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 actually passed out between contractions due to the pain. So I guess that Hill would say I actually slept through 77% of my labour.

I just have not been thinking about it in the 'right' way. Silly me.

The surgeons sticking the fingers up your bum to check for 'extra holes' straight after a delivery was also fun.

Passed out Alice? I think you'll find that was actually your mind moving to a higher plane through the positiveness of birthing.

[smacks forehead]

Of COURSE!!!! See, my relentless negative self talk lets me down.

;)

It was 7 years ago and I still get all shivery when I recall my labour.

Been there, cat. Also the ultrasound up my bum to check healing, followed by consultants finger up my bum to check how well I could clench.

Mine was 9.5 years ago and it's still a very sharp memory.

Oh yes HeyRoly, the postnatal checks and the physio (for the separated stomach muscles too) were an added bonus.

Loved the Cath Jones article. My labour was horrific and ended up with PND and PTSD. I bloody wish someone had been realistic with me. I was also badly let down by those caring for me but the pain was mainly due to having an undiagnosed back to back macrosomic baby.

My stomach muscles separated too, cat! And they didn't go back either. And the NHS won't find corrective surgery. Yay! So I'm basically ruined from the waist down

I think a lot of this comes down to some women having relatively easy labours and having nothing else to compare them to.

I've given birth twice. The first time, I had no waters and was induced. Within 20 minutes, the agony was indescribable (and I've had dry socket and a tooth abcess). It felt like my back was in one of those car crushers and I was climbing the walls. There were no contractions as such, because the pain never eased. It was constant and no matter what I did, I couldn't get away from it. I begged for drugs and got them.

Second time, I had a natural labour, my waters didn't go until right at the end, and I managed with gas and air.

Had I only ever had my second birth, I might have been more susceptible to the hypnobirth, natural, your body can cope mentality. But just like every pregnancy is different, so I reckon is every labour. Some women do suffer and it's not because their chakras are not aligned or they are imagining the pain. It's because it can bloody well hurt to the point you want to throw yourself out of the window.

I have a friend who is due next month who has read loads on hypnobirthing, and is utterly convinced that she is going to manage fine, and will just spend her whole labour just deep breathing in sensual calm with lovely relaxing hypnobirthing music playing and inhaling the lovely aroma of her scented candle, because obviously she's not going to feel 'pain', only 'tightening's' so it's all going to be really calm and easy.

I really genuinely hope she gets the experience she wants, but I have a horrible feeling she's going to be very upset by the reality, and feel that she's 'failed' for not being able to live up to this 'fantasy birth' that she's been told she can have using hypnobirthing techniques. And that's what makes me cross about hypnobirthing - I have nothing against the techniques per se but it sets up an expectation of an easy, serene birth that isn't possible to achieve for the large majority of women.

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.

So women push so hard they tear themselves because they were told to expect it? I wonder how else we can harness this awesome power, can we carry a months worth of shopping into the house in one go if we tell women that thats what they can do and everyone else is doing it?

Imaginary pain - does Ms Hill have a trapdoor where the rest of us have a cervix?

I was lucky I got ruined severely enough I got a designer vagina out if it. Yay me! In the words of my surgeon "almost as good as new" ...so thats all fine then.

I wasn't particularly worried about labour beforehand, I figured- yeah it will be painful, but it will be fine. I couldn't have had a much more straightforward delivery on paper- labour wasn't too long, baby in 'optimal' position, wasn't too big, no complications. I also couldn't imagine a nicer team or environment to give birth in, I felt supported and my choices respected. And yet I still haven't got over how absolutely horrendous the pain was. The thing Cath writes about facing your own mortality- that's how I felt with every contraction. And I know I didn't even have it bad. I'm all for thinking positively (and my daughter was fine- and that was ultimately the end goal), and I'm sure there are women who genuinely don't feel that much pain, and good on them, but to somehow suggest women are being failed if they have a painful labour, and that it shouldn't be that way, seems ridiculous to me. I wasn't failed- it is what it is- f-ing painful!

The Cath James article is spot on. I'm still angry that no-one told me the truth about birth or about induction or about forceps deliveries or about the damage they do to your body and your mind.

I remember in great detail the strategies we are all given to avoid the big bad c-section. How 'major surgery' should be avoided at all costs and so I read the hypnobrithing book and Ju Ju Sundin and Ina May Gaskin. I bounced on a ball like a loon. I planned snacks and massage and relaxation and tens machines and it was all fucking bollocks.

