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

Great to see you on here Cath! After my labour (which as I said above was very straightforward, but which I found horrifically painful), I mentioned to a few friends, who had told me 'labour- yeah it's not great but it's not SO bad', that I'd had a different experience to that. They, without exception, told me they'd lied, because they didn't want to scare me. It made me feel so much better to know they'd really struggled too, because before that I'd felt somehow like I'd failed some sort of stupid motherhood test. But I honestly wish they could have been more honest with me to begin with. The pain I felt was a really scary pain, and really shocked me, nothing to do with my outlook or support, it was just the way it was. I can accept that, but trying to suggest it needn't have been that way is actually very disempowering- as if I did something wrong, and if I'd just approached it differently, it would have been fine. It really wouldn't.

Prettywoman I agree completely.

After a few weeks of no sleep and painful breastfeeding etc. I was ready to get in my car and just keep driving. DP had gone out and bought formula. He would never make me do anything but he just said enough was enough and made a bottle. DD slept for 4 solid hours. It was such a relief but I still felt guilty and a failure.

I also complained about the health visitor who, when I had asked the best way to stop breastfeeding, made me feel so much worse and basically told me to suck it up and carry on!

Thank you Cath. Your article and its honesty was a breath of fresh air. It's refreshing to know I'm not alone. Reassures me of my sanity in fact.

The censorship of women's birth experiences (either directly by press, or indirectly by social norms which oblige women to suppress their honest experiences) is a feminist issue. I can think of no area of male medicine where men would be kept in the dark 'lest they frighten themselves into a worse experience' . Women are not being furnished with the full facts which would enable them to make completely informed choice about birth and birthing options.

Thank you thank you thank you for putting your story out there. It makes mine (ours) that little bit more acceptable.

I used to like Standard Issue. I thought it was honest, progressive and supportive, and found it a breath of fresh air among the glossy piles of drivel and adverts that are usually foisted on women to make us feel as inadequate as possible.

I have just lost all respect for it. What possible grounds were there for withdrawing a perfectly valid counter-argument based on a real person's real experiences? Is her voice somehow less significant because she isn't writing for a broadsheet?

Sarah Millican should have stepped in. Disgraceful.

@passportissues123 Yes, exactly. Heaven forfend we send someone into a fit of the vapours with honesty.

Honestly, I have no problem with people peddling hypnobirthing. I read the literature myself and realised that I wasn't likely to go for it as I wasn't... can't think of a nice word for "gullible" enough to be able to convince myself it wasn't actual pain.

BUT fine if it works for some people, and I don't doubt it does. So much the better. Less pain in the world, what's not to like?

What is NOT acceptable is silencing anyone who says otherwise.

Just came back from a lovely long chatty dinner with my pregnant friend. She had a realy fucking serious, incredibly painful pregnancy related incident a couple of weeks ago (don't want to give detail, it's a relatively rare complication of pregnancy but not unheard of). When she went to A&E on the advice of NHS 111, she literally could not sit with the pain.

The doctor who treated her asked her to sit, and when told that she couldn't, the doctor patted her on the shoulder and told her that pregnant women sometimes go through these things and she'd basically need to toughen up. Then she scanned her, and admitted her for two days for treatment, after discovering how serious the complication was.

I had to confess to friend that I wasn't even slightly surprised at her treatment.

Thank you Cath for your honesty.

I so often feel that I shouldn't tell my birth stories around women who haven't had children.

3 years on from my last traumatic birth experience and I am still not over it.

I have had 2 EMCS the first after a failed ventouse and forceps with only local anaesthetic and 7 minutes to get dd1 out. The second a vbac attempt and a failed ventouse plus pph. I planned a natural birth both times, I breathed, went into the zone, it fucking hurt still.

The third a planned high risk ELCS well, I lost 7 litres of blood, they removed my uterus to save my life, they started the hysterectomy under epidural, I could feel it. I had to kiss goodbye to my husband and newborn son not knowing if I would wake up from the general anaesthetic to see him and my 3 children again.

Yes I am alive and so are my children and I am so grateful, but it did fucking hurt! The labour pains, the internal trauma, the recovery from major abdominal surgery, the mental and emotional trauma.

