To think our expectations of childbirth are too high?

[RimmersLoveMonster]

Just that really. It’s inherently agonisingly painful and dangerous, but a lot of posters seem to be surprised that it is and feel traumatised afterwards. I think our expectations around birth are unrealistic and that women are being sold a fantasy by ‘positive birth’ companies and pictures of pools with twinkly lights etc. This then leads to disappointment when their experience doesn’t go that way. AIBU?

Maybe to an extent but I think there will always be an element of surprise behind HOW painful it actually is. I was expecting it to be bad, but it was worse.

during the 9 months : advice on how not to put on unecessary weight.
a-the food. 4 to 5 stars, proper food, not canteen.
b- you are cleaned ie washed twice a day. In your bed. For a vaginal delivery, I am not even getting started with c section. You will have to walk around the bed though. It's good for you but no more and assisted. You don't leave your bed until day 3.
c- usually no nore then 2 women per room
d- all toiletries for free
e- water to wee on all toilets
f-visit of the obgyn every morning
g-perineal exercices for free 20 sessions for each birth.
h- you are shown how to wash your baby and to take care of it the first around.
i- 3 to 5 days in hospital is standard.

French women go back to work after 3 to 6 months, usually so if you start with a nightmare and ptsd or a body half exploded that has not recovered it will not work. You won't be able to come back. The free year at home hides away a lot of things from what I see in the UK.

And people are the same, I see the same dedication on both sides. There is no money, people are run down. Midwives do the job of 10 people instead of their own and they don't have staff to do the work that they should not be doing given their level of training. I've said it. I hold my peace. We worship our midwives in France.

I had a great birthing experience. Got looked after. Would happily do it all again 🥰

And when you go back home the midwife comes to see you a couple of days in a row to take care of you (YOU, not the baby). Not just once. There is also someone coming for the baby.
That was the olden days. Ask me how do you not get PND without asking me.

I think women are so used to being able to control every aspect of their lives that they can't deal with it when they have a Labour/delivery that is not how they planned/expected. A birth plan is just a list of wishes that a pregnant mother would like to happen during her Labour and delivery but once circumstances take over the actual reality may be very far away from that! They then feel cheated and traumatised. We also have a society today that is so sanitised from the gritty reality of normal bodily functions such as Labour ( death being another bodily process that we don't have to cope with to much in the 21st century) that women don't expect the harsh reality of actually experiencing it! Finally and this one will probably go down like a bowl of cold sick women today can be very mollycoddled and more than a bit precious about pregnancy and Labour in general! They are treated as though they are " special" from the first minute of pregnancy and struggle when the harsh reality kicks in both during Labour, delivery and in the first few months of a child's life!

They then feel cheated and traumatised.
No I felt I had been treated appallingly and given birth in an entirely inappropriate and dangerous place. To say the care was “not mollycoddling” is utterly minimising and wrong. How stupidly blinkered you are to express such twaddle. Women and babies have died due to poor care in rather large numbers.

I've had 4 kids. The first birth was the stuff of nightmare - bullying/lying/coercion from midwives ending up in cascade of intervention. The antenatal care was poor - no movements for 24 hours at 28 weeks was met with "I suppose it's viable so I could send you for monitoring" and postnatally my milk didn't come in for 7 days and no one gave a hoot.

Then I had an independent midwife who gave me the care the NHS should be giving - and which would cost them far less financially and women far less emotionally. One woman one midwife. Didn't need a birth plan because she knew what I wanted after frequent antenatal visits and that she would be there. I trusted her to do the right thing. Birth was the whole I Am Woman thing and my milk came in 1-2 days because she was there instead of me being left alone.

One of the IM births was a little tricky and didn't progress - exactly the same as my crappy hospital one but instead of piling on the pressure to me she quietly an ambulance on stand by and then got to supporting me and using her 30 years of experience to safely get him out.