I got back to back induction, Keillands forceps, scarred baby, faecal incontinence (don't remember that in the NCT preparation) broken down episiotomy. Induction with contractions that were non-stop - how I'd have loved even 20 seconds between them. I went from pain at midnight to pain at midday when they finally got the epidural right (after 4 hours of trying). I was beggining to piss them off screaming no-no-no through every contraction by that point...

If I'd have had a gun I'd have shot myself and during the time when I hadn't yet persuaded the NHS to give me a CS for child number 2 I actually planned where to stash the stanley knife so I could slash my wrists when the pain hit that point second time round.

I was a professional intelligent healthy mentally strong woman before vaginal birth. I can certainly say I will never be the same after it and it has nothing to do with the baby that was eventually extracted from me.

I'm furious at the soft lighting deep breathing everything will be ok bullshit we are fed. Why did no-one warn me how horrific birth was?

We shouldn't be censoring anyone's experience. We're not North Korea.

However, I do think what sometimes does need saying is that labour doesn't always hurt. Whereas giving birth to DS really was painful, I had little if any pain with DD1 and DD2's births. I'm aware that I am very much in the minority of women to have had that experience. But I still think that I would have been a lot less scared before my first (DD1) if I had been reassured that pain is not an inevitability.

In Milli Hill's right to reply, she says "women do need confidence in birth; this is missing in our culture"
Confidence I have. But I have never had anything approaching adequate pain relief, either during childbirth or afterwards, from the permanent injury I have from obstetric trauma. Nor have I forgotten the pain. I think Milli Hill and her ilk do a massive disservice to women by fundamentally misrepresenting the process of childbirth as something you can control.

What I find difficult is when people like Hill essentially say that 'this is what it was like for me and so if your experience was different you were clearly doing it wrong'.

I feel very strongly about this and the "positive BF". My dc1 was normal delivery, everything fine, but BF was absolutely horrendous. I was told time and time again by midwives that I should just be patient and by 6 months it would be established. On day 3 I was in so much pain that I couldn't bear another feed, let alone another 6 months

I was on a birthing FB group and it frequently advocated that if anyone tried to share their birth stories with you that you didn't feel were positive that you should just shut them down immediately. Listening to a story about C/S would make you more likely to need one. Oh yes, and every woman who had intervention during birth had been raped

How fucking ridiculous. I never realised how judgey the natural birth brigade could be (and petty, fuck censoring honest retellings of birth, it's different for everybody). I went to hypnobirthing classes. Yes the talk of surges and tightenings was a bit wanky but at no point did our teacher say "It doesn't hurt, it's in your head." She took the piss out of the wanky terminology with us and explained to us that it's to bring the idea away from thinking about it being all about pain. She made a point of saying it does hurt but these techniques can help you through it and if it doesn't then do ask for pain relief. We were talked through various pain relief options as well. It was brilliant IMO, I felt more in control and educated about my decisions and there was never any of this judgey shit or being told that we were doing it wrong. But then the instructor was a midwife and it was a free course run by the hospital, so she had a much better idea of the reality of how it could go I think!

FWIW, I was supposed to have 4mo DD in an MLU and have a nice, tranquil waterbirth literally down the road from my house. Reality was being turned away by them and told to go to the hospital 24 hours after my waters broke as I still wasn't 4cm, DD turning to be back to back, being put on a drip to induce labour at 6am and having an EMCS at 1am the next morning because DD turned again and got thoroughly stuck. Two hours of trying not to push (and doing it anyway because it felt natural to) and barely remembering anything from the second day as I'd managed two hours sleep before going into labour and was utterly delirious is not my idea of a magical birth. I feel so fucking guilty for saying it but I am glad that DD had to be taken to NICU as soon as she was born because I think I would not have coped had they put her in a crib next to me and left me to it. I think had she been born vaginally my mental health would have seriously suffered because by that point I was utterly out of it and non-coherent and it would have been forceps or ventuse, both of which I was vehemently against having (like being induced as I knew the rates of intervention were very high but they talked us into that one). I was using hypnobirthing techniques for the first 24 hours, the breathing exercises and scripts actually helped a lot. Apparently I then went on to gas and air and the injections before I had to have the epidural in theatre!

