WatchWithMerlot (superb username btw), thank you. I'm not sure about eloquent, maybe rambling but you're very kind.
I think it's like a lot of things in life, we've just fetishized the narrative (for want of a better way of describing it). It's symptomatic of modern life I think. Childbirth has fallen into this false dichotomy of positive vs negative, intervention free vs intervention, home vs hospital, midwife vs consultant and what we've done is failed to recognise that these reductive scenarios are meaningless in real life.
I am a bit of a hippy tbh and absolutely embrace the notion of instinct, trust and mindfulness where your body is concerned but I think in retrospect, I've got it a bit wrong in the past. I speak as somebody who planned a home water birth and ended up with an emcs and I was very unhappy about this for a while. It wasn't because the emcs was traumatic (though sometimes they are and again, that's still not a horror story, just mere fact) but because I myself had built up this notion of ideal birth and of course reality didn't live up to it. Ironically, what I actually did was the opposite of what I claimed to believe in. Listening to my body, using instinct etc meant that I knew, I absolutely knew something wasn't right but I didn't listen and transfer in and accept good, brilliant, marvellous intervention which ensured the health of me and my baby, I became terrified and resistant and I created the most untenable situation. I was frightened but of the wrong thing. I was frightened of intervention instead of mindful of the rare but very real possibilities of childbirth when it doesn't go to plan. If I'd approached it more pragmatically, the intervention would have fallen firmly on the side of the positive, surely? It's there to prevent the things we actually have cause to fear.
I of course say all of this with a complete acceptance that there is also a very strong argument to suggest that birth can be over medicalised and we have moved away from empowering women to know their own bodies. However, as a counter to this, we've introduced a new element of fear, almost a trope whereby we are all told that the horror lies in the wrong places. And we become cowed by it and we shut down discussion and we come to believe that it's black and white. Human experience can't ever work like that. We can't tell a woman that x is negative because where x is a lifesaving intervention, we're ensuring her feelings about that are negative too.
It does all feed into the way we approach neonatal mortality too. Because our discussions and our fears around educating on childbirth are centred on what we want, what we don't want, what we falsely believe to be good or bad. What we don't do is deal very well with the absolute truths. So when that devastating, absolute becomes your reality, you want to scream and shout about it, you want people to know, you wish you'd known, you wish you could turn back the clock. What you spend a lot of time doing post that tragedy is trying your utmost to change the narrative, to prevent it happening again. One of the big fights is that false dichotomy which permeates all of it. I think most of us where childbirth is concerned, where babies are concerned, are very lucky to be able to adopt an attitude of 'well it's extremely unlikely to happen to me' and you force this division of them (the unlucky few) and us (the 'norm' who are protected from the potential of devastation by trust in statistics). What we need to do instead I suppose is move towards an acceptance of the reality of it. It could happen to any of us (whether that is a cs or a stillbirth, rarity is not a factor) but actually, here's what we can do to make the truly negative outcomes less likely. That's it isn't it? Here's what we know and here's what we can DO. Instead of painting this picture of good vs bad and positioning yourself on that spectrum. It's a one way street. Any one of us could move from the one to the other and that's where the real 'horror story' might lie. When a very large number of us will have non-textbook births for whatever reason, you narrow the space you can occupy on that spectrum. It's not good vs bad. It's 'here's the range of experiences in childbirth and you can feel negative or positive about most of it. The absolutes are tiny.
Oh I'm rambling again. Am I making any sense?