to detest those who think they are superior beings because they were lucky enough to have a natural birth

[Reallytired]

My son was born naturally, but my second is currently stuck in a transverse position. I am trying everything to get bump to turn, but if it is not sucessful its looks like I will have to have a c-section. In many ways I feel disappointed if I have to have a c-section, but I will still feel proud of myself.

If you go into labour with a transverse lie then there is very little to you can do to deliver naturally. It does not matter how much whale music or however many doulas or independent midwives you employ. My waters broke at 36 weeks last time so this is why am a little concerned. The local hospital is not prepared to try and turn the baby before 38/39 weeks.

I know that it is possible to a have a vaginal breech birth, but with a transverse presentation, its just not going to happen.

I am still hoping bump will turn, but the experience is making realise that a lot in childbirth is complete and utter luck. You can try everything suggested on the internet, but there are times when the baby is stubborn.

You're not kidding, Pruni. He's fucking amazing. dd2 owes the sanity and health of her parents in no small part to him.

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I guess also what I'm trying to say is that good doctors often don't over-medicalise and control what's happening - MW was great, but maybe being a wee bit cautious - he came in and just made us all believe it was really going to happen, and that there weren't going to be any interventions.

(After dd2 was born, he and the midwife were discussing who was going to be named as having delivered her, as it really was a joint effort - he laughed and said - "You! I'm an obstetrician. We don't do normal deliveries" - he was slumming it just for us!>

Some women are lucky enough to have a good natural birth; some have a horrendous natural birth. Some women are lucky enough to have a good CS; others have a vile CS. C'est la vie.

Some women are bloody heroes in how they handle their birth experiences. I wasn't one of them. But I'm prepared to doff my cap to those who were. And if some women smugly consider themselves heroes when, in fact, they were just lucky, then I'm happy to just smile and nod. Whatever gets us all though is fine by me.

I think the threads that bothered me were the ones that suggested that pain was all about fear - do we have Michel Odent to thank for that? - and it was a bit like, well, you clearly weren't calm and "into" the experience enough, blah blah. And you know the rational side of you that says well, that's just fucking nonsense - sometimes it gets a bit over-ridden by the fragile, overwhelmed side of you that just wants to "get it right" however briefly, even if you know there ISN'T a right.

I'm tired - apols if that make No Sense.

"standanddeliver out of interest how do you define an "unnecessary" c-section?"

Ten years ago we would have laughed if anyone had told us that the c-section rate would go up by yet another 5% before our children had even finished primary school.

There are avoidable c-sections being done (rather than unnecessary perhaps - one example of this is with induction for post dates primips: in some hospitals up to 50% of post date inductions for first time mums are ending in theatre. These c-sections become necessary after a mother has been through 2 or 3 days of augmentation and intervention but they may well have been avoidable had the mum been counselled and advised thoroughly about the risks and benefits of induction)

In the US it's nearly 1 in 3 pregnancies which are ending in surgical birth.

I'm sure each one of those mothers has a special reason for needing or wanting a c-section, but in my opinion that rate is too high. It's not healthy for women, babies or the health care system.

"beleive me you really won't be lying on your death bed thinking "bugger I wish I'd just managed with gas and air"."

It's got nothing to do with competitive birthing. I will probably remember the night my second children was born (an unmedicated birth at home), when I'm on my death bed. It was the best night of my life (so far). I was ecstatic. I've never felt so alive or so strong before or since. The joy and memories of my first birth were sadly spoiled by the fact I was completely stoned on opiates at the time - I can scarcely remember the details. I could have got away without the drugs - if I'd been cared for differently. I know that now (having had an even longer and more difficult labour with my third child which was unmedicated but with brilliant support).

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But I am proud of myself for delivering two very big babies vaginally with no pain relief. I KNOW it was largely down to luck - but am I not allowed just a little smugness?

Competitive parenting is something to avoid. I always avoided it. I avoided it 24 years ago by having babies years before any of my contemporaries and always working full time so that I just wasn't meeting bored housewives with nothing better to think about than whether little Johnnie crawled sooner than her friend's boy and I avoided it by having much ebtter things to be interested in like my own children and my own career. Birth isn't a competition and people should try to avoid others who spend their times showing off about their children and births. Have about you those with a good dose of English self deprecation and modesty. Look for humble mothers who don't think they're the bee's knees and they will make better friends.

