to by annoyed at this NCT antenatal group

[birthstoryvisit]

Ok, I know I'm being unreasonable, that's why I've name changed, but I need to get this off my chest.

My DS is three months' old. Yesterday, I went back to my old NCT teacher's class to give my birth story (long, epidural, ventouse, lots of stiches). A friend with a wonderful birth (waterbirth, soft lights) went too.

They were horrid to me. Did not ask me one question about my labour (I thought that they'd want to know what some of the interventions were really like). Their basic attitude was "You failed to have a natural labour. I do not need to talk to you because my labour will not be like that. I am coming to classes and will have a lovely, natural birth with maybe a bit of gas and air. You are a failure." They spent their whole time asking my friend about her ante natal yoga and whether it was the raspberry leaf tea that ensured the quick labour.

This isn't just me. The first thing my friend said when we left was "goodness, they were a bit judgy weren't they?". I get it, they're first time mums and in denial, but am I being unreasonable to hope that at least one of them has a long labour and needs an epidural?(I know I am really ). I gave up part of my weekend to try and be helpful. Grrr, won't be doing that again.

tiktok OP isn't saying the text was judgung her.

judging

Bell -'But enough. To the original poster - we have at least brought the NCTers out in their true colours. Nope, they don't want you back in that class with any tales of difficult or traumatic natural births. And nor do they want me in there smiling and recommending my way.'

The OP was invited back to the class by the antenatal teacher - it was the parents-to-be she was AIBU about. Maybe the antenatal teacher was actually concerned how the class were approaching labour and birth and thought they would benefit from hearing two different stories.

As for you recommending 'your way' I am not sure that will have gone down well either in this actual group nor the effect it may have had on you. Elective sections certainly have their place but you have to respect that people may not agree with your choice just as you don't agree with vaginal birth.

freakname....my post wasn't about the OP, it was about the continual and repeated suggestion that NCT judges women who have sections and makes them feel guilty. So I posted the link to the factsheet about sections. If there is a teacher judging, then she's out of step with what the organisation is saying...that was my point.

sigh......deeeeep intake of breath.....

some of us are saying that whilst the NCT as an organisation would not judge (because it is a thing, an idea, a movement and not capable of judging) that indeed there are women involved within the NCT who are capable of judging and this is what the OP experienced.

Do you see the difference?

Whereas you and sabire just keep blatantly saying 'oh that could never happen in NCT'

But it could and obviously does judging (sorry) by some of the posts.

freakname: the organisation is made up of people, some of whom will, indeed, judge. Happily, the wider organisation - also made up of people who write the factsheets, who check the factsheets, who edit the factsheets, who train the teachers, who supervise the teachers, who observe the classes - does not.

I have never said 'this could never happen in NCT'. I am aware that people don't always do what they 'ought to' - but if they judge, or make people feel guilty, then they are out of step. Posts here have intimated that the entire ethos is one of judging. I linked to factsheets that show it is not.

Freak - again the OP experienced 'judging' by the class participants not the ANT and she herself has come up with some reasons why this might have happened.

There are likely to be individuals within the NCT (as in any such role involved in labour and birth) that are judgmental but it is also likely that sometimes new mums/mums-to-be are also oversensitive to perceived criticism/judging because of a fundamental desire to get things right particularly in those early months of motherhood. We all are affected by this as witnessed by the MN discussions!

For an NCT teacher to say to me as an invidual that I should have had support so that I could have made the decision to labour in a midwife-led unit was clearly plain silly. I'd have lost ds. And dd might well have lost me."

Did you tell her you wanted to birth in a midwife led unit, or did you tell her you wanted to birth in a consultant led unit? If it was the latter then she was plain silly to encourage you to do otherwise and should have been challenged.

On the other had not all women follow the advice of their obstetricians when it comes to choosing their birth venue - I didn't. I opted for a homebirth after a diagnosis of gestational diabetes and macrosomia. My choice. I was aware of the risks and benefits and I was grateful to be supported in my choice by my midwife, who also happened to be an NCT teacher.

