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

Oh thank heavens for this thread; I feel like I have found my people. I dabble in the pregnancy and childbirth threads here and try to respond realistically to the gas lighting and often frankly dangerous comments that appear to form the majority view here - baby is breech? Your fault for sitting on the sofa, scrub some floors on hands and knees. Baby is two weeks overdue? Don't listen to your doctors, simply refuse intervention. You have multiple risk factors? They can't stop you having a home birth you know, go for it. And above all, the pain or difficulties you felt in birth or breastfeeding is your fault for not having enough support or somehow doing it wrong. It is heartbreaking for new parents, perhaps feeling vulnerable, to be bombarded with this nonsense. And it is terrifying to see the push to ignore medical advise that is routine here.

For me, the worst bit of the estatic natural birth propaganda is how they start by telling you that what you believe to be true - childbirth hurts a lot - isn't. You desperately want to believe this and the language of the whole movement is very carefully calibrated to make you think a tolerable limited-pain experience can be uours if only you do X, y, and Z. Then when reality hits and birth is painful beyond your carefully-built expectations, you are faced with a response of "sheesh, we never said it wouldn't hurt, it's called labour for a reason" that is designed to silence you and denigrate your experience. The whole narrative is carefully constructed to make you abandon your initial belief that labour will hurt; then once you fall for it and realise that this is a lie, you are told you are at fault for believing this - they never exactly said that even though it is designed exactly to transmit that message. It messes with our heads and it is so effective because it is pushed with the promise that this is what is best for our baby, and that is all we want most of all.

Pain is a feminist issue. I believe the advent of effective safe pain relief for childbirth, namely epidurals, is as important a step in women's rights as the contraceptive pill. It disgusts me that not all women have this option available to them if they so choose.

I could tell you a wonderful birth story about breathing my baby out into a birthing pool with soft lighting and gentle mood music. But it would be a heap of fiction

My birth stories are not some horror stories to terrify some poor primagravadia. They're just the stories of what happened to me and my babies. They're not anyone's plan A, and many people have had far worse experiences.

The first one hit me hard. My family has had quite simple births. I wasn't expecting to end up exhausted from a long labour, locked out of reality on pethadine and having an EMCS then transfer to HDU and Neonatal. It wasn't all a horror story. The long slow hours as labour build up were quite calm and helped by hypnobirthing techniques.

The second birth was better. I got the VBAC although at the cost of another trip to theatre where the imminent threat of another EMCS was won over at the last moment by forceps and a 3rd degree tear. The actual labouring was better despite being another back to back. The MW took my birth plan seriously, and we'd got a sensible middle ground between my mental comfort and their need for monitoring.

The second birth was mentally better, but had a slower, considerably more painful recovery.

Birth is incredibly personal and we can't judge how much a person has suffered or not, and certainly not by simplistic terms like time or interventions. Discussing birth honestly helps people to process the experience and that shouldn't be shut down.

YES to all these experiences - embrace the great, let's talk about the bad.

NO to a "right of reply" on an opinion piece on the realities of childbirth as if it's a libellous personal attack. A big fat NO on silencing or "editing" women's experiences to fit a woman with a book out's marketing ideology.

The original article is back online, albeit with some disappointing edits.

I have a friend who waxes lyrical about her 'natural', pain meds free birth like it is some badge of honour, she always fails to tell people she actually had pethidine, which yes, wears off, but you needed it to help you cope, why gloss over and pretend you had nothing, who cares?

I found my first labour incredibly difficult, it was so long, DD was back to back, I was given too much pethidine so for hours of it I was fucked, completely off my face and not in a good way, gas and air made me sick, a lot, I wasn't dilating so had the syntocin drip which ramped up my contractions to a level I just couldn't cope with too quickly, DD became distressed, she was pulled out at 9cm via ventouse and was not breathing for what felt like a lifetime but was probably less than a minute, it really was one of the most horrendous experiences. I know not everyone's is like that, but I had to talk about it, it was cathartic because I had found it so shocking and traumatic.

Dicks like Milli Hill pretty much implying that I could have avoided all of that by just breathing correctly and thinking of flowers blooming can quite frankly take a long walk off a short pier.

Part of my emotional baggage of the first birth was the pethadine brain fog lifting and finding myself beached up on my back feeling like I was on fire from my ribs to my knees. Gas and air had lost its edge by that point The spinal block for the CS was an amazing relief! The CS was fine other than the fact that DS and I were totally exhausted and struggling for it. Had it have been carried out at an earlier stage, it would have been a better experience, although I'd have mentally have still flogged myself for it. That's eased over time. It's much less important to me now my little baby is in school

I wonder if I were to tweet Milli Hill and point her in this direction she'd demand right of reply to this thread and/or its removal...

For that 77% of labour between contractions that I was not in pain, I was a sweaty mess, off my tits on gas and air and vomiting a lot. Pretty much like the girl in the exorcist.

Pain ramped up a gear when midwife accidentally broke my waters and instantly felt like my (unkown at that point) almost 10lb baby was going to climb out herself!

