…person utter the statement “It doesn’t matter how your baby gets here, as long as he/she is healthy.” I will have to scream.
I’ve been feeling very jaded about the whole childbirth issue recently. Part of this is due to hearing a few too many “failure to progress” C-section birth stories which have been on the go lately, or perhaps there’s a bit of post-Christmas crotchety old git creeping in as well – particularly since said Christmas was a swine-flu and vomit-tastic festival of illness in my house.
Having suffered what I would call “light to medium” birth trauma following the arrival of Lewis last year, I am becoming more and more passionate about womens’ rights. These rights, as I see them, are being denied to women every single day in this country.
Imagine a shopkeeper tells you that the pint of milk you’re looking for is in another shop on the other side of the road. This road is busy, filled with fast-moving traffic and difficult to negotiate safely. You decide to cross (you really really want this pint of milk, ok?) and make it safely to the other side, despite some extremely frightening moments dodging traffic and fearing for your very life.
Adrenaline kicks in, your whole body and mind are flooded with feelings of relief and joy, you feel euphoric having escaped serious injury. You buy your pint of milk from the other shop and return home, thanking your lucky stars that everything is ok.
A week later, you find out that the first shopkeeper misinformed you. The milk was available in his shop all the time, so your hazardous trip across the danger-filled street was in fact completely unnecessary. Adrenaline and relief have by this time worn off, and you feel pretty aggrieved that the information you had available to you at the time led you to make what was essentially a bad decision, potentially risking your health, your life and your access to fresh dairy products.
Ok, so the anecdote is a bit laboured (if you’ll pardon the pun), but essentially this is what’s happening to women every single day. Many many women aren’t even lucky enough to make it to the other side of the street uninjured.
Why is it that when women have been giving birth successfully and naturally since the dawn of humanity, we have allowed ourselves to become so convinced that in fact it’s an impossible task; achievable only by a lucky few? I will allow for there being some women out there who are not built for giving birth (perhaps due to malformed pelves), and women or babies who will encounter true life-threatening complications, and these are the situations in which our new medical powers have the potential to save lives and do a lot of good.
But for the rest of us, I’m talking about the vast majority of women who are fit, healthy and perfectly capable of giving birth to a baby. What about us? Modern medicine is harming us and our babies, and for some reason we are not complaining about it! In fact, we are embracing the very practices that are leading us into situations that could cause harm – and then when the inevitable car-crash comes we thrust our heads into the sand and tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter – nobody died, so all’s well that ends well.
Of course it matters! What about women who are so traumatised by their first birth experience that they can’t bring themselves to attempt it ever again? Should they just stick to their only-child families and dream wistfully about new babies they can’t bring themselves to make? Or should they steel themselves to get pregnant nonetheless, hoping that a sympathetic consultant will authorise a C section on the grounds of previous trauma?
A friend of mine shared a story with me today that illustrates exactly my point. Her friend gave birth in October 2009, she accepted induction based on her scan dates and a consultant obstetrician’s recommendation; said scan had moved her due date forward 8 days from her date based on ovulation – so effectively she was going through dates-based induction for her first baby at 40&4. So that was just 4 days past her estimated due date – a time at which you could be forgiven for suspecting perhaps baby just wasn’t ready to come out yet?
The inevitable cascade of intervention followed the difficult induction, and my friend’s friend ended up with forceps, rotation cap, the full array of unpleasant and painful procedures to force her baby out. Baby was drowsy from all the drugs (please note I would be the last person to judge anybody for wanting drugs to help with medical childbirth pain – I still remember synto contractions in a back-to-back labour…) and wouldn’t feed, leading to more problems getting breastfeeding established. This lady is now, I believe, to undergo surgery under general anasthetic to repair the damage to her birth canal and nearby areas. She emphatically did not make it to the other side of the street unscathed.
Compare this with my friend, who’s as much of a natural birth advocate as I am, and luckily had the benefit of very supportive and well-informed NHS midwives during the birth of her gorgeous daughter. She turned down dates-based induction at 42 weeks, and gave calm, comfortable, safe and natural birth to her baby girl at 40&17 at home in her birthing pool. No injury, no trauma. Her pint of milk was right there to pick up, all along – it just so happened that she knew that, while Mum number one needed to be told but wasn’t.
The tragedy is, that Mum number one is horribly traumatised, and will spend the rest of her life listening to people tell her that her trauma means nothing, it doesn’t matter, as long as baby’s here and healthy then that’s all that’s important. So the infliction of unnecessary injury on a human being doesn’t matter does it? This woman receives massive damage to her body – which could very possibly have been avoided by waiting for her to go into labour naturally – and it’s not important? I have to say, I find that very difficult to agree with.
Then there’s Mum number two, who has experienced normal, natural birth the way it’s meant to be, and yet can’t share her story to any positive effect because there are a hundred and one damaged women out there who simply won’t believe that this is how birth should and can be for the majority of women.
Our maternity care system is truly shocking. It only took one night in hospital last week (vomit bug and associated dehydration) for me to remember exactly why I’m going for an independent midwife this time. Of the two women that took care of me, one clearly couldn’t be bothered with me, and the other was so over-stretched and stressed by having too many people to take care of, that she would forget to do things like check my baby’s heartbeat, or take my blood pressure. Thankfully I have enough respect for my internal baby-radar to know when things are ok and I can afford to let this sort of thing go.
Is it any wonder that I’ve chosen to spend thousands of pounds on a women who can, if not guarantee that I will make it through my second birth without trauma, at least do her utmost to give me the opportunity to do so? It makes me profoundly sad that casual acceptance of horrific birth trauma is the norm, while positive, healthy, well-informed women like my friend (and with any luck come April, me) are denounced as irresponsible and unrealistic for wanting and believing birth to be as straightforward and uncomplicated as we know it can be.
Having a positive birth experience and a healthy baby should not have to be mutually exclusive.
Nor should we believe it to be so.
Thank you for writing about this. As a midwife, I hear the “as long as you have a healthy baby” line all the time. I think people are uncomfortable acknowledging that birth is an intimate, emotional, primal, insanely powerful experience for women. Many people would rather keep it nicely contained in their mind as a medical occurrence. It’s a lot easier to fork over responsibility for your birth that way. But birth change IS happening, in large part due to strong women like you, writing, telling their stories, changing the public consciousness bit by bit. Thank you!
I really hope you’re right and the wind is changing – women are suffering too much, too often, and most of them don’t even seem to realise how avoidable that suffering can be with the correct support and information. Yes the most important thing to Mums is to produce a healthy baby, but if that can be done (and in fact is more likely to be done) through a process which lessens the risk of trauma and injury, then isn’t that a bit of a no-brainer…? Anyway, enough ranting from me – thank you so much for your kind words!
Brilliant brilliant brilliant
As you know I agree wholeheartedly, and definitely couldn’t've put it better myself.
We’re slowly changing the world! We need to trust women’s bodies to do the jobs they’re designed for, and only accept medical intervention when it’s absolutely, truly necessary.