to think the natural birth at all costs ideology is fucking crackers?

[burnagirl]

We have a scandal on our hands. Shrewsbury Maternity Unit.

I couldn't believe what I was reading, but to be honest, I wasn't all that surprised, having had many a run in with the natural birthers/earth mothers in the past.

There is a toxic and insidious ideology permeating the 'birth culture' in the UK. This culture that tells women that our bodies were 'made' to give birth, that our bodies KNOWWWW what to do, that any intervention means failure on our part. That childbirth pain is something to be endured with happiness and joy - I mean, really? Is it some sort of a more 'noble' pain? Something transcendental and sacred and good?

Nah, fuck off with that. You wouldn't have a root canal with no pain relief, so WHY do we fetishise female suffering in childbirth? To me, there's this mile-wide misogynistic miasma around this narrative, probably rooted in religion.

Then there's this totally daft idea of intervention/c-section being a failure. Such bollocks. We don't seem to realise that, from an evolutionary perspective, it isn't even necessary for MOST mothers to survive childbirth. All we need is ENOUGH mothers and babies to survive, so no, our bodies are not sacred temples that somehow magically Know Best.

Can we please do away with the woo around childbirth and just do what needs to be done to ensure that mothers and babies come out of the (let's face it, fucking painful and dangerous) process alive and well, however the hell it happens?

orangeteal

I think you are absolutely right! I now know that my DM did, after my birth, but they didn't recognise such trauma in 1967. And to be honest I don't think they do now. Women are patched up, stitched up and sent home after suffering appalling things and are expected to just forget and get on with it. It is a national scandal.

I agree with that. Some have been saying that it doesn’t matter at all, in five years time etc. But it can matter a lot.

MarshaBradyo

Totally agree. It matters hugely. My DM still remembers 52 years later, as do I 32 years later. It absolutely and really matters. And it doesn't seem as if much has changed really.

Can you imagine if men were traumatised by vasectomy surgery? There'd be a national bloody enquiry!

Agree, agree, agree. Also whilst we talking about Shrewsbury I think we also fetishise that all NHS healthcare workers are Mother Teresa types, they’re not, they’re people, some people are terrible people. These healthcare are/were terrible people.

No not a typo. Just a long wait. My consultant was a relaxed type but I was the longest overdue he had at the time. Towards the end I did go in to the private hospital where he worked each day and check the placenta was still functioning but that was my decision. I really appreciated having medical professionals who were prepared to give me information and advice and then leave me to make the decisions. It made the whole process much less stressful than I feared.

YANBU OP. The barriers I faced when I requested an ELCS were ridiculous and caused me unnecessary stress in my final trimester.

I thought it would be a straight "yes". I was already under consultant care because I was an aul doll in my mid 40s. I was diagnosed with pelvic arthropathy at 21 weeks. My mobility was severely compromised. My baby was, and remained until birth, breech. But I was wrong.

The natural birth ideology was being pushed so hard that at one appointment I waited over 2 hours passed my appointment time because doctor after doctor would put my notes back in the box and call the next pregnant woman on the list. Who wants to be the junior doctor caught between their consultant and a pissed off, uncomfortable, middle aged, pregnant woman in pain? I countered their arguments. I gave sound medical reasons for rebuffing their ridiculous suggestions.
I should not have had to.

Eventually, they agreed and a date was set for my ELCS which went like a dream. Indeed without a CS I would have required surgery down the line. My last pregnancy had a really high probability of ending with a CS. All the evidence pointed to it which is why I requested it.

It was not evidence that put barriers in my way. It was an ideological belief that natural birth is best wot dun it.

Fucking hell, Dione. We’re you at the John Radcliffe, by any chance?

Mrsgogginsthe3rd as a healthcare worker I would totally agree with that. We’re usually doing our best within the limits of the system, and lots of us do go above and beyond because we feel we have to (due to pressure on beds, lack of staffing etc), which I think is where the Mother Theresa stuff comes from. But we are human, and will make mistakes, or have blind spots, or just be stressed and in a foul mood.

