To be annoyed at the smuggy smugness? why is childbirth such a competion?

[AddictedIsFeelingHappy]

i'm 38+3 weeks pregnant and am getting irrationally annoyed by every thing.

a friend of mine had her baby yesterday and on facebook (i know its the spawn of satan) her status is along the lines of

'baby x arrived weeighing 8lb 4oz in a birthing pool, i had no pain relief drugs, even with a very long labour. come on ladies we can do what nature intended'

now i'm already alittle annoyed because she was due the day before me and has already had her baby, and mine is still not here. (irrational i know!)
but why put that about the drugs? you dont get a medal for doing it all naturally and it doesnt make you a failure if you do need drugs.

gah now i'm all annoyed and wound up and cant sleep [hangry]

woooooaaaaahhhh there DuelingFanjo.
Willing to conceed I may have misunderstood but are you seriously saying that suggesting without intervention one or other of baby and mum would have died is CRASS???
Huh?
It's true in many cases mine included.
xwitch - me too! Doctors were great, my body was the issue. Midwives not so much but then if I was the coalition government they'd be the first cut I'd make. Compeltely batty, useless and ill informed every last one of them imo.
I will clarify that I see a doctor every month during pregnancy so have less use than other people for these blundering fatties I guess...

Erm I had a consultant led pregnancy Pomme and I still ended up giving birth with a midwife - the consultant appeared the day after the birth and said "didnt WE do well" - she was more useless than the midwife!

these stories of barbaric midwives are really quite scary :(

Dueling You have my sincerest apologies for being so crass. I should have insisted they left my dd and I to die. The intervention to save our lives was nothing to with an epidural btw. My XH would love you he wishes they had let me die too.

My midwife was there to supervise mainly. i seemed to know much, much more than her the whole way through. As I ended up in theatre with the locum doctor who had adminstered my induction drugs I believe it was him who got us through it.
Consultant was great in preparing me for labbour and making me informed and locum was great for doing the deed.
Midwives - useless and had stupid bf information as well.
Midwife there during the birth was the worse. Got shirty with my mum who came to sit with me when dh went home to cry sleep and told me off for not feeding the baby but wouldn't help me do it.
DuellingFanjo - I am led to believe that some are really, really great and amazing. You may be lucky, fingers crossed for you.

MOST births have the potential to be non medicalised. No one ever said ALL births. My dc2 would have died without a cs. However that's the exception. My dc1 and 3 were born naturally ( even the higher risk vbac ). It's the level of intervention that is the worrying thing, and the fact that many women go into labour BELIEVING that medicalisation is the norm. Do people seriously believe that all the sections and epidurals administered in the UK ( or indeed the US) are medically necessary?

Jodiesmummy I also had a consultant led pregnancy, never so him after the pregnancy was confirmed! What is the point, they only seem to work office hours and labours happen at all hours?

Midwives getting some tough comments here, and in my experience, largely deserved. I wonder whats going wrong. I'm sure they don't start out so cynical or bumbling. I wonder if there isn't too much tension between the 'with mother' midwife philosophy and the medical side.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, perfumed. With my first baby, I had the most fantastic midwife. She was so calm and supportive. This was in a MLU . After the birth, I stayed in for several days as it was such a pleasant environment. The midwife on duty would often make me' a cuppa and sit and chat during night feeds ( yes, they had the time!!) and more than one told me how much they loved working there, and how the MLU was seen as the creme de la creme of jobs. They'd all served their time in big hospitals, but found that frequently they weren't able to utilise their expertise as midwives because the doctors were so keen to intervene. Their job satisfaction was far greater working in the MLU because they were able to use the specialist skills they were trained in - ie supporting the mother through labour and delivering babies! It seems so obvious, but clearly working in a very medicalised environment was pretty demoralising for them, which speaks volumes

Titty/Duelling et al: My comment about being glad to be alive was nothing whatsoever to do with my treatment at the hospital (fucking appalling btw but I did not want to go in to that at the time and hog the thread) so please don't me out to be some simpering idiot with low expectations.

I was replying directly to Juno's comment, the jist of which was that it's pretty trite to be self-congratulatory for not "giving in to drugs" because some of us don't have choice.

I am not glad I had a birth with lots of intervention, several repair procedures and PND in the months following. However when you are told by medical professionals that you couldn't have pushed your massive headed, badly positioned baby out "in a month of Sundays", you tend to count your blessings on that point at least. And find it a little hard to stomach when people with one experience of a straightforward birth have no idea how lucky they are.

"Dueling You have my sincerest apologies for being so crass. I should have insisted they left my dd and I to die. The intervention to save our lives was nothing to with an epidural btw"

I am very sorry xwitch but I don't know what you are talking about or why you are directing that at me.

You have misinterpreted my post, I see I could have worded it more clearly incase it was misinterpreted, what I meant was that to suggest to women who choose to not have drugs that they will die without is crass.

Apologies if anyone was upset by my post.

I don't think your post was difficult to understand. It's pretty much what I was saying: that the vast majority of births have the potential to be non medicalised. In a ( thankfully) very tiny percentage the baby or mother or both would be damaged or dead without intervention. But it's a very small number. In most cases where the mother has drugs during labour, it's not to save life . That's not being judgemental- it's a fact. Does anyone seriously believe The vast number of sections performed in many hospitals are totally necessary? Does anyone really believe every epidural administered is a medical necessity?