If your teacher was trying to show support for your choices then she wasn't doing anything wrong. You either accept the concept of informed choice or you don't. You can't argue that it's ok in some circumstances and not in others, unless you're also going to argue that all women should be coerced into making the 'best' choices (ie those are proven to lead to the best possible outcomes, according to good quality scientific research)in pregnancy, birth and infant feeding, for their babies.

Would also want to add - do you think your teacher might have been joking about the biscuits? It's a sad thing for someone to admit about an organisation she supports, but biscuit jokes are very common currency in NCT circles.

freakname - you and lots of other people have generalised like mad about what they see as the 'typical' NCT attitude to birth. As someone who has observed many NCT (and NHS) antenatal classes, and is familiar with their training materials and their publications on a range of issues connected with pregnancy and birth written for parents, I would just say that it doesn't reflect what I have seen and read, or anything I know about the NCT's position on choices in childbirth. It's utter, utter bollocks to suggest that 'the NCT wants to guilt trip women for having c-sections' or as an organisation doesn't value the experiences and feelings of women who have difficult births and I'm sick to death of reading comments suggesting these things are true.

Yes there are inept teachers, just like there are bloody dreadful midwives. The difference is that when it comes to the NCT the very worst is taken asrepresentative of the whole, in a way that is never done with any other profession or organisation. Why is that? Why do people feel the need to grind the axe? I personally think the NCT gets scapegoated for the failings of the whole maternity system.

Maybe NCT teachers should open every course by saying 'Medical evidence suggests that the vast majority of you low risk mums would have normal labours and healthy babies if you stayed at home to give birth with an experienced midwife, but the reality is that most of you will go into hospital where you feel safer, and instead experience a cascade of interventions leading to surgery, serious perineal damage, assisted birth, infections, postnatal depression and breastfeeding difficulies. So we're going to spend most of the course talking about all the things that are likely to go wrong with your labours, and discussing how awful you're going to feel. We won't do any practical work designed to help you cope with your labour and reduce the likelyhood of these bad things happening in the first place, because that wouldn't leave enough time to discuss the many many ways your labour can go wrong. And better for-warned than for-armed I say!

As for you 'high risk' mums - just give up now and accept that you're going to give birth lying flat on your backs with your legs in stirrups. There's bugger all you can do to make it any better for yourself so why bother to even try!

Look, here's a picture of some c-section scars. Lets look at these, then I'll pass round some forceps and a couple of amnihooks for your to play with. Best familiarise yourself with them, as they're bound to end up in your vagina in the near future'

sabire Fri 16-Oct-09 18:30:38 Add a message | Report post | Contact poster

For an NCT teacher to say to me as an invidual that I should have had support so that I could have made the decision to labour in a midwife-led unit was clearly plain silly. I'd have lost ds. And dd might well have lost me."

Did you tell her you wanted to birth in a midwife led unit, or did you tell her you wanted to birth in a consultant led unit? If it was the latter then she was plain silly to encourage you to do otherwise and should have been challenged."

Sorry I thought I had told the whole story on this thread, but might have been an earlier thread. This was after the event, in fact the last time it came up must have been a couple of years later. I told the lady repeatedly that I was very happy with the care I had been given. She kept going on about how I should have counselling (despite my trying to explain that I was very happy with my birth experience even if it did involve one caesarian) and suggesting that if only I had had better advice and the full support of the NCT before birth I would have had the confidence of choosing to give birth in the midwife led unit. Considering that I was already ill enough to be in hospital when I went into labour, I somehow doubt that. I would have chained myself to the bed if they had tried to discharge me. (and yes, of course I had explained that).

My SIL had the same experience if someone jumping to conclusions about how she ought to be feeling, rather than asking her how she did feel- thought note that the NCT NOT to blame in any way for this one. Midwife rang her up after the birth, when she was over the moon with beautiful baby boy, to tell her she would want counselling to get over her feelings of failure. My SIL was somewhat non-plussed: she had produced the world's greatest miracle (still is a bit PFB about him 12 yrs later) and couldn't understand where the failure came in. But according to midwife, she must have these feelings because she'd had a caesarian. Again, what may be right in statistical terms didn't work on an individual level.