The whole time I was well supported by the staff and they followed my instruction of informed consent to the T. If we were to have a second we'll be going straight for the C Section!

The trouble is Joanna in my experience you get told more that it's all going to be fine, you just have to breathe/have gas and air/think positively etc. Being told that it's not that bad and then finding, as I and other pps did, that it hurts so much you actual want to die is pretty damn scary too. If I'd known that before and I was prepared for it, I'd have been a hell of a lot less scared. Surely a balanced approach is what is required, e.g. Many women are fine and can manage the pain without too much difficulty but some women find it difficult and may need additional pain relief and support both during labour and afterwards. I was given the impression that pain relief would be bad for me and my baby. My midwife suggested that I might be better waiting for an epidural after 11 hours full on labour with very small breaks between contractions and very strong contractions (which they could tell from the monitors). Why? Just why wait when I was exhausted and suffering? Once I had the epidural it was an enjoyable experience. I wanted to kiss the anaesthetist. I genuinely believe that another woman experiencing the pain I did, wouldn't have coped better with it than I did.

As for people telling me afterwards that it's not that bad, it was how I viewed it, as if they know what it was like for ME, well they can just fuck off (not saying you were saying that btw). Equally I found breastfeeding easy, but I know that was just down to how my body and my babies bodies operated, not down to any superhuman qualities I possess. I wouldn't dream of telling another woman who was struggling with it that it's mind over matter, she needs to just try harder etc.

There is profit to be had in making women feel inadequate - be it looks, weight, childbirth. Perfect childbirth is now a product that can be sold - just read the right books / do the right courses / employ the right birth consultant and you too can pop the baby out in your insta-perfect home then be baking gluten free goji berry cookies within the hour.

Yes, women should be feel confident and empowered but pretending there is no pain, blood, shit, and risk is just fallacious. Adequate mental preparation requires knowledge - that involves being told all the risks and preparing for all the outcomes. Adequate physical preparation isn't really possible since none of us know what will happen once childbirth starts.

I have no time for women who give birth and then wax lyrical that theirs was the perfect birth experience, painless, easy. A walk in the park. Dismissing the experiences of millions of women who have given birth before them.
It does hurt, a lot.
As for contractions being called surges...I had to laugh at "being brought to her knees by the power of the 'surges'.
I was brought to my knees by the pain of a kidney stone the size of a marble that got stuck as it tried to expel itself from my body. Someone told me it was more painful than childbirth, I laughed at him and told him he hadn't got a clue about childbirth. It hurt but nowhere near as painful as childbirth.

I was also brought to my knees by the powerful contractions of childbirth. I didn't imagine the pain. I also didn't imagine the urge to push my baby out, it was a primeval and visceral urge.

I'll admit I was scared, I was induced after developing preeclampsia. Despite being promised the day before that they wouldn't do the ARM until my husband they were determined to do it NOW (luckily he arrived just before they did it) and was made to feel silly for questioning why they were doing things differently to what had been agreed the day before.

Then a doctor made me finish my birth plan. A bit pointless at that stage I felt as I clearly was not going to be encouraged to stay mobile.

Last thing I really remember before the pain turned unbearable was reading the notes and finding that they'd written that I was coping with the pain well. Then the pain suddenly escalated, turned constant and I started screaming for an epidural. I wasn't scared at that point just because there was no room for anything other than pain. As I'd said I'd prefer not to have an epidural on that sodding birth plan I was encouraged to have pethidine which just meant I was in pain and really confused. Got my epidural, turns out it's the best thing ever - except I couldn't feel when to push, nobody checked and by that point I wasn't really into verbal communication.

Episiotomy (ooh, these scissors are a bit blunt, aren't they? is not what you want to hear), third degree tear, baby not breathing properly and whisked away, then somebody checks the monitor and is all like 'look at this' and 'they can't have been contractions, she wasn't pushing', failed attempt to stitch me up, off to theatre I go.

SCBU nurse was a complete cow the next morning and I was stuck in hospital for another week and a half.

Kept reliving it all, but if you mention that you're not ok about it you get shut down with a cheery 'but the baby is fine and that's what's important'. Which of course it is, but a bit of consideration for the physical and mental wellbeing of the mother would be nice as well.

Still, I suppose if I'd just been a bit more positive about the whole thing...