Why should my experience be invalidated because people want to think it's all unicorns and rainbows?

Just thinking further on this, all those women who still die in childbirth all over the globe, they're just not thinking enough happy thoughts, yes?

God I'm feeling angry all over again.

Catch, thanks for writing that article, it's a fucking disgrace that it was ever removed.

I am absolutely bemused at why analgesia free birth and delivery is held to a higher standard than any other sort. And why post delivery women are treated so differently to other patients (story for another thread!).

I'm a doctor. I was fully aware that labour was unlikely to be a beautiful experience- I saw it as something I would get through in order to have my baby. As it happened my labour started very well- I was comfortable enough to walk around during contractions and so didn't need pain relief. Not because I'm especially stoic, but because I was having an easy labour. I dilated nice and steadily over a few hours to 10cm. Then when fully dilated I became suddenly quite unwell, DD became distressed- I had a failed forceps followed by a traumatic emcs complicated by uterine tear, pph and bad infection and a horrible 10 day hospital stay.

If I had an epidural earlier on in my labour I'm quite certain some people would decide that things went wrong due to a "cascade of intervention". Whereas in truth it was all luck- both the part that went well and the part that went badly. And believe me when I woke up in HDU to see my DH cuddling our newborn I was bloody pleased to have had the option of a CS.

Thank you Cath for posting here. Can you please tell us more about the editorial process surrounding your article and its utterly chilling deletion? Did you write your own article spontaneously or were you invited by your editor to react to the Telegraph piece? Did you know when it was taken down? What reasons were given? I'd love to hear your perspective.

If you would be happy to do so, I am certain that Dr Amy Tuteur of the skepticalob.com website would be very interested in hearing about the process that led to you being effectively silenced.

Cath you are a star, really you are.

I thought labour pains would be like bad period pains, tbh. I mean, I knew it would be painful. But no-one told me HOW painful. It was only afterwards when I talked with my friends who had already had children, when we compared notes and agreed the pain was literally indescribable, that I realised what I'd felt was normal.

AND I had an epidural after a couple of highs because I had high blood pressure and was being monitored for pre-eclampsia. That had all been agreed in advance, it just took a couple of hours before they got round to it. So I barely suffered in labour compared with a lot of women, and I was and still an incredulous at how bad contractions hurt.

I can honestly say that childbirth is not the most painful experience I have had in my life. Straightforward, drug free labour, DS delivered about 4 hours after I went into the hospital. I actually quite enjoyed some parts of labour, and genuinely felt in control, serene and pretty powerful. (The kicker is that he was premature, and went straight into SCBU, and I would gladly have taken the pain in exchange for being able to get him to term)

However, people who witter on about water pools and some whale music being all you need for a pain free delivery are idiots, IMHO. The only way you get a straightforward, low pain delivery is with a huge dollop of luck, nothing more, nothing less. It is doing pregnant women - and those who care for them - a huge disservice to pretend otherwise.

Cath - thanks for your article, and thanks for coming on here

Imaginary pain 😂 my imagination isn't that vivid.

Thanks again everyone. You so rock!

My experience of giving birth once is such that I cannot imagine ever having another child. I don't want a second child for several reasons but mainly because the pain of childbirth has damaged me mentally and I could not cope with another child as a result. I fact, I believe that I would not survive it a second time because, in addition to my PTSD, I I am convinced that would revert back to the suicidal state it left me in the first time. I'm only here now because my husband caught me with a knife and hit it away from me as I put it across my wrist. Perhaps I should have thought more positively, right?

THIS is why I feel such a need to be honest and open about the pain of childbirth. I have an enduring horror of other women going through this. I have no problem when people like Milli Hill have enjoyable labours. It's amazing, in fact. Good on them. I do have a problem, though, with handing the responsibility of a pleasurable labour to women when they have no clue what to expect in the first place. It's like telling a woman to enjoy her skydive then pushing her out of a plane without a parachute. It not just wrong, it's dangerous.

Yet hearing all of your stories is so weirdly comforting. It's horrifying to hear all of what you have been through yet such a relief to know that I am not alone. It makes me want to boo and cheer at the same time.

