To think censorship of birth stories should not be allowed?

[NunntheWiser]

I love Standard Issue magazine, I really do. Earlier this week, Milli Hill was published in the Telegraph extolling the virtues of a natural birth and "imaginary pain" guff guff guff. All well and good.

The excellently sweary Cath Janes wrote an opinion piece about this - about how her own experiences of birth were very, very different to this, and whilst it's not right to scare women, it's unfair to expect them not to be honest about their birth experience.

Hill complained about this opinion piece and has forced Standard Issue to withdraw Janes' article, against the author's wishes. Now, I don't know if the fault lies with Standard Issue for not backing up their author, or if it's Hill threatening some legal recourse to the magazine but since when do women's opinions get censored?

In the meantime, Janes' sweary article can only be found using Google Cache: webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3An6IV7Qmr9GcJ%3Astandardissuemagazine.com%2Fvoices%2Fbirth-muthas%2F%20&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

I had the most straightforward deliveries possible. Went into labour without intervention, vaginal birth within 2 hours of popping in to the hospital, with a little gas & air to take the edge off, no tears or stitches.

But it fucking hurt!!

So I can't (nor do I want to) imagine what it must be like for women with a lower pain threshold, complications, previous trauma etc to deliver a baby.

And... AND!!! Her fucking "maths" of 77/23 pain ratio? It wouldn't be so bad if it happened like that, but it's exhausting hours of excruciating pain followed by a brief respite, followed by pain, with no time to properly regroup, and certainly not enough time to sleep in your 8, 24, 36 , or 72 hour labour.

IMVHO, Milli Hill is a shite-talking, goady troll. And I'd be interested in hearing from Standard Issue on their role in the censorship. I find it off-putting in a magazine whose principles drew me to it before the articles even did.

cory I remember going to see the breastfeeding counsellors with ds when he was two days old. Their advise was 'he will have to be bottle-fed, not all babies can breastfeed'. As it happens it took two weeks for him and I to learn to bottle-feed and he was nearly readmitted (this wasn't my first). Like your dd, we now (many years later) know why - he has hidden disabilities too.

The original article and Milli Hill's response are both up on Standard Issue now, OP.
Cath Jones article
Mill Hill's response

Yes IThinkIMadeYouUpInsideMyHead - out of my three births the quickest one definitely hurt the most! And the trouble with quick births is that there is no time for pain relief if you do want it.

Not a clue how/why such a good article was withdrawn. I was told that you quickly forget the pain of childbirth - ffs I want to be one of the lucky unicorns that forget that childbirth is painful. I went from "oh this isn't too bad I am doing quite well on codeine thankyou very much no gas and air for me" to "I need all the drugs, all of them, right now" in about five minutes. Then I had an emergency section which was no walk in the park either.

I (and everyone else who has gone through growing a child and then birthing it, in any format) deserve a medal, not a holier-than-thou article about how pain at pushing a small human out of a uterus was imaginary.

My first baby was stillborn at 35 weeks, had to deliver my dd knowing she had died. I don't really remember much about the actually labour that time, I think I was just numb so the contractions were nothing to me.

DS birth was easy 6 hours, water pool for most of the birth, no pain relief. Breast feeding a breeze. Not because I did anything special it was just pot luck.

Dd birth was 9 hours, again water pool for a lot of it, no pain relief needed, breast feeding more difficult. Again I did nothing special I just got lucky again

Did I suffer in labour, No. would I do it again, Yes. Was I respected and listened to, Yes

Yes labour hurts but I don't think anyone is naive enough to believe it doesn't so no need to try and scare people and it's only ever people with bad/scary births that want to tell you all about it when your pregnant well in my experience anyway, do they think they are helping?

Should the article or whatever be cut No becuase we do have free speech

Ah - that's interesting to see the right of reply. I shall have a proper read.

Regardless, I think it's unacceptable a) for an opinion piece (NOT an incorrect factual piece) to be taken down to wait for a right of reply and b) to have an automatic right of reply for anyone who disagrees with you. That's the whole point of opinion pieces, they're opinion.

And of course some people do have a pain-free birth, and I'm delighted for them. I'm happy for Milli to have her opinion in the Telegraph, and I am happy for Cath to have her article in Standard Issue. I just think it's not good journalistic practice to censor (even temporarily) articles because the subject of the article fancies it being removed.

If I were Cath I would be demanding right of reply to Milli in the Telegraph!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. People who are published and/or famous have a responsibility when sharing their opinions publicly. When Jamie Oliver says all poor people can survive spending 5p per day on food, people who make public policy listen. When female journos publish opinion pieces saying labour is a doddle, policy makers are reading that.

The facts of the matter are that women's pain is frequently underestimated. Women are ignored and told they're being hysterical. Women are less likely to receive life-saving interventions than men. Women DIE because their pain is taken less seriously than men. So Milli Hill can fuck off with her watered-down "right to reply" especially because I imagine the intersection between people who read the original article and women who read Standard Issue fairly small.

Just seen this on her Twitter feed - surely that's not how journalism works?

What utter rubbish. My maternity care was amazing but as I cannot handle pain well at all, I "suffered". I suffered a feckin LOT! My first two births were pure hell. Nothing but pain pain pain. And they were run of the mill normal. By-the-book births with outstanding support and care from the midwives and my husband. Yet I was barely lucid during them thanks to the "suffering" I went through. No amount of positive thinking and that crap would have helped. My third was different but only because water births apparently agree with me and I hadn't considered one before with my others.

