Childbirth- inherently risky or inherently safe? Painful or not?

[WhatTheHellJustHappened]

My friend recently made the fatal mistake of saying in the company of some female colleagues that childbirth was the most painful, horrifying thing she had experienced. An argument ensued and majority of the ladies there believed it was wrong to call childbirth risky or painful. They said they pitied women who looked at such a beautiful and empowering experience in such a negative manner. They said that even sitting on a lawn was risky but sensible people didn't spend time fretting over it. My friend asked me later "When did it become a crime to call childbirth painful or risky? ".
While I personally agree that childbirth can be very empowering and rewarding, I also do agree that it is painful and potentially risky.

What are you views? Do you think childbirth is painful? Do you think it is inherently risky or safe?

Garlic - You can't be guaranteed an epidural. They don't see it as a basic human right because they think that as it is natural the pain is tolerable (a load of bollocks imo). I think that actually what most people don't realise is that it depends so much upon the mother's physiology and the baby's position (which actually mostly can't be helped).

I was told that I would be able to get an epidural within 30 minutes of asking (I was assured that my state of the art, NHS teaching hospital was extremely competent). The advice has obviously been modified to be more realistic - I had to wait an hour first DS and second I couldn't have one because I was stuck in a side room of the hospital (they were seriously negligent - another story altogether).

I get really upset when I hear people say that labour is not painful because for most people it bloody well is. I am sure that some of the reason why people get depressed is because of a lack of sympathy and the assumption that a woman is whining when there is nothing wrong.

Sorry - were the women in the OP anything to actually do with the NCT?

No?

Everyone's experience is different. Mine was extremely painful and has left me with long term health problems, but I'm happy to say DD was absolutely fine.

Beautiful? Empowering? (hate that word - I find it patronising) Maybe, but I mean come on people, I did a poo while I was trying to push dd out - didn't feel especially beautiful or empowered at that point!

I'd call it a visceral, intense and totally rewarding experience, and the pain was all part of that.

Labour is horribly painful for many if not most.

But most women are are not traumatised by experiencing this pain if they have good, responsive care.

Overall easy access to epidurals is not associated with higher levels of satisfaction with childbirth in the UK.

Good care and a good outcome are.

I'm unsure as to why a real, whole, if small, person passing through your actual pelvis and out of your body for hours and hours is deemed to be something that shouldn't hurt.

Yeah, it hurt. It hurt like fuck. Especially the two hours of fruitless pushing and the episiotomy. That hurt quite a lot, especially after the local anaesthetic wore off.

It was also an incredible, mindblowing and wonderful experience, which resulted in my beautiful son arriving on the planet, but, and I may have already said this, it really did hurt. For ages. And the attendant fear, loss of dignity and feeling of being quite close to death at times was s bit of a downer as well.

Good pain. Yeah. Whatever.

Sorry - can someone link us to whatever official source everyone seems to be talking about which apparently describes birth as painless and risk free?

It's just that so many people on the thread are ranting against this view - leads you to assume that it's a commonly held belief which has 'official' support from respectable organisations.

I'm not aware that this is the case.

"They don't see it as a basic human right because they think that as it is natural the pain is tolerable (a load of bollocks imo). " That's how they see it onelittlefish and you are absolutely right. And until they get the message that this is inhumane, unacceptable, mysogynist, discriminatory, evil, sadistic and has no place in modern maternity care they will carry on treating women like shit.

My experience was all over the shop!
I went in (for an induction - baby was overdue and starting to not fare very well). I was a bit nervous but on the whole looking forward to it - had images of birthing pools and dim lights and loveliness.
The 'cramping' they told me to expect started and I got stressed very quickly (they told me the induction was unlikely to work first time round but I wold experience some mild crampings as everything readied itself). I lay on my bed thinking 'If this is cramping labour is going to kill me'. I dutifully took the paracetamol the midwife gave me which didn't even touch the sides of the pain. No wonder - when they examined me an hour later I was over half way. Induction happened fast! And at that point I got much calmer because now I knew I was in labour and not just having mild cramps, I thought, I can do this and it will all be wonderful after all. (I can state with some authority that paracetamol does not work as pain relief in labour, for anyone considering it!)
So success for mind over matter at this stage. I used G&A and drifted in and out of sleep for the next six hours while my husband watched movies. I was in pain but it was easy to manage and I was quite happy and contented.

Then I got to the end bit and they said 'baby will be here in the next twenty minutes'. Only she wasn't despite all the pushing and exertion. And from here it went very wrong. I had to be examined as they couldn't work out why the baby appeared to be crowning but going no further. I had SPD and it was tat rather than the birth which caused me more pain than I could have ever imagined. At that point, the G&A failed me, and I was screaming in sheer agony. They gave me pethidine and I couldn't tell the difference. They tried a local anasthetic which also didn't make a blind bit of difference. I had a few minutes where I would quite happily have taken my own life such was the blinding level of pain.
I have no idea how long it went on for because I lost all sense of everything - I had no idea who was in the room or who said what or what they planned to do. I know it was SPD not the birth that did this but it is all wrapped up in my head into one thing. I didn't feel the birth itself at all. They suctioned the baby out and discovered that she had the cord wrapped round her neck, which was basically holding her where she was. I was so consumed with pain that I couldn't hold the baby - they popped her on my chest for a fraction of a second - I registered that she was there but couldn't move anything to hold her, and didn't register I should be holding her. They whisked her off anyway to check her out so the next I saw of her she was wrapped in a towel and had a hat on.