It’s ages ago now, but I do remember reading that how much pain you felt would depend on your preparation (breathing etc.) and your ‘attitude’ to labour.

I had the Sheila Kitzinger handbook - she was one of the lucky ones who just pop them out with very little pain, and evidently reasoned that with proper preparation most of us could do the same.
So it was basically your own fault if things didn’t go to the ideal plan. 🤬

I think women are so used to being able to control every aspect of their lives
🤣🤣 Only a few very privileged and wealthy women can even get close to this. 99.99% of women cannot control every aspect of their lives. So how can we be so used to something we do not have?

Im 4 months pregnant and the thought of giving birth in an NHS hospital is keeping me awake at night.

If accessing my GP over the last 4 months is anything to go by I'm screwed. The receptionist told me to call my midwife, when I explained I had and the midwife said to call the GP for a prescription, the receptionist said 'oh for goodness sake cant you just go to the pharmacy?'

For antibiotics? Yes of course I can, why hadnt I tried that before

No I think that the opposite is true. Lots of things are inherently painful. Breaking a bone, having a tooth removed, dying of cancer etc.

The difference is people aren’t expected to just put up with other types of pain. Research is done into how to best manage it, and people are actively made as comfortable as possible.

For childbirth, on the other hand, we’re celebrated for refusing pain relief and medical intervention as if not breathing peacefully through the pain is a moral failing. It’s sexist bullshit.

I think @AutumnScream is referring to actual studies done where all the women were low risk and they followed a homebirth cohort vs a hospital birth cohort. They even made sure to keep the started at home but transferred to hospital as part of the homebirth cohort.

Yanbu. I agree there is a lot of expectation of the birth, and the birth rather than the baby becomes the "main event" in itself. There is so much focus on it, and not what happens after. Certainly this was my experience of my NCT course, and there are lots of other service providers cashing in on the same.

That said, women deserve good care to be respected in their birth choices. A lot of the women I know who have experienced bad feelings around their birth have so because, at least in part, they have been ignored and/or received bad care. Sometimes medically bad, but often just poor communication and being ignored or spoken down to.

I loved both my births - but oddly had a better experience of my heavily medicalised first birth with inducation lots of intervention which resulted in me being quite unwell afterwards, than my biologically "perfect" second birth (short, effective labour, limited pain releif, no real medical intervention, baby out in one - involuntary! - push). I couldn't say why.

The last time I said this I had my ear chewed off! I have given birth twice, the pain was nothing, I've had worse back ache from moving furniture. I was told that I was not in labour because I had nothing apart from mild back ache. No pain relief needed. I know that labour can be excruciating, the problem is that every body, every birth is different, I went into it knowing it could be bad and was pleasantly surprised. I think chucking birth plans out of the window would be a good place to start, no amount of soothing music will help if it is painful. It's best to accept it can hurt and have the pain relief if needed. And it's not a competition.

Just my 2 cents worth I think there is too much focus on making a birth plan. And then women feel unhappy/failure/traumatised that things didn’t go to plan. I made a more general list, indicating preferred options and things I may like. I think this lessened any feelings of the birth not being “right” or “failing to follow the plan”

@ChillysWaterBottle
But I see the tiresome bingo card phrases are already out: 'cascade of interventions' 'over medicalised' etc. I do think that whole narrative that runs through a lot of pregnancy prep is damaging and dangerous. In our NCT the leader told us we could feel smug listening to the other women scream as they had 'lost control', unlike us who had done our prep, so wouldn't lose control. Such a horrible ideology and one that hides a nasty strain of misogyny beneath a facade of 'female empowerment'. The issue isn't the 'medicalisation' of birth, but inadequate and poor quality medical care.