ElBandito

This is my issue with Milli Hill:

'I agree with the Milli Hill article in part, once she gets into the second half

Many women ‘suffer’ in childbirth, and it’s because they’re not respected, or kindly treated, they don’t have the tools to cope, or they feel unloved, or alone. If a woman crosses the line from ‘pain’ into ‘suffering’ in childbirth, we’ve failed her.

I've seen plenty of women's stories on here where this is definitely the case'

Yep. Me too. But I know from my own long, professional experience that some women are In pain in labour (I would say over 95% in fact) & of those women I think a fair amount suffer - & not because they aren't listened to or cared for or because they feel unloved or alone.

It's because labour can be really really hard.

I've heard Milli speak - she talks a good talk. She is equally, as someone said earlier, a goady little troll. The entire positive birth movement are at present a bunch of sycophantic back patters with the odd exception.

Yanbu, censorship is wrong. I don't think there's any benefit to scaring women for sensationalist purposes (and I wish there was more balance in how birth is portrayed in the media), but it's ok to acknowledge that it's intense and lots of mothers find it painful. Others don't and that's ok too.

I had two very positive births. Had an epidural as soon as possible with both of them and was up and about the next day. Marvellous. Will they let me join the movement, do you think?

She's clearly trying to stir up controversy in an effort to flog her book

@PeaFaceMcgee Yes, exactly that. Women who have a great birth are welcome to share their tips. Women who have had an awful birth may need to talk about it to process it. Milli wrote an article expressing the first point. Cath wrote an article expressing the second point. For Standard Issue to pull Cath's article until Milli had had her "right of reply" is what I'm having trouble understanding.

(For what it's worth - very little - I had induction, failed forceps, failed manual, meconium in utero and eventually emergency C section where they had to push her back up my vagina in order to get her out, with my first. My second was elective C section to avoid the same thing happening again. I don't regret any decisions I've made, but would be furious if anyone told me that I was unwelcome to discuss a personal experience in case it upset someone else.)

Ah yes. She has a book out.

Imo, its bloody idiots spewing all this 'it's empowering, just concentrate, no need for pain relief' blah fucking blah that are responsible for an awful lot of PND issues.

No one needs to be scared before labour, but be realistic ffs. My labour was for me, horrific. On paper, not that bad.

Women need to stop being told that it will go as planned if they try hard enough. They need to be told that the can have the most prefect idea in their head but frankly, it could all go tits up and there's no shame in accepting help to make things as easy and as danger free as possible.

It must be the season for overwhelmingly rose tinted pieces about childbirth, then. I read a blog on the Selfish Mother site yesterday about how birth stories don't all have to be doom, gloom and horror, etc.

Which I agreed with, in principle. But then the author told her birth story, and it was full of hypnobirthing guff like "surges" instead of "contractions" (a personal bugbear of mine), insisting that it wasn't painful (although she was "brought to my knees with their power" - hmm, sounds like pain to me). Basically it read a little too much like a humblebrag. Look how GOOD I was at childbirth. I did it RIGHT.

So although I agree that, as women, when we share stories about our birth experiences with pregnant-for-the-first-time women, there's a fine line between reality and scare story. But I also think that the "childbirth was a piece of cake" stories are, for me, equally problematic because they set the bar unattainably high for most of us.

I had a textbook birth with DC1, but was I prepared for the contractions to be so agonising that I thought my head might explode? No. I'm with Cath James.

My 3 day labour and third degree tear didn't hurt one bit, I just imagined it because someone told me it might hurt. The infection afterwards was quite jolly too.

How did Hill manage to get this article removed?! I can't see any obvious grounds. Just because someone else disagrees with your article isn't grounds for demanding that it get taken down. There was no hint of any libel etc.

Mycats sorry but 😂😂😂

My 3 day labour and third degree tear didn't hurt one bit, I just imagined it because someone told me it might hurt

You know, thats one of the main tenets of the hypnobirthing movement. They say that the urge to push doesn't exist. It's not a real phenomenon heralding the start of the second stage of labour. Nope. Any woman who says she felt an overwhelming urge to push only did so because she was expecting it to happen.

That was the point at which I realised hypnobirthing wasn't going to work for me.

Because I did feel an urge to push so great it felt like a juggernaut trying to come out of me. And I would have gladly imagined it away because it was a horrific sensation.

I had a third degree tear too. I laid in recovery after being stitched in theatre, legs akimbo in stirrups with what felt like dozens of people milling around, and swore I'd never push a baby out of my vagina again.

mycats I think you'll find of the 3 days labour you were probs v v cheerful 77% of the time.

Ya?

HeyRoly, I was so tired (having not actually slept during those three day for more than half an hour a time) I fell asleep while being stitched up in theatre. That was DS2, I didn't have anymore after that.

AgathaMystery, yes the three days were joyous and spiritual especially the almost hourly visits by a midwife (sometimes two - lucky me!) would stick their hand up my fanjo to check if anything was happening.

I've had two very different experiences:
Dd1 - back to back, I had pre-eclampsia, failed to dialate or progress, talk of an emcs leading to an epidural. Wonderful care, thoroughly listened too and treated kindly leading to natural delivery without too much pain.

Dd2 - induced due to reduced movement, back to back, incredibly fast labour (4 hours from first contractions, 6 hours after I'd had the propess pessary. No pain relief as their wasn't time. Treated with respect and kindness and listened to. Dd2 born with the cord around her neck and the midwives saved her life. It bloody hurt!

The only advice I ever give first timers is to listen to the professionals, have pain relief if you want it and remember it isn't a competition you can 'win'. You get a 'prize' either way.