One Born Every Minute The Truth

[midwifeVH]

midwives and women have started a FaceBook page to try and redress the balance and give true information to women. The Popular TV series is watched by thousands of women every week and the stories of the couple involved are compelling and lovely to hear. What is not good however is that women are being shown outdated and non-evidence based practices. They are being given false and sometimes frightening information by the show. Childbirth does not have to be like that and the dedicated writers on the page are committed to making things better for women having babies....please come and like our page

www.facebook.com/OneBornEveryMinuteTheTruth?ref=tn_tnmn

I don't like the obem the truth fb page. I do wonder how much of it is independent midwives (whom have links to their private practice page on fb ) to their making out how fab they are as they don't have the constraints of working on a big delivery suite, and the policies that goes with it. There are obviously shit midwives out there whether they are NHS or indys. What we see on tv is just minutes worth of labour. Not a true representation surely of what can or has happened.

Childbirth without modern effective pain relief- really is traumatically painful. It isn't fear that causes women to suffer pain - that is just propaganda by the natural lobby and very cruel because it makes women feel bad when things go wrong.

Did anyone watch the lovely birth on US OBEM by the midwife? Totally peaceful, joyful, no groaning in pain or anything. Was it natural? Not a bit - spot the epidural line in her back!

I think the problem is that OBEM by showing the reality is scaring the natural birth believers. It is making them feel they are losing control of the agenda. Actually, for women, that is a good thing. Some women do have relatively painless births, good for them - they are lucky.

A documentary is a documentary. Yes, of course they will have edited the highlights but what they recorded really happened. They didn't rehearse it.

The natural birth lobby need to open their eyes to reality.

But surely it's less about "thou shalt not have pain relief" and more about women understanding how their bodies work in labour. Trouble is nobody takes the time any more to inform women about labour and unless you are lucky enough to afford NCT classes then programmes like this are very influential.

All the research internationally about labour show that women in upright positions who are mobile cope better and have less complications. OBEM does not reflect this research though.
On the other hand we have very short staffed labour wards where women often feel abandoned and not surprisingly end up with lots of intervention.

As a midwife I was privileged to be part of many birth-days and saw every method of pain relief used with excellent effect. Some of these confined women to the bed and some did not. A higher number of those confined to The bed ended up with instrumental deliveries. This is not wrong and most women were happy with the outcome. It doesn't mean we should ignore the research though and women deserve to know the risks and benefits.

OBEM is a reality TV show. It shows reality. Yes, it is edited - but you can't say it isn't THE TRUTH. It is.

Yes, more women confided to bed flat on their back have instrumental deliveries but you don't have to be flat on your back with an epidural - unfortunately that is NHS practice. France has over double the epidural rate of uk and there is no difference in the instrumental delivery rates.

But this programme shouldn't be the truth, I think that's what the FB page is trying to say. There are better and more well researched positions to adopt in labour.

With the advent of mobile epidurals it's much better, and flat on your back should be a thing of the past.

Angela Horn's home birth site has excellent info about labour and maximising the chances of an uncomplicated birth. If this research was put into practice more women and babies would benefit.

It would not have helped me with DS who was huge and a failed induction despite being upright, sometimes things do go wrong but they go wrong far less when the right support is given. Fat chance of that though with the current shortage of midwives.

Codandchips sorry to hear what happened but why does it take less midwives to look after a woman who is flat on her back than one who is upright and you can be upright with a modern epidural.

So its not a shortage of midwives, its the training that is the problem.

Just as an aside, there aren't film crews in with the labouring / delivering woman - al births are filmed via remotely operated cameras.

I went to university where OBEM is being filmed and as a consequence have a number of friends living there who have given birth in that hospital. They tell me that unit is EXTREMELY pro-active birth and my friends there say most women in that hospital would have a lot of active labour. I heard from one of them that the supervisor of midwives told her they had systematically edited this out, and chose not to show some of the filmed births that involved women birthing standing up or with no pain relief. In particular, there are births where only key moments of exhaustion and pain are shown and hours and hours of the woman bouncing up and down the halls on birthing balls has been omitted.

It's not the truth really, definitely not.. but nor is it true that this particular unit desperately conspires to keep women on their back. It's just that women in pain and fear makes better telly than women managing labour, or at least that's what the producers think... .

"onebirthplaneveryminute* " It's not the truth really, definitely not.."

But it is SOME of the truth...none of those women are acting..

Yes, but we have virtually NO context for their births or what has been said to them over the period of their labours. If you see a minute out of a six hour period of time where a woman is lying down and screaming you don't know how many times they've been encouraged to move or what they have done. If the bit where a midwife suggests a different position and the woman says: "nah, grand on my back here love", why assume that it's the HOSPITAL dictating the position and not the woman? There are 5000 births on that uit annually, apparently. There will be 28 births in the series. It is not a representational sample.

If you saw me this second, I look like a lazy couch potato as I am sitting on my arse eating sweets and typing online. My posture is bloody shocking, I am slumped here like a fool. I have probably walked about 7 miles today and I spend most of my time paying huge amounts of attention to my posture sitting on the floor on yoga blocks. To combine this with another example, we also watch a maximum of about 1 hours television here a day. Often it's a lot less as we won't turn on the television at all.

If you filmed my evening in 10 minutes and showed 9 minutes with the television on in the background, you might very well think all I had done today was sitting around slumped eating sweets watching television. I'm not acting right this minute either. My posture IS shocking, I AM eating crappy sweets and I could be more active. It's ust not representative of my activity levels, posture or diet today.

If the bit where a midwife suggests a different position and the woman says: "nah, grand on my back here love" is omitted - sorry.

Not all the truth, but for the minutes shown, those minutes were real and what was filmed happened.

The camera can be edited but it doesn't actually lie.

You missed my point. Anyway, it seems arrogant in the extreme to me to judge professional practices on edited video where we have no idea of the woman's input into the decision eg to lie on her back or her medical or care history, her or the baby's vitals etc.

France encourages many women to have an epidural posed in case it's needed. In some hospitals that is virtually routine but the majority use minuscule amounts is drugs which can be turned up as needed and the woman can remain mobile if she wishes and sit up rather than lie back etc.

I had a long discussion about why I didn't want a needle in my spine 'just in case'. Also epidural is the standard pain relief. G&A isn't always available and morphine is rare. So making those comparisons isn't as straightforward as it would seem.

OBEM shows what makes good TV. They know what gives them good ratings. Controversy like this helps that. They might have 1 episode which is fuzzy and feel good but the majority is going to be edge of your seats, nail biting stuff which is doubly scary because it real people's lives.

I have had 5 births. The programme is very true to life except often you will not have midwives around and film makers cannot film 10 hours with nothing much happening adn 10 hours with nothing much happening can often be part of labour.

The programme also shows the reality that just as it seems unbearable a lot of us are about to give birth anyway so ends up being tolerable just with gas and air.

What I find most amazing about the programme is how fat everyone is including NHS staff and how much junk food they eat. That is so sad. Why can't we go back to how we ate? This will be the first generation with worse health than its parents because of obesity.

Mumsnet scares the shit out of me far more than OBEM when it comes to childbirth

The births on OBEM look look pretty painless to how I remember mine! I did a hypnobirthing class when I was pregnant and wanted a nice active water birth with no pain relief. I ended up being induced at 36 weeks as my waters broke but I wasn't in established labour. It was AGONY, after 7cm I couldn't move without being sick so not a chance of active labour from then. The births of my friends were equally traumatic not one of us managed our planned pain relief free water births!