledger constitutes "a preliminary claim upon the soul's allegiance to the Body of the Faithful." I report the ruling as Doctrine wrote it. In my experience, the midwife reports the hour.

#On Compliance and Its Price

The Registrar is the midwife's auditor and, on her better days, her only advocate. The deputy who can strike a licence over a missing seal can also:

• secure a ration adjustment for a pregnant household;
• clear a midwife of a false non-filing accusation;
• find clean blanks during a winter shortage;
• certify that a stillbirth was in fact a stillbirth.

Midwives who loathe the Registrar still stay on terms with her. Those who don't soon learn why the others did.

On the penalties, the instruments quarrel in print, and I record the quarrel unhealed.

According to the Act's account, failing to file within forty-eight hours incurs a fine equal to the child's projected lifetime tithe. Non-filing doubles that fine through the Administrative Inconvenience Premium.

The Writ's account opens with the same lifetime-tithe penalty. Later it describes filing after forty-eight hours but before thirty days as costing one-tenth of the projected lifetime tithe, and it puts the non-filing surcharge at roughly another full tithe.

That makes two published accounts of one statute, and no source available to this survey rules between them. Both agree on ruin. Either figure exceeds anything a midwife earns, and either arrives with professional discipline behind it. The Act's own commentary calls the unpayable fine a leash, and I cannot improve on the word.

#On Refusal

Most midwives obey. The Church stands because most people obey most of the time, and because disobedience is exhausting when there is a child to wash.

Some refuse, and their record predates the Act. Under the Decrees, from A.S. 152, a handful of midwives:

• delayed reports by declaring the labour false;
• filed stillbirth notations for children carried out through laundry doors;
• taught mothers to rehearse fever stories;
• hid cord-blood linen under ash;
• bought infant burial tags from ossuary men.

In A.S. 154 Mother Sava of the Ash Steps burned her parish registry and vanished with eleven infants. The Bureau calls her an aberration, and it keeps a great many aberrations on file.

The Act sharpened the old evasions. A false stillbirth now had to survive a Registrar who held both the pregnancy notice and the blank inventory. A concealed child had to survive the neighbour who heard crying through the wall. The Pale Kin draw on midwives where they can. The Pale Kin Runner counts them among its upstream feeders, borrows their kits, and fears the informant midwife as one of its common failures. When pressure rises, a midwife is among those the runners will sacrifice. Some hidden births never pass through a midwife's hands at all: certain households call no one, and others use unlicensed women whom the Act does not recognise.

Standing Order 34-PK binds Records and Purity in joint suppression. The Registrar supplies the discrepancy: notice without a writ, a writ without notice, flour for mouths nobody declared. Purity supplies the boots. Amnesty writs offer retroactive entry with a surcharge, after which the child carries "Late Registration — Voluntary Compliance" for life. A child who is not surrendered goes to an Orphanarium, receives a name from the approved list, and is entered under ADMINISTRATIVE RECOVERY. If a midwife attended that birth, her seal-stamp carries her number, and the number can be searched.

#On Present Practice

In A.S. 201 the midwife still comes when the household sends for her, and she still leaves with paper. She notes the hour before she notes the weather. She sends notice before the twelfth hour because the Decrees have never told her otherwise. She walks the writ to the counter well inside forty-eight hours because the Act tells her to. The seventy-two hours remain in print, and I have yet to meet the midwife willing to test them against the Act.

At the counter the Receiving Clerk turns the sheet over, checks the serial against the Registrar's list, and presses his stamp beside hers.

FILED.