There are also toxic systems which are set up to make you see the patients as your opponent - I remember doing A&E in a very dysfunctional department, and realising after six months or so that I was approaching patients with the attitude that there was nothing wrong with them, and it was up to them to prove me wrong if they wanted treatment from me. Awful. I switched to a different specialty asap, and you would never imagine now that I had ever behaved like that. I do wonder if people working in these departments (Mid Staffs, Shropshire) have just normalised completely abnormal and unacceptable attitudes and behaviour, because everyone who works there is like that.

No Tolleshunt. NI, two years ago.

Despite the risk due to my age, I was not offered the screening available to other UK citizens. I was told I would have to wait for the routine anomaly scan, then undergo amniocentisis before anomalies would be diagnosed. I came away from my 12wk scan in tears.😢 I booked a private blood test that gave me results within days.

The relief.

So maybe I was U in expecting woman centred, evidence based birth when I wasnt granted it in difficult, complicated pregnancy.

At 42+2 weeks after 48 hours of failed induction I was offered an elective c-section or to go home and wait. I had a ceserean. First thing my midwife (who wasn’t at the hospital) said when she did a home visit was “let’s try for a natural birth next time eh?”. I’d had 2/3 hours sleep a night for 3 MONTHS because of a skin condition, I had anemia, I’d been awake for 3 days solidly while being induced and was bleeding from the internals, there was no way I was going home!

She also thought I was having a girl even after I had a gender scan at 25 weeks because he had a girls heart rate .

Just read the last few pages and want to add I’m not bashing midwives or any health care professionals, just one person. The midwife and consultant who looked after me in hospital were lovely and supported my decision.

Articles like these:

www.mamanatural.com/epidural-side-effects/

Read until the end. The writer preaches about being non-judgemental but then cherry picks research to suit a “natural” birth agenda while exaggerating the harmful side effects of pain management and intervention in childbirth.

For example, when explaining the few stated positives of an epidural:

“an epidural can actually help a mom avoid a c-section, which is a very good thing.”

Why is it a good thing? C-sections are not the work of the devil. An EMSC saved me and my baby’s life. The epidural put an end to 12 hours of me vomiting. She notes extra monitoring as a negative when, again, in my case, the extra monitoring due to the epidural highlighted some issues that would have been left unnoticed and potentially life threatening otherwise. I DIDNT choose the intervention, the intervention found me. I have spent the past 12 months feeling like a failure (even embarrassed) as I wanted to be like my mother-in-law who gave birth to 10lb babies with no pain relief. We’re given so many options and choices with childbirth but sometimes 1st time mums need to be educated that these things aren’t necessarily a choice and it depends how your body reacts to labour- and that different bodies cope better than others and that’s ok.

I’m slowly trying to resolve these feelings and accept that a planned C-section would be best next time. Nevertheless, I still feel like I should give “natural” another go just so I can prove myself next time. It’s ridiculous and it’s created by this kind of narrative.

@DioneTheDiabolist I think you're local and your post worries me. I had an EMCS in September and am 100% requesting an ELCS for any subsequent births. I didn't think they'd be so bloody awkward about it.

I was "lucky" in that staff recognised I was struggling and wasn't progressing, so was offered a section before things got hairy or I was truly exhausted. I was also lucky in that I had a dream recovery from the EMCS and am not in the slightest bit bothered about even trying a VBAC in the future. It would be really insensitive for me to say "major abdominal surgery isn't that bad" in the same way some PPs have described vaginal delivery as if it's the same for everyone- I laboured first for 18 hours on the drip and it was excruciating.

My experience immediately after in the postnatal ward was shit, but the birth itself was fine. And that was because I was given a choice- I was told I could continue to try to deliver vaginally but due to the position DD was in it was likely they'd still need to bring me to theatre in case forceps were required. As soon as I said I didn't want forceps the doctor advised me to go for the section. There was meconium in my waters, DD's heart rate dropped once dramatically during monitoring and she had the cord around her neck so god knows how continuing vaginally would have panned out.

I feel confident that the alternative would've resulted in complications but I'm not "proud" of making the call to go for a c-section when I did, or for bouncing back from the surgery. They were quirks of circumstance or physiology, exactly like any straightforward drug-free vaginal birth. The elation I felt at DD's birth was from knowing she was here safely, not from any sense of personal achievement.