Over-medicalisation is a type of poor quality medical care imho. It’s pushing unnecessary interventions on vulnerable women while ignoring consent or misinforming them to get consent. I was with a friend for her first labour and because she wasn’t ‘dilating fast enough’ had been put on pitocin to speed things up*, the midwife then during a vaginal dilation exam tried to stretch her crevix manually, and actually tore my friends cervix. She said nothing, she did not ask,she just did it. I knew she had because when she withdrew her hand, I could see very dark blood on there that I knew was not normal at all. The other midwife standing next to me saw this too and I could feel her gasp and stiffen. The red-handed midwife just wiped her gloved hands on my friends hospital gown and shot a “say nothing” look to the other midwife.

And they did say nothing, and my friends cervix never healed. Six months after the birth(which got much worse, but I’m cutting a long story short), she was in constant excruciating pain previously written off as “oh it’s normal…”
She was finally examined and her cervix could not be repaired due to the scar tissue and such. She was made infertile by that midwife who did an unnecessary medical intervention without consent.

*this baffled me as she’d only been in labour for 4hrs.

women today can be very mollycoddled and more than a bit precious about pregnancy and Labour in general!
The midwife performing my third sweep seriously assaulted me and left me with severe PTSD that dramatically impacted my labour, recovery and mental health to this day. I don’t think I’m being “precious” about what happened in that room. And postnatally once discharged back to your GP women aren’t remotely mollycoddled: once the baby arrives, women are treated like nothing more than the meat sack that got the baby here. Aftercare for mental and physical health, from C-section wound infections to tears, is shocking.

I should say though that every other medical professional I dealt with during labour and birth was exemplary and went above and beyond to compensate for my assault, my birth plan was adhered to and, while postnatal wards remain their own special hell, that was more to do with trauma and people’s husbands than the care I received there. (Aside from one nazi midwife who stood over me barking “Delatch; again! Delatch; again!” as her form of breastfeeding tutorial.)

My beef is more with dishonest hypnobirthing courses, dishonest antenatal classes with their essential oil bullshit, midwives who try to dissuade you from proper drugs in favour of sniffing some frankincense on a cotton wool ball, and women who had the luck of easy births crediting such to their preparation, investment and determination instead of sheer dumb luck. It is so insulting.

I had a traumatic first birth with DD, forceps, floppy baby who needed to be resuscitated outside the room, appalling after csre, birth trauma appointment. Did not fit the NCT portrait which had been painted at all.
Took my 5 years to have another baby but I went into that birth with a very much What will be will be, no birth plan ( rather preferences which I was happy to sway from if necessary ) and had a wonderful healing experience.

Then DC3 came along via emergency section under general at 34 weeks 😁

Women suffer far more then necessary because of a lack of respect for consent and aftercare then from the positive birth experience ‘propaganda’. Nearly every traumatic experience I read about it was because women giving birth are not listened to, disrespected and sometimes even abused and violated.

@luxxlisbon
All this bullshit rhetoric around the ‘over medicalisation’ of childbirth is dangerous too. Why are we choosing to reject modern medicine in childbirth??

Protesting against over-medicalisation isn’t rejecting modern medicine in childbirth. It’s not “bullshit” at all. It’s pointing out that for many women the medical staff will do completely unnecessary medical interventions that carry risk of harm to the mother and/or baby and then when that risk happens, another intervention is needed.

What happened to my sister is an example of this. My sister’s midwife started to tug on the umbilical cord to “encourage” her placenta to come when she should have left it alone. But no, she did an unnecessary and risky medical intervention that then resulted in the known risks of a) haemorrhage and my sister needing 10 pints of blood and almost dying and b) a piece of the placenta broke off and she then needed a painful D&C to clear it or risk a uterine infection and death by sepsis. D&Cs also affect fertility as well, luckily my sister was still able to have another DC, but that’s not the case for all women.

If that midwife had not been in a hurry, my sis could have given the baby a first breastfeed kicking off uterine contractions and then the placenta would have come on it’s own. But because the placenta hadn’t arrived the textbook ten minutes after the baby had, the midwife decided to risk my sisters life instead of popping baby to breast and waiting five minutes.