NO, the biscuits weren't a joke: it was part of the description of what a wonderful cared-for experience I would have had if I had only given birth in this unit. Nice- except that that option wasn't really on offer as far as I was concerned. Besides, there was nothing wrong with the bakewell tart I got from the NHS in the early stages of labour (yes, a bit naughty that, but it set me up nicely).

I was also told how much better informed I would have been if I had done the NCT course (which cost money we didn't have).

And Sabire, you keep suggesting that a high risk hospital birth will be flat on your back with stirrups. Isn't this rather generalising about the NHS? I never met anyone who had stirrups at our hospital; in fact, the midwives kept encouraging me to move around throughout my highly monitored birth. Not their fault that the fire alarm went off the moment they had helped me into the lovely warm bath...

"I never met anyone who had stirrups at our hospital"

I was exaggerating.

That said, the statistics for our hospital is 19% giving birth flat on their backs and/or in stirrups (yes - flat on their backs, not even in a reclining position......).

In my experience most people are pretty loyal to their birth choices/experience. I went around saying 'I would have died but for the doctors/forceps/monitoring I received during my first labour'. One NCT course and one baby later I learned how it's often possible to have even a high risk labour managed in such a way as to make an easy, safe birth more of a likelyhood......

Would want to add - I don't know about your birth centre, but as a high risk mum I would have felt as safe/safer in ours as on the labour ward. For a start you're closer to an operating theatre than you are when you're in the rooms at the far end of the labour ward! There are also swarms of doctors and paediatricians a few yards away and at the end of a bleep. My experience of 'care' on the labour ward involved a number of very harassed, pressured midwives trying to monitor too many women at once. At least in the birth centre you get one to one attention.

Hallelujah!!!! [evangelical emoticon]

At last some acknowledgement that there may be some members within the NCT who are biased in their agenda and therefore present a judgemental outlook towards some mothers who did not experience a 'natural' birth or made choices (that at the time was right for them and no one else can say otherwise) or had choices made for them by the medical staff which the NCT (it appears) is sometimes uncomfortable discussing!

sabire you've quoted me as generalising about
the typical NCT attitude to birth. Where? You must have me confused with someone else.

I repeat I do not have a personal grudge against the NCT and I have consistently tried to assert (based on OP's experience) that maybe some NCT members are a bit too fascist about their own views and conduct themselves in a way that the wider organisation would disapprove of.

You on the other hand have defended it at all costs without any regard to the details of OP's experience - in fact telling her how mistaken she was about their intentions and how she must have been over sensitive and interpreted it all wrong.

All you need to do is accept that maybe sometimes people (yes within the NCT!) may come across as a bit judgey and smug and whatever !!

[bangs head against brick wall emoticon]

oooo the stirrups? Might be wrong name for them. You know those things your ankles go into when they're about to do ventouse/forceps?

They flip up from the foot of the bed on either side?

Anyone know what they're called?

Bloody medieval if you ask me!

Um Freak you did notice it was the parents not the NCT teacher who were felt to be horrid? I know that technically they would be members to go to the classes, but essentially they were just expectant parents who probably didn't want to hear stories that they weren't comfortable wit (although as they had asked for the OP to visit them, they should have been nicer to her).

Sadly there are plenty of medieval things that go in in maternity units. In my second labour (VBAC) the midwife strapped me up to a monitoring unit and wouldn't let me get off the bed (ie lying down on my back). Not surprising really that I didn't progress at all. But then perhaps if I had gone to an NCT refresher course I would have remembered that the only intervention that I really really should have avoided was syntocin.

Unfortunately the one thing that you really can't control (except if you hire an independent midwife) is the quality and availability of your midwife. Good consistent care is the best predictor of a good birth experience (normal or not). But again it's not terribly helpful to say to women, well if you are lucky you will have good care and a positive (or at least not too awful) experience, but otherwise you are highly likely to feel scared, disempowered, out of control and generally awful during the birth and battered and bruised (emotionally and possibly physically) for many months afterwards. Most first time mothers feel scared enough prior to birth!