Anyway, despite being totally happy with my choice I find myself saying "emergency c-section" when people ask about the birth. I don't have any feelings of failure or disappointment so why do I feel the need to caveat it? My social media is filled with ads for hypnobirthing, influencers having home or drug free births and talking about how amazing an experience it was, and antenatal groups where descriptions of interventions open with "sadly..." or "disappointingly...". It's like needing (or wanting) intervention is abnormal or a sign of weakness, when it absolutely isn't.

@ColdTattyWaitingForSummer’s personal choice to have 3 vaginal births because she was terrified of a needle in her spine, for example, really points up the need to LISTEN to what women want from their antenatal care and birth experience.

I was far more scared of tearing during a vaginal birth, or of the need for interventions, than I was of any needle during a section. As it happened, my son was breach late on and so my consultant strongly recommended an ELCS. It was exactly the right experience for me.

But each woman is different. NCT and the NHS shouldn’t be pushing vaginal birth as the way to go at all costs because (particularly for older first-time mothers like me) it may not (and probably won’t, if experience from my peer group is anything to go by) be the right choice.

@dogcrazy

First thing my midwife (who wasn’t at the hospital) said when she did a home visit was “let’s try for a natural birth next time eh?”.

HAHHAHAHHA!!!!! so many assumptions in one simple sentence, I don’t even know where to start. If my midwife had said that to me, I would have gone through her for a short cut.

And women should absolutely feel proud of their labour because it’s an objective fact that it’s a physically and emotionally demanding event, akin to some kind of long-distance athletic challenge!

But I (personally) don’t feel sorry that I skipped the pain of the marathon in favour of a wee sit-down on the couch, figuratively speaking. Albeit a fairly uncomfortable sit-down in which my abdomen got sliced open.

Absolutely terrible, Dione. It seems maternal choice and considerations of maternal mental health just didn’t enter into the equation at all.

I'll be giving birth in a maternity clinic in France next year. The midwife said that the first thing they will do is to ask me whether I want an epidural. The choice is left to the patient since the moment she is admitted in the unit.
That is making me far more relaxed that any hypnobirth lessons, dim lights or a birth plan.

The midwife said that 95% of mums asked for epidurals. Such a relief I won't need to be begging for it.

Agreed. When I had my boy I had visions of a water birth, It was all on "my preferences". Didn't get anywhere near it and after being in labour from Sunday(not active I know before I get hammered) to the tuesday morning I couldn't give a rat's ass how they got him out. When I had the paperwork handed to me I was that out of it I was shouting and balling (whoops) but still managed it. Apparently according the current husband he was asked to sign the paperwork unless "she complies". Oh, and I was a forceps then knocked out to fix the damage.

I think that the fact that everyone is so different physically isn’t mentioned enough in this.

On breastfeeding, I fed my DCs quite easily. However, I was lucky to have a maternity nurse helping me to establish bf. she also made me express milk at different of day for 24 hours to see what my baseline milk production was. I was her second highest milk producer very (cow!) and she had worked for 20 years. She said that some women naturally just had much less milk. I was never “proud” to be able to breastfeed, I just felt lucky.

It must be the same with labour, some women just have easier births. To believe that one size fits all or that someone is a “failure” for failing to do something is just ridiculous. I wish women would support each other more.

an epidural can actually help a mom avoid a c-section, which is a very good thing

I think avoiding a Csection is a very good thing. I don’t know what is wrong with that statement specifically. And I had one, as I refused an instrumental birth! The recovery is a bitch :(

I think avoiding a Csection is a very good thing.

That’s entirely subjective. For some women - some of whom have taken the time to explain their thinking on this thread - it is their preferred method of giving birth.

Avoiding a C-section is a very good thing for you, from your perspective. For some women, for a variety of reasons, avoiding a vaginal birth is a very good thing. And we should support them in that regardless of our own experiences and preferences.

@JassyRadlett entirely agree. Found my recover from c section relatively straightforward, not “a bitch” at all!

Jassy I thought we were talking about women who intended on vaginal birth. Obviously an EMCS is not a good outcome in that situation (but better obviously than injury or death).

I’m not a believer in natural birth at all costs, as I refused to consent to instrumental birth as I perceived it was riskier than c-section.

But if you’ve chosen ELCS than all this doesn’t apply to you, and the advice won’t fit your situation.

Piglet Hooray for you. You are not me, however. I was in constant pain and still feel occasional discomfort around the scar, over a year later. My core strength will never be the same I fear.