... about "natural birth" and "your body knows what to do"?

[ParsnipsAreTheDevil]

I keep seeing the whole "don't worry your body knows what to do" thing thrown at pregnant women and it was a massive part of the hypnobirthing course I did before
DS was born (he's 2 now). When it came to it it turned out my body didn't have a bloody clue what to do. In labour for 3 days, wasn't dilating, emergency c section and we both got sepsis. Felt like a massive failure afterwards thanks to the massive emphasis on natural birth and my body categorically NOT knowing what to do?

Aibu that what we should be saying to pregnant women is to keep an open mind about birth? I've met a few women since who had very similar experiences to me. Breathe the fecking baby out my arse.

It hurst like fuck but there’s no other process in life that involves that much pain but which is not terrible injury that must be stopped. Knowing what the pain was doing and why helped me so much. Any other situation that level of pain would have meant I was dying!! Believing that I wasn’t dying but my body was doing what It was supposed to and so being able to fight back the fear and panic was crucial.

I've had a birth where midwives yelled PUSH at me and told me if I didn't dilate 1cm an hour I would have a section, who told me it was going to be difficult because of the baby's position, in a room where I could hear lots of other women screaming in fear and pain and you know of course my body shut down and I didn't progress to their requirements and after that every intervention that was supposed to help made things worse. The epidural meant I didn't have a clue what was going on but now I couldn't move, for example.

And I've given birth - at home - with a midwife I trusted implicitly, in an atmosphere of total calm and silence, and safety, where I did not push once as my body "vomited downwards" I did not have any pain relief, I did not want or need any. I WAS WOMAN and could have run a bloody marathon afterwards. I had the right support and was in exactly the right situation.

I've also been in the nice situation where it went slightly wrong - and rather than be told 'this is how we do things' and it be a panic - it was a slow developing issue. Had I been left alone for an hour and then the issue was suddenly discovered, perhaps there would have been some panic. But my midwives had been with me all along and knew my history and because they were confident, experienced and not dealing with loads of other women at the same time and various hospital protocols - it was sorted out and I went on to have a similarly nice non-traumatic birth.

YANBU
My body didn't even know what to do during pregnancy, as my placenta failed and I delivered my twins at 26+1....

Yanbu! How come the biggest killer of women, in fact people, was childbirth or just being born before medical interventions? If I had left it to nature my son would not be here.

I haven’t done it yet but after reading lots of recent threads on mumsnet I am absolutely petrified and I’m not sure if it helps- because I don’t have a solution or anyway to ensure that things ARE ok. So I’m not sure if I would have preferred to go into it with a sense of the unknown!

By body knew what to do... unfortunately it does it as such a speed to totally freak out the child it's trying to expel at the time resulting in two emergencies.

YANBU!

We are not designed to do anything
Birth is inherently risky
Hypno is a great technique and a tool to use and for a straightforward birth it’s great.
However... it will not change the basic set up - if your baby is back to back, or your anatomy is unfavourable you’re going to have a hard time.

Women should be given much more accurate information about birth IMO. There’s almost no discussion along the lines of ‘x% of women have an uncomplicated birth, x% need interventions, these are what they are, what causes them, what we do and the potential outcomes.’

Anyone wittering on about natural birth should be directed to the stats on maternal death and morbidity in countries with poor healthcare. And also historical data on just how many women died during or just after birth.

My body seems pretty good at pregnancy and breastfeeding but utterly shit at birthing.
DC1: Had to be induced at 14 days overdue, ended up with ventouse
DC2: Crash section under GA due to placental abruption at 6cm dilated
I think that whatever is going to happen with a birth is going to happen anyway, all this woo thinking makes no difference

I feel like I had absolutely masses of information about the danger and painfulness of giving birth. Loads of people told me horror stories when i was pregnant and if you're on mumsnet there are lots of threads about birth injuries and awful experiences.

I don't know what lovely bubble those of you who were never told any negatives lived in but I rather rather wish I'd been there too!

YANBU. DS just wouldn't come out on his own. I had to have forceps.

I find it interesting that one of the oldest professions in the world is the midwife i.e. someone who knows what is going on to help the poor mother work out how to do things.

My first birth was relatively easy, pain wise but my body still didnt know what to do. Even in the final stages where the head was coming out, I didnt have the urge to push, I was just doing as I was told. This was with just gas and air too.

Glad that some people had good coverage of complications in their nhs classes. We had a very off putting impression of the noises women make during birth (!), and just a ‘cross that bridge when you come to it’ when it came to complications, and a leaflet about inductions.

I find it interesting that one of the oldest professions in the world is the midwife i.e. someone who knows what is going on to help the poor mother work out how to do things.

That's very interesting. I'd never thought of it that way.

One of my friends who has a 6 month old asked me what labour was like when she was pregnant and I didn't really know what to say so I just said "mine wasn't great but it's different for everyone". Then she had a terrible experience and the first text I got from her after the birth was "why didn't you warn me?!?!"

I hate this stuff too - although of course it can help some women, and birth is a wonderful and natural experience for some women, no class or organisation should present it to pregnant women as if all they have to do is get their attitude right, breathe properly, etc. No wonder so many women are down on themselves after having to have a CS or even painkillers.

I was reading a thing about farmer and she has sheep who sometimes die in childbirth, cannot give birth without assistance, cannot bf. It's normal and no one blames the sheep for not trying hard enough or breathing right. They just find a solution to help.

It also makes me think of eyesight - we haven't evolved to all have perfect eyesight - a few people have no problems, many people need aids to see and some can't do it at all. But no one blames you if your eyes don't function perfectly.

Childbirth is similar – it does not go right in a significant amount of cases and that's part of what is "natural" for us, as a species, at the point we are at.