Thousands and thousands of women attend NCT antenatal classes. Most of them are not members of the NCT or involved in the organisation in any way at all.

LOL OMG Was there some kind of initiation when you joined?

Its nice that you all feel so passionately about this. I posted early on in the thread that I agreed with the OP, but I also agree that my experience as it was some time ago, may not be typical.

Sadly, the city I just left behind was divided by post code areas, and still has an active NCT in one particular area.

"Was there some kind of initiation when you joined?"

Ah yes, the NCT initiation ceremony...... a circle of posh women with big bottoms weaving yogurt together to the sound of whale music, followed by the ritual retelling of birth stories and the solemn offering of sacrificial lentils upon the alter of the great god Psychoprophylaxis.......

"Was there some kind of initiation when you joined?"

Ah yes, the NCT initiation ceremony...... a circle of posh women with big bottoms weaving yogurt together to the sound of whale music, followed by the ritual retelling of birth stories and the solemn offering of sacrificial lentils upon the alter of the great god Psychoprophylaxis....... grin

Ah, yes, you went to the same class as I did. Were you the pregnant lady in the large smock?

The back and forth about the relative risks of CS vs vaginal delivery misses a crucial point: a lot of women don't have a choice.

My mother had two CSs because she was a very tiny woman who needed to birth two large babies through a very tiny pelvis. As happens with breastfeeding etc, endlessly quoting research that indicates that having a CS will increase your risk of hysterectomy/stillbirth/whatever is unfair on the majority of women who have had to have a CS because of medical reasons/fatigue/exhaustion.

A friend who attended our local NCT class was horrified to be told that above all else, each couple should remember not to 'just' listen to the doctors and be 'forced' into interventions when their body was blueprinted with millions of years of reproductive experience that would keep them and their baby safe. Interesting, then, that a very tiny proportion of women die in childbirth in medicalised societies isn't it? My grandmother lost three babies at term because the majority of my family had the same tiny pelvises that my mother did. It wouldn't have happened to her today.. and yet I know many, many women who feel significantly post-natally depressed and that they didn't 'really' give birth because of the emphasis on having 'the best birth' (a pain-free vaginal delivery, of course!). The best birth is one with a healthy mum and baby at the end of it, end of story.

Also, research is a tricky, tricky thing. Interpreting research is tricky, even for professionals. 'Research has shown...' is the most overused phrase in the world. People who have significant research training would never use that phrase, as they recognise that research is always limited in scope and generalisability. Very robust research that a CS is wrong for some women will not make it wrong for all, and vice versa. Individual circumstances will skew the applicability of most research.. so arguing on flimsy statistics is misleading.

"Interesting, then, that a very tiny proportion of women die in childbirth in medicalised societies isn't it?"

I suggest you read Marjorie Tew's 'Safer Childbirth' for a different take on this issue. Her research suggested that improved living conditions, better nutrition and better antenatal and postnatal care were largely responsible for the huge decrease in childbirth mortality and morbidity seen in the middle half of the last century, not the move to more medicalised birth.

"The best birth is one with a healthy mum and baby at the end of it, end of story."

Agree - but the 'healthier mum' is usually the one who hasn't just had major surgery.

You can't ignore the fact that nearly one in ten women in the UK is like to end up having avoidable major surgery in order to deliver her baby. That can't be a good thing in anyone's book and we all ought to be concerned about it.

Re: research, it's a bit silly to say "Very robust research that a CS is wrong for some women will not make it wrong for all". Nobody is making a case that CS is wrong for all! The risks of surgery have to be weighed against the benefits, and this has to be done on an individual basis. All doctors know this this, as do midwives.

And everyone who has bothered to stop and think about it for more than ten minutes knows that research varies in quality and reliability. That doesn't mean to say that it is always unreliable or of little value when it comes to helping us make decisions about medical treatment.

This thread is littered with antagonistic posts, I have to agree with the earlier post of Edgarallenpoo that many of the posts seem to be fantastically poor taste to me too.