The next hour or so was a sweary blur until suddenly there were about 10 people in the room and I was handed a pink piece of paper to sign which I could barely see, let alone read, and whisked away to theatre.

I remember being told not to move when they put the needle in my back. After being awake for almost 40 hours and not being able to keep any food of liquid down for most of that time, I couldn't have moved if i'd tried!

I personally didn't make a birth plan. My midwife asked why and I told her it's because i'm the type of person who gets pissed off when things don't go to plan and even though I usually have a high pain threshold, I have no idea how painful labour/birth would be for me.

There have been some really positive birth stories here and that's fantastic. But censoring the negative ones is harmful. Harmful to women who didn't have a good birth and are now in physical or emotional pain because of it. It's almost as if their experiences should be brushed under the carpet, because to feel any emotion other than joy is shameful.

HeyRoly was yours +10lber too?

Nope! 7lb 15oz. But I'm short and seem to carry babies in no other direction but OUT. Result? Total destruction of core muscles!

I'm so glad I've found this page.

Spiteful, I totally agree wth you. People would ask about my birth but they didn't want to hear it was horrific. They would say "oh well it was all worth it" and inside I would be crying because, no, it wasnt worth it. I love my son dearly but his birth was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Yep mine are shot too, I've just accepted having a 'gut' now. Both mine were all out front, you couldn't tell I was pregnant from the back, even with the 10lb one!

@PastysPrincess Yes, yes, absolutely.

Two days after my emergency section I still was unable to get out of bed by myself, and to hear the words, "Well, you're both here safely, that's all that matters" from a midwife was utterly insulting.

If I had required major surgery after a car crash, would they still have been so dismissive of the accident itself? Yes, we were both safe (although my daughter's face was scarred by the forceps). I am glad we are both safe. But that doesn't mean that I didn't go through something horrific.

And fuck me if I'm not going to talk about it, lest I scare another woman. This happened to me. It's my story. And Cath Janes' story was silenced because someone didn't like the experience she had, as it won't help her sell books.

@NunntheWiser this image sums it all up for me.

What a simple but powerful image Pastys.

The 77% is so infuriating, the smugness of even working that out, ugh. As others have said, I spent the time between contractions in absolute terror waiting for the next one, vomiting, shaking, crying and generally wanting to die- and my labour was quick compared to many.

The original article is back online, albeit with some disappointing edits
Good, but not good enough.

I think most of what happens during childbirth is out of our control - that includes doctors. We like to think "if I do / don't do X, Y, Z I'll be OK". But what we can do makes such little difference. That is hard to accept and it scares some people.

Haha. I had soft lighting, minimal interrruptions and kind and supportive midwives. I was completely calm. Ultimately it made fuck all difference. Still ended up with an EMCS after 45 hours of labour. I couldn't have solved it with positive thinking. I don't wish people had been more positive, I wish they'd pointed out that c sections are common so I could have anticipated it and been less traumatised.

I'm so glad nobody on this thread has defended the censorship.

I totally agree that it's got nothing to do with positive thinking, my first borns birth (which I was completely positive going into) was horrific, I was not capable of imagining the extent of the pain as I'd never felt anything like it before. It ended up with alarms going off and a roomful of people attempting to get my son out as quickly as possible.

I was absolutely terrified going into labour the second time, completely expecting the worst.. and it was fine; some back pain but all over in about 2 hours and nowhere near the pain of the first birth.

So I say bollocks to positive thinking.

I just have to say thank you to everyone on this thread. In fact I've registered with this site just to do it. I wrote the Standard Issue piece and cannot thank you all enough for your honest stories about your experiences. It means so much personally and professionally to know that honesty is what is needed in these matters.

As you read in my piece I had PND, PTSD and a breakdown as a direct result of my childbirth experience and no amount of positive thinking would have stopped that happening. I refuse to be quiet about it because it was the silence of others that lured me into thinking that positivity and strength was all I needed to get through it. I never want that to happen to another woman.

So thank you again, you amazing, determined and wonderfully open survivors. You rock more than I can express.

I would go further actually. I think people don't tell you what a nightmare it is with a tiny baby after the birth. They just look at you all pursed lipped and smug when you say your naive, elaborate plans for after the baby arrives. For me it was hell, awful mastitis, failing to breastfeed, depression, c-section pain, sleep deprivation and utter cluelessness as to what to do.

Fab to see you Cath. Keep fighting the good fight. Milli Hill is a bloody nasty piece of work. Get a look at some of her tweets to James Titcombe, a man who lost his wife and son at the hands of an incompetent midwife.

I did hypnobirthing and pregnancy yoga and lived on ball, did fuck all and I ended up with emcs, a massive infection and ptsd from failed anaesthetic in theatre. Then I had elcs and lost nearly half my blood with my next dc. And I'm the one telling expectant friends positive things about sections because nct and the NHS don't say very much at all. Pretending you can have an intervention free water birth if you wish for it hard enough does far more damage than some measured honesty.

Thank you for the article Cath. We need more people like you.