One of you asked me about the circumstances of having my piece pulled. The piece was commissioned by Standard Issue (they contacted me knowing very well how forcefully and shoutily I write). It had been online for several hours when Milli Hill complained, publicly calling me unprofessional on social media for writing it without giving her a right of reply (an astounding lack of understanding of how journalism works. I and all of my journalist colleagues remain stunned by it). SI then pulled it because it was "easier", backtracking and claiming that I had misrepresented her which which I absolutely did not in any way. It's this point especially upon which my ed and I do not agree. Milli Hill was given 24 hours to respond, which she did in a piece of copy that I believe to have no merit whatsoever. I have since told SI that I will never write for them again. I live in fear that Milli Hill will next demand a right of reply to this post.

So keep shouting, you lot. Tell the world about your rips and tears, blood n guts and beds covered in shit. Anyone who wants us to be silent about it can (pardon the technical term, here) go fuck themselves.

Cx

SI should be ashamed of themselves.

Let Hill come on here for a right to reply, I'm sure a forum full of intelligent women who have a huge variety of birthing experiences - good and bad - can make our voices clear to her.

I agree with Every. Single. Word. of your latest post, Cath.

I was exceptionally lucky that i was able to have a natural home birth - and that's what it was down to Pure luck.
Yes i read all the shite about breathing, Imagine your vagina is like a flower slowly opening, candles all of it, And do you know what it usually doesn't help unless you are some kind of zen master.

Its hard to breathe right when you are in sodding agony, and concentrating more on not screaming profanities at the stupid fu*ker who got you into this mess in the first place.

Vagina opening up like a flower - No it felt like a flower being run over by a lawn mower and then set on fire - the pain was real and no amount of positive thinking was going to be of any help as actually it was my fanny ripping apart rather than my mind playing tricks on me.

Candle? i would have happily ate the sodding thing if i thought it would have helped.

Ive never been smug that i had it easier than most as believe me it was down to pot luck - it was a quick labour, if he had been a inch turned round the other way i would never have had it as good as i did.
Labour is scary, messy and sodding painful and i think for most a bit traumatising - its certainly the worst pain i have voluntarily put myself in (and expected to be happy about it afterwards)

The truth is you never know until you are in that moment how it is going to go, and i think that telling women they have a major control over how it goes is wrong and is doing more harm than good, as you cant control it. All you can do is hope for the best, know that the best laid plans don't always happen and most of the time its no ones fault and you're not a failure

the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Pasty I spent my first hours as a mother, possibly made worse by the fact my baby was in SCBU, with the words 'if I'd known I'd never have done it' going round on a permanent loop in my head.

I love my little boy to bits and would not be without him, but I am not doing it again. It was the worst experience of my life.

Let Hill come on here for a right to reply, I'm sure a forum full of intelligent women who have a huge variety of birthing experiences - good and bad - can make our voices clear to her.

Yes! And she's got an account. She was happy to come on when she was fishing for stories for an article.

Cath is my friend and awesome. Yanbu.

What struck me hard a while ago was Caitlin Moran's account of childbirth. She says that on the birthday of her daughter she doesn't remember the time she was born, she remembers the moment the pain ended. That is how I remember the birth of my daughter.

When the midwife put my girl on my chest I didn't care about her. I just cared that the pain had stopped because it was the first time in hours that I believed I wasn't dying. It horrifies me now because I love my girl in a way I cannot describe. She is my shouty, funny, sarcastic, clever, gorgeous, real-life incarnation of my soul. But that delivery-room wonder was obliterated by pain and I despise that, because I had no idea how bad it could be, I was robbed of the chance to be wonderous.

That Milli Hill thinks that this could have changed with enough support, hand-holding and dim lighting horrifies me. I had all of that. All that was missing was the truth.

@mirime I often say that if I had truly understood how bad it would be I wouldn't have had children. I honestly don't know how people do this more than once anyway even if you take out the horrific birth.

Totally with you on that one, Cath.

I won't out myself but we are Facebook friends and you leave the most wonderful comments on my daughter's pictures. She is incredible but birthing her destroyed me and I feel it was so damaging mentally for me.

I too feel robbed