We'd like another baby but going through this again scares the s* out of me -not sure I could do it. So will be announcing the SPD right from the start and insisting on all medical procedures available! I want to be in a place where I can remember clearly holding a seconds-old infant.

I tell everyone now. Not because of the birth but because I feel angry that SPD (which wasn't really taken seriously by the midwives) had such a massive impact on the whole thing. It robbed me of those first moments with my daughter that i can never get back. Maybe, just maybe, if I had had support with the SPD right from the start, then it needn't have got this far.

For me, this all shows that you can have all the positive thoughts in the world, and the confidence (I did, even half way through!) but that if something goes wrong, you're buggered and it can turn into the experience from hell in a second, and there's nothing you can do about it except try to get you and your baby out of it alive.

Shag Overall easy access to epidurals is not associated with higher levels of satisfaction with childbirth in the UK.

I am not surprised - it can be so stressful and such a battle to get one in and it is incredibly difficult to get one in early labour when they are least likely to fail.

However, in other parts of the world where there is a better attitude to women, more respect for individuals and a less ideological bias epidurals ARE associated with higher satisfaction.

Ushy - is it 'evil and inhumane' to deny women acces to a birth pool as well? Or to one to one care in labour? Or to a homebirth?

Because these are all things some women need to make labour a bearable experience for them. Never heard the current lack of widespread access to them being described as 'evil' though.

Babybythesea that is just so awful

"Ushy - is it 'evil and inhumane' to deny women acces to a birth pool as well? Or to one to one care in labour? Or to a homebirth?"

No - never said it was.

Women should have their choices respected whatever - having an epidural does not mean you have to deny homebirth, birth pool or one to one care.

Ushy - where do your figures on access to epidurals come from?

Sorry - haven't read whole thread. Do you actually refer anywhere to any research in relation to this issue? About levels of satisfaction with childbirth?

Denial of epidural taken to the Equality and Human Rights Commission

I'd say the fact theres 'a case to be considered' in itself is interesting.

The problem is Ushy that there simply aren't enough obstetric anaesthetists available in the UK to ensure safe cover for women needing surgery to deliver their babies to guarantee epidurals for everyone. I suppose we could always bring some in from developing countries though - we already do this with other health professionals, so leaving women in these countries in even deeper shit than they already are.

Has the case been decided yet Hmm ?

Shag
Re epidurals, there was a study done this year "Rev Assoc Med Bras. 2012 : The use of Combined Spinal Epidura; was associated with a significant reduction in VAS pain scores during delivery and with greater maternal satisfaction with the pain relief method and with the childbirth process" I think I have seen others as well.

It is painful. When men ask me about childbirth I say it is like a melon coming out of your bottom during a few hours.

Shag - yeh perhaps we should stop doing analgesia for all other sorts of agonisingly painful procedures as well. Deep breathing for vasectomy...

Selfish selfish women for expecting not to have to scream in pain...

It fucking hurts like buggery and screws your body up forever and always.

(This is my experience of it).

If someone told me I ought not to view 'such a beautiful and empowering experience in such a negative manner' I think I would actually be tempted to kick them. Hard. In the noony.

What the Hell would anyone else know about your own personal experience of anything?! They should keep their tree-hugging opinions to themselves and feel bloody lucky that they didn't have a similar experience to me or the thousands of other women who would never, in a million years, call such an event 'beautiful'.

According to the Quality Care Commission, in the UK 8.3% of women did not get the pain relief they wanted. It's not clear from the survey whether this figure includes women who got the pain relief they requested, but for whom it didn't work well (which would include a very high percentage of those who used pethidine and about 1 in 10 of those who requested an epidural).

Shag Only 65 % of the Care Quality commission could answer a definite yes to the question 'did you get the pain relief you wanted'. The rest - which would be over 200,000 women in uk per year if the survey is accurate - either did not get it or only got it partially.

That is unacceptable and the Care Quality Commission said so.

The problem that meant DD3 had to come out by crash cs was nothing to do with age, nothing to do with socio-economic status, level of preparedness for a natural labour (had been textbook pregnancy and I was in fact booked for a homebirth), my health or any other external factor. The little sod had been playing with her cord for weeks and would have died if we hadn't been in hospital. In an earlier age I would probably have died too. It's a random event that could have happened to anyone, at any age, in any place. I'm just eternally glad that we were in hospital being overseen by excellent staff who recognised that there was a problem when it appeared.

The only thing that might conceivably have helped would have been a doppler scan on the cord a week before her birth but she would still have had to come out by CS.

That event could happen to any of us, and could have happened to me during any one of my previous births. I was just lucky it didn't happen during my two homebirths.

I wonder if some of those women were like me, had pain relief and were very disappointed with the outcome? I thought G&A would be great, but it did nothing for me, and that's really when I fell apart. The epidural on the other hand was the moment of bliss I remember from the birth, but as it was a precursor to a c-section I didn't really think of it as pain relief, although the numbness was fantastic.