Yes, the idea of pain being a direct consequence of fear is quite odd, IMO. I don't dispute that being very very frightened can make pain a lot worse, but it would, surely, be at the least unusual to give birth to a baby which is considerably larger than anything you'd actually want to have up your vagina or down it or whatever and not feel any pain at all? I was pretty lucky (it didn't hurt that much, fairly fast labour, no intervention etc) but I still had a blinding moment of clarity just before DD arrived when I thought 'why the hell do people do this more than once?'

Obviously I know, now. They forget.

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I agree with Xenia.

2 of my 3 dc are IVF/ICSI.

They were all born by C/S.

My b/feeding skills were about as good as my conception and birthing skills.

However I have 3 gorgeous healthy children that I very nearly never had. When you've faced a life without children for many years all the above seems rather trivial.

Thankfully I haven't met many competitive parents but when I do I run for the hills with the rest of them.

I think somewhere on one of these birthing threads someone has posited the idea that yes, pain is a direct consequence of fear. But I may have got my threads slightly muddled due to wine intake, lateness of hour and ill child who will not stop coughing.

I've only read part of this thread and I am only responding to the OP, not to anyone else's post - but feel free to go ahead and flame me at the end, because I'm going to go against what a lot of you are saying and agree, at least to some degree, with the OP.

My DC's birth was quite a terrible experience, lasting three full days, with mucho intervention, and ending in a forceps delivery which caused horrific tearing and haemorrhaging. It took yonks for me to recover, both physically and emotionally. And I've found myself being judged by other women who assumed, and told me, that I must have done something wrong for things to turn out as they did.
For starters, I was given grief for having an epidural by someone who had her DC at home in 9 hours. Telling her that I had back labour made no impression - apparently I ought to have walked off the pain. Needing a pitocin drip was apparently also my failure, as I'd have done better walking to strengthen the contractions. Not being able to push my DC out (never mind that he was stuck and I pushed so hard I broke blood vessels in my cheeks, for over four hours), and needing him delivered with forceps, apparently meant that I was weak and should have been doing more to strengthen myself for the delivery. All this from women who, as the OP says, were lucky enough (personally I say they were blessed) to have normal vaginal deliveries in under a day, at home.

Getting over everything that happened to me was hard enough. I was shocked and horrified to be made to feel as though I had personally failed, or done something wrong, by these smug cows - it was nothing more or less than the luck of the draw, after all. I could have been in their shoes or they in mine.

So, yes, to some degree I agree with the OP, and despise these women who have no idea how lucky they were and judge where they have nowhere near enough knowledge to judge.

This is similar to anyone who breezed through breastfeeding judging someone who ended up formula-feeding because she couldn't breast-feed. It happens all the time.

I will say that most women are lovely about other women's births - but there are some who aren't, and their behaviour is despicable.

dd2's birth was made infinitely more frightening by the fact that my lovely consultant was in Lake Bloody Como at the time, hab... i just wanted him in the building, like a lucky charm.

I can single handidly blow the 'fear is the cause of pain' theory out of the water.

I was so so so looking forward to my birthing, not frightened at all. Welcomed every niggle. Felt safe secure and well looked after. Hurt like a right bugger.

Bit more fear 2nd time, fear of pain and fear of intervention fear of length of labour, fear of malpresentation, fear of fetal distress, fear of childcare arrangements for dd1, - 2 hours-ish and not really painfull. Most painfull bit pooing infact. It was some poo.

Possibly not the best evidence based conclusion but hey ho.

Op never to be seen again?

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Big fat occipito posterior both times. Both rotated once fully dilated and pushing. Or thereabouts. 20 hours difference in labour length too. Bonkers!

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I think a lot of it is to do with people being unable to see past their own experiences. Women who have had a very 'easy' relatively pain free non-traumatic and quick (say, 4 hour labour) will struggle to understand how someone else feels having been in labour for 24 hrs and ending up needing an epidural or forceps delivery with associated pain and recovery times etc. Because it is outside their own experience they just don't 'get it' and can't understand it.