Many midwives and OB/GYNs have zero respect for our bodies and our lives. They just want to get the birth done and dusted as fast as possible and the consequences be dammed. All the while we are told that complaining about birth injuries and psychological trauma means we have unrealistic expectations, are Molly-coddled and selfish because healthy baby is all that matters.

Well I expected it to be horrendous and was happy to find it not as bad as I expected at all

as my dad would say always expect the worst and anything else is a bonus 😂

on a serious note I do think there is to much focus on it being perfect and then people seem disappointed when it doesn’t go that way for example they end up having a c section

I couldn’t have cared less when I had my dc other than a healthy baby and me being in as minimal pain as possible by accepting whatever drugs I would be offered that was essentially my birth plan though I wrote even less words on the paper than that , I was quite young though and didn’t really know any other mums etc so was very much just in the get on with it mindset

I think preparation and informing yourself can go a long way to making the natural physiological aspects of birth less psychologically traumatic. But it doesn’t improve your chances of getting a “good birth” in terms of what actually happens during the birth. That is all a lottery of luck. It might make you more able to make informed choices during birth and stand up to awful midwives, but I doubt it because once in active labour myself and every other mum I’ve talked to about this you are almost in body, out of body at times and it’s so easy to find things being done to you that you had specifically told the staff were a flat no, do not do and your refusal to consent is being wilfully ignored and yet you are too out of it and focussed on the labouring that you’re unable to object or physically fight them off.

Even reading these its clear that the issues are from healthcare failures rather than birth itself being inherently the worst possible thing you could do.

Women are over medicalized and failed. Women arent respected in labour. Women do often get told to do things in labour not realising they have a choice to say no they think because the midwife has told them then they must comply.

That doesn't stop things going wrong. It doesn't stop a breech baby or a cord prolapse or lack of oxygen or progression. Of course things can go wrong and when they do its absolutely the most serious thing that could go wrong.

However i do think sometimes womens trauma is being normalized, we see it on tv all the time, lay on your back and scream covered in blood until your rushed in for forceps or a C-section. Im 25 weeks and am constantly hearing jokes about how im going to need a c section because my dp is 6'5 and how this baby will destroy me.

I think a lot of women look down on the mention of hypnobirthing because they either have experience of weird none nhs approved hippy courses that dont acknowledge what can go wrong and how to deal with it, and they see it as calling them a failure.

Studies show that a lot of things are proven to help when in labour, like exercise, good birth positions, being relaxed. That doesn't mean some women wont experience something out of her control. That doesn't make the woman a failure for needing intervention. Maybe if this was drilled into society that even if you need a c section or ventouse or forceps that you can be informed, make it as relaxed as possible, have adequate pain relief and medical staff listening to you.

I think the narrative of birth is agony you might die or you absolutely will have interventions and end up with ptsd and post natal depression and life long birth injuries and an injured child and thats just the way it is, is far more dangerous than hypnobirthing or belittling and getting angry at women who did have easy enjoyable births. Because even on this thread any woman who enjoyed her birth is belittled with good for you do you want a medal?!

👏👏

Even reading these its clear that the issues are from healthcare failures rather than birth itself being inherently the worst possible thing you could do

Um no. The outcomes for women in countries, or at times of history, who do not have access to proper medical health care are poor. High maternal death rates, high child mortality. High complications afterwards with dreadful impacts. Did you know there are charities in some countries which provides homes for women who are permanently kicked out by their families after developing incontinence after childbirth?
There was an extremely popular book in the 18th century in England which provided guidance to women on how to write a letter for their unborn child, in case they died in childbirth, giving them all the advice they would have given them if they survived. I suspect few of us know a woman who has died in childhood. Almost certainly all of us would of if we had lived before modern obstetrics, or we’d have died ourselves.

Birth has always been hazardous for women due to the size of our babies brains. Pressures on NHS services mean there’s a lot of poor practice. But we are still better off having these services than nothing at all.