Anyway - excuse the thread hi-jack but in my opinion, the quoting of research left, right and centre does not seem to be informing the debate, so what the heck I'll join in and post a secondary link about raspberry tea - neither of the studies are statistically significant... due to the small sample sizes, if anyone does have anything better regarding recent research on raspberry leaf tea then I would be interested....

www.birth.com.au/Preparing-for-new-baby/Raspberry-leaf-during-pregnancy.aspx?p=3

sabire who decides (after the fact) that the surgery was 'avoidable'? For which women? As you say, the doctor/midwife will weigh up individual risk/benefit.. they make the decisions they do based on their interpretation of that.

I don't believe in handing all power and responsibility to doctors.. but I also don't believe in the notion of the 'informed consumer' who (without any medical training) assumes that they know better about the risks they are facing than the medical professionals caring for them because of a couple of potted extracts from research they've read online or in books with agendas that suit their perspective before they are actually faced with the decision. There's a balance to be struck here.. and NCT leaders in my particular area actively encouraging women ahead of their labour to discount what doctors are telling them is in their best interest seems extremely rash and dangerous.

I certainly don't want a section.. of course I want to spring up from my labour ready and physically able to mind my new baby! Who wouldn't? But some antenatal childbirth classes give women the idea that this is their choice and their choice alone to make: ssomething they can control with their actions and words. Those women invest a lot of time and energy into making that choice work for them (with no prior knowledge of labour, most with no additional medical info) and then when it doesn't work on the day and they have to go back from that choice, they feel they have 'failed'. Their whole preparation has been based on visualising one moment (that magic where the pain all stops and they hand you the baby) - that doesn't happen for them and they are traumatised by the fact.

I don't want that for myself, nor do I want to plague myself with considering all the 'additional risks' an unforeseen section might bring to a next pregnancy (which, in reality, many many women don't experience) based on snippets of research.

My point about research wasn't meant to be silly, spurious or patronising. I find that it's really hard to read and interpret well if you're not a researcher in that particular area (or have PhD or research training). I've only recently realised this since doing my own MSc and I'm flabbergasted by all the things I believed there was research for in my own field of work that I now realise to be very subjective (because before I did my MSc, I hadn't a clue babout statistics). I now know a tiny weeeny bit but I know that I'm stil not that fantastic at working out the true value of research even in my own narrow field, where there's actually hardly any of it anyway and it should be easier! So it's not that I'm saying I don't support ongoing research and/or people making themselves aware but I do feel it gets bandied about a lot e.g. increased risk of stillbirth following CS. That's a MASSIVE load for women who have had a CS (again, often not their choice!) to carry into a next pregnancy and I just wonder how significant a risk it truly is..

'I certainly don't want a section.. of course I want to spring up from my labour ready and physically able to mind my new baby! Who wouldn't? But some antenatal childbirth classes give women the idea that this is their choice and their choice alone to make: ssomething they can control with their actions and words. Those women invest a lot of time and energy into making that choice work for them (with no prior knowledge of labour, most with no additional medical info) and then when it doesn't work on the day and they have to go back from that choice, they feel they have 'failed'. Their whole preparation has been based on visualising one moment (that magic where the pain all stops and they hand you the baby) - that doesn't happen for them and they are traumatised by the fact.'

Hmmm once again is it the antenatal class or teacher that give mums-to-be this idea or is this idea already in their heads before they attend.....you have to consider both possibilities here and how to teach subjects to people who have already made their mind up. Someone earlier in this thread did not want to be questioned or judged about her choices because of the 'research' she had carried out....would she take kindly to being told that she may have not done the right research thus challenged on her beliefs?

FWIW the classes I have witnessed (and I realise that statistically the quantity is negligible for research purposes!) do not make out that straightforward births are achievable for ALL if you make your own choices,avoid all interventions, don't trust the medical profession, listen to whale music........

Instead they explain the realities of birth, provide information such as what happens in a section, types of drugs that might be used (and their effects) and stages of labour. Most parents there want a straightforward birth and are there to be informed but they need to be open minded and prepared to accept that the class is for the whole of the group (unless they book a one-to-one).