Similarly it's like people who breastfeed really easily not being able to relate to people (like me) who spent the first 12 wks of breastfeeding with bleeding, cracked nipples hanging off and sobbing in agony through feeds. To my friends who breastfed easily and painlessly I was obviously doing it 'wrong'. According to all the countless m/w, h/v, counsellors and b/f specialists I was doing it totally right. I was just unlucky and had very sensitive skin.

And I'm not sure how 'lucky' it is to have a 'natural birth' actually - I have a couple of close friends who would probably have recovered a lot quicker postnatally (and possibly have avoided PND) if they had had an elective section instead of the horrible, damaging and frightening birth experiences they actually ended up with. Don't think anyone particularly feels superior about this do they?

I think it is a bit unreasonable to 'detest', don't I think it's unreasonable to feel angry and upset that you have got this to deal with. We all want the best births that we can, for us and for our babies. After my son's icky medical, forceps-drugfest of a birth, I used to feel jealous of people who had these amazing natural births - possibly because it made me feel that i had let my son down. But, then my DD's birth was totally different. Natural, painless, drug-free home birth. That only happened because I didn't have any medical issues and because I hired an amazing doula - purely because I didn't want a repeat of DS's birth. Luck has a allot to do with it, but so does experience, so does the general pattern of life...
If DS's birth had been your average, painful yet bearable hospital birth I would never have gone to lengths of having a homebirth and hiring a doula next time around.My daughter was born with imperforate anus after her amazing homebirth. If she had been born in a hospital, they would have picked up on it much more quickly and whisked her away onto a neonatal ward. I would have been able to breastfeed her until they had done tests on her. She would have had a canula stuck in her wrist and been starved for days. As it was, it was missed. She slept next to me and breastfed for three blissful days. Because of this 'test drive' of her digestive system her operations could be delayed for three months until she put on weight and we had time to enjoy her without having to deal with stoma bags and so on. So now I feel so grateful for my son's birth. Not least for the insight into birth it gave me.

Sorry for long, slightly irrelevant post. Good luck, keep positive x

sorry, that reads a bit rubbish and makes it sound like she only fed for three days...she is still breastfeeding now and has had her three ops, all of which seem to have gone OK.

Like the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose, I think how your uterus/body responds to labour is written in the genes. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all had uber-long labours. "But I'm an athlete" and I thought I had a trick up my sleeve and could out-run that past, as I was doing all the yoga, aerobics, walking, birth positions business. I ended up with long labour, long pushing, syntos. (sp?) drip, epidural, ventouse. The works. I was damn proud of the 4 cm in 48 hours that I got without pain relief, and I was damn proud to have given up my ardent desire to a hippie birth in favour of getting my child out.

I would rename 'luck' as 'genes.' And in ALL births (vaginal, c-section, pain relief, none) it is hard work and a job well done. The point is a BABY -- parents make decision as to how they are going to go about getting them out. Finito. No one ought to feel or be made to feel that they have failed. How silly.

MIL had both DSs without any pain relief. I heard that a lot, before and after I gave birth. Smug and annoying. A woman I chatted with in the HV waiting room put it down to the fact that I wasn't in the right aerobics class. So like samestuff, I've seen the 'superior' thing.

Flipside, it is okay to be proud of your birth, and even proud of a uterus that performed splendidly... I do envy you! Hopefully everyone will be respectful about it, though.

Competitive parenting is weird. Just say no. Judging stinks.

Re: the fear and pain link - while I wouldnt say pain is a direct consequence of fear, it seems common sense to acknowledge that fear can heighten pain. Also, if you are fearful, your overall experience is going to be less positive.

What I find fascinating about my own births, is that the one which was most painful (first and biggest dc, born naturally) was also, for me, the 'best' birth experience. Why? Because I was supported by an excellent midwife, I wasn't in a hospital, and I felt calm and empowered and allowed to labour at my own pace. Whenever I started to doubt that I could do it, my midwife encouraged me. In contrast, my third birth in hospital was fairly traumatic, not so much because of the pain (second vaginal birth, smaller baby and shorter labour) but because I didn;t want to be in hospital, and felt disempowered and out of control.