If a woman chooses intervention that's fine, but most of the time it's not a black and White scenario, the birth COULD be natural or it COULD be medicalised and there are a range of factors which contribute to how it turns out

ooooh op now you've got me riled! your fb friend can fuck off back to bitch land!

i had a crash c section with dd because her heart rate was all over the place. i'll take my healthy, beautiful, unscathed 1 year old and my scar over bitchiness smugness about perceived nature thanks!

"it's pretty trite to be self-congratulatory for not "giving in to drugs" because some of us don't have choice"

Can you explain the logic of your statement - I just don't get it.

It's like saying - it's trite to congratulate yourself for reaching the summit of a mountain because other people trying to do the same sometimes need winching to the top as a result of poor weather or faulty equipment.

LeQueen - my comments must have been personally offensive to you for some reason I haven't understood. I can't think of any reason why you would want to be so unkind. I found myself being stupidly stroppy with my children after reading your comments. Realised that I was actually quite upset. First time that's ever happened to me on mumsnet. Think that's a warning for me that I should be spending less time on the computer - so perhaps you've done me a favour.

I'll try to put it simply for you.

It's fine (and quite right) for the OP's friend to be proud of her natural birth/mountaineering skills.
It is not fine to go further and suggest to others that they just didn't try hard enough, when she didn't face the complications/bad weather and faulty equipment that they did... all wrapped up in a passive aggressive 'rallying' "we can do it girls!" - type statement.

Addicted you may find your friend sobers up a little from the blissful early days, re-reads her statement and feels a bit of a twat.

Or has a baby that just won't sleep no matter what she does, then feels riled by another mother (hopefully you) who seems to have the answer. Motherhood has it's way of humbling us all eventually
Best of luck with your babe.

not unreasonable to be annoyed its all just luck so really instead of saying 'well done' we should say 'i'm glad u were lucky' or something like that, coz even if the mum did do lots of preperation/research they were still lucky that it all worked out so well same as the rest of us were UNlucky that it didn't.im not gonna change my mind on this x

I need this thread. I am getting obsessed by my impending labour and thinking that I can prepare myself for it.

I keep on forgetting there is an element of "unique physiology" (not sure who I am quoting but someone put it on here a couple of weeks ago and I can't express it better myself).

"its all just luck so really instead of saying 'well done' we should say 'i'm glad u were lucky'"

It's not all just luck. Some of it is down to luck. Not all. If it was only down to luck you wouldn't get hugely varying rates of c/s and instrumental birth from hospital to hospital, birth setting to birth setting, country to country. They'd all be pretty much the same.

Lotser, as you feel comfortable with my analogy let me extend it: Saying "i had no pain relief drugs, even with a very long labour. come on ladies we can do what nature intended!'' is about as far from saying 'the rest of you are fucking losers for not achieving a natural birth' as 'I've just climbed a mountain - and guess what, you can do it too!' is to 'all of you who can't make it to the top of Ben Nevis are bloody cripples and wusses'.

AliGrylls - hope all goes well with your labour and you get a brill midwife.

Titty, "come on ladies we can do what nature intended" is offensive. She might not have meant it to be offensive but it is, because it implies an element of choice/effort that some of us just didn't/don't have. Nature intended my baby's placenta to be over my birth canal, and intended that we'd probably both die if i we laboured. No amount of "come on ladies" changes that, and FB girl clearly didn't think about women like me when she posted this. Do you see what I mean?

It implies that if we all tried harder we could have a birth like hers. Idiotic.
Also assumes we'd all want a birth like that.

Ok titty, when I got my last job I'd been to university, worked hard in a few different roles, put my all into an interview and got this job. How does my (imaginary) facebook status on the matter read:

"I've just got a new job. It pays 10k more than my last one, final salary pension scheme and I get to work from home five days a week. Come on university graduates - we can do what our education qualifies us to do!!!"

And to use your analogy, for me, there wasn't a bloody mountain so I couldn't bloody climb it, so "guess what, you can do it too" isn't true. I couldn't.

Ok, ok.

But you're all being literal minded and seeing as much offence as possible in a statement which was poorly worded and silly. And written by someone off their head with tiredness and excitement.

You've got to ask yourself - why are so many people here so keen to interpret this comment in the darkest possible light? I don't believe for one minute that the girl who wrote the fb comment believes that everyone who tries hard enough can give birth without help.

Do you know anyone ANYWHERE who actually believes it? I don't. I bet you don't.

So why are you choosing to believe that this strung out, mush-brained new mum is sincerely suggesting something that every other mother knows to be complete bollox?

Somewhere on the outskirts of my consciousness there's a little voice saying 'It's political correctness gawn mad!' but I'm trying to hush it up because it puts me in mind of the Daily Fail.

The context behind 'come on ladies we can do what nature intended' might have been that her mates, her mum, her colleagues and every stranger she met in the street/on the internet might have spent 9 months telling her horror stories and insisting she would end up having a medicalised birth, shredded fanjo, pulverised pelvic floor, supperating stitches etc etc etc - and she didn't.

So she was feeling, you know, well chuffed.

I think she has come over as a bit of a berk but hey. This is why I killed my FB account. The thought of what I might have typed up after a bottle of Sancerre and no dinner in the olden days was bad enough, let alone letting me loose on there after labour and flying on endorphins and no doubt I'd have made a complete twat of myself too.

I also think it is natural to feel stressed to fuck in the last weeks of pregnancy and to find ANYONE"S birth stories/facebook updates annoying and terrifying in equal measure. I know I ought to stop reading MN childbirth forum and go to bed for precisely this reason.

Titty I do know some people who think like that. One of them is a mother and she is definitely not immediately post birth.