I had 2 C-sections, I don't feel bad about them (in fact I expected to need them because of family history) but the pressure from midwives to try for a "natural" birth ("we can just use forceps!") was horrendous - even when I had a BOOKED CS and went into labour early. There's also a sense of an opposition between MWs and doctors which is really unhelpful when they should be a team and prioritise what each woman needs, instead of an agenda.

I think it's an over-reaction and backlash against the previous tradition of birth being over-medicalised , but it fails to take account of the reality, and ends up making so many women feel like failures.

Globally, 800 women die every DAY from the complications of so called “ natural” pregnancy and childbirth. And for every death, a further 20 suffer injury, infection or disability.
Imagine two fully laden jumbo jets crashing every day, year round. That’s the death toll.
That’s why we have obstetricians, anaesthetists, operating theatres, crash teams. As a retired doctor, who has in the past helped to save the lives of mothers (and babies)when labour has gone very, very wrong, I find all the nonsense about “your body knows what to do”, “gamble your survival on a home birth with no emergency facilities”, etc, positively terrifying.
By all means make labour suites more welcoming and homely, hide the emergency resus kit behind screens, whatever - but don’t claim that natural childbirth is safe.

I don't know what lovely bubble those of you who were never told any negatives lived in but I rather rather wish I'd been there too!

I do think this too - I am always astonished when women say they had no idea birth might be go wrong or that bodies change postpartum etc, as I feel like they're ideas that were very much pressed on me from a young age! Actually, I wonder if I completely accidentally got a good balance between the positivity of the hypnobirthing and the pretty relentless negativity of the way birth is presented in popular culture, which is why I don't think hypnobirthing was useless to me - I think it helped me in some ways, but I am glad I didn't fully internalise it to the extent of making my perfectly normal birth feel like a failure just because I wanted to lie down (turns out that's what my body knew to do!) or because it wasn't joyful and empowering (until the bit where I got the baby to hold at the end, which was both)

YANBU

Instead of positive birth stories and woo about mother nature or missing out on an amazing experience, perhaps we could just give pregnant women the facts?

Success rates for VB with your medical status are X with Y risk rates. If you choose to try a CS the success rates are A with B risk rates: which do you want to do?

With hindsight, that's what I needed. Not being sold some perfect birth myth which almost certainly wouldn't happen.

I gave birth naturally with no problems, I was told I don’t even need to push and the contractions will ease baby out. I definitely didn’t push, I felt my belly tensing and pushing the baby down and out.

But I also remember being really bloody angry at people telling me to breath. I had no idea what that meant, because obviously I was breathing. My friend had a 3 day labour. No amount of relaxing and let her body push the baby out would have done the job. Every single woman and births are different.

I really don’t think saying to women let your body do it’s thing is good advice, even though that’s exactly what happened for me!

I agree LisaSimpsonsbff. From a very young age I was aware that childbirth was something very painful and potentially dangerous. I don’t know if this was because I read everything I could lay my hands on as a child! As I got older, I only became more aware of the risks involved. Then started to get the horror stories from my contemporaries who had given birth. Hypnobirthinf helped me to counteract some of the fear, and enabled me to stay calm even when things weren’t going as planned.

Yes and there is a weird fetishisation of how some supposed "primitive" or "tribal" people give birth - one woman I knew rhapsodised about some group of people in papua or somewhere who go into the forest and lean against a tree and give birth with no help because of their wonderful natural method. Total misrepresentation of what life/birth is actually like in most underdeveloped or poor countries.

I half agree with this I half don't not you the op just the whole your body knows what to do comment. When I had my first DD I was ignored by the midwives and they didn't believe I was in labour and didn't try and help at all I ended up crowning in the bed on the maternity ward instead of delivery and screaming in pain and I believe that is why I ended up with pnd, with my second I knew when I was ready to push and I just went with the flow without intervention as such. My body started pushing for me and it wasn't actually that painful at all it was like strong period pains and quite relaxing

after my first birth I was not only traumatised but so DISAPPOINTED by the whole experience. I'd been obsessively watching those American one born every minute type shows where the care the mum got was round the clock and their plans were stuck to, painkillers given etc

I had to labour alone most of the night because they sent my husband home I remember wandering the hospital corridors in agony and taking bath after bath alone because the pain wouldn't stop. I felt I couldn't cry out on my contractions because there was someone else in the ward trying to sleep.

I also vividly remember the despair I felt when the third change of shift midwives bustled into the delivery room, plonked a large radio down and declared "We always have music when we work". I exchanged glances with my DH and can pinpoint that as the moment when I felt I had absolutely no say or control in the whole situation and almost gave up at that point.

I only once felt an urge to push, but because at the time the midwives on the ante natal ward were still refusing to believe I was in labour I didn't recognise it for what it was. When they realised I was fully dilated and went into panic mode I was stuck on the drip and never felt that urge to push again. (It really shouldn't have come as a surprise to them, I was being induced). Bossy midwives were shouting at me "Well do you feel like pushing or not" and I remember screaming back in frustration "I don't KNOW!".

On reflection I possibly would have been better alone at the end of the garden chewing on a stick. At least I would have felt empowered to shout out and listen to what my body was saying rather than having a medical team disbelieve me because my contractions weren't 'regular'.

The care you get from the midwives is crucial to the whole experience I think.

I don't know what lovely bubble those of you who were never told any negatives lived in but I rather rather wish I'd been there too!

I deliberately didn’t read anything (apart from hypnobirthing which was promptly chucked across the room when labour started) and my friends and relatives were careful not to tell me scare stories I guess? I’ve always thought of childbirth in the same way as death, you know it’s going to happen but it’s best not to think about it too much!