Really upset at the natural child birth brigade...

[Huncamuncaa]

Sorry everyone.... need to vent...

I had a baby almost 5 years ago. I did the NCT course and armed myself with all the facts. I took in everything they said. I wanted a calm, natural birth.

It didn't work out that way. My baby was delivered by ventouse. I had severe bruising and scaring which took months to heal. Walking was painful for weeks. After the birth, the bruising prevented me from sitting down for days.

I was told that the heart rate had dropped due to the cord being round the baby's neck, hence the way he was delivered that way. I had been a bit out of it at the time on painkillers. I have never talked about the birth much and nor has my husband. It was traumatic but we survived it.

The NCT reunion came round and it turned out that all of us had had to have some sort of intervention at birth, except for the girl who had wanted a home birth. Her baby sailed into this world. It was blissful. The NCT leader looked quite smug. Her message that 'if you want a natural birth and remain calm, it will happen,' was ringing true. I told her about my birth and how I had had to have the baby born quickly because they cord was causing his heart rate to drop. She told me this was most unlikely, many babies are born this way (I know that this is true). She said it was more likely that my birth had been 'over medicalised'. Apparently when you give birth in hospital, doctors frequently don't give first time mums the time they need to give birth. She suggested that I had been very anxious and this has reduced my ability to push. The woman basically changed my understanding of my own birth. For the last 4 and a bit years I have believed that if I had breathed deeper, been more in tune with my body or had dimmer lights I would have not had six months of physical discomfort due to scarring from my episiotomy. My birth would have felt joyful not traumatic.

So I am pregnant again. Did a different (but similar) antenatal course, desperate for that joyful birth. Told the group about my first birth. Was told again, it was unlikely to have been an actual emergency. This time the meditation will get me through. Childbirth will be a dream.

Today I finally spoke to my mum (a doctor) who had been in the delivery suite at my first birth. She filled me in. She was really shocked that my understanding was that my birth had been 'unnecessarily medicalised'. She told me that my baby's heart rate dropped critically low and that, yes, I was in that very small minority of cases where the cord is wrapped in such a way that it affects the heart rate and could have caused a still birth. I knew that my son had been taken off me but didn't actually realise he was being resuscitated while I was stitched up. My mum had been very concerned. My bruising was caused by him being born with both his hands next to his head. (There isn't anything they could have done to prevent this position, not even a home birth amongst scented candles). I was unlucky with the episiotomy scarring, but the quick delivery saved the life of my baby.

My natural birth prevented my child from being still born. How was I so easily brain washed and made to feel inadequate by these people, even after almost five years?! I do believe that being calm, meditation and the rest of it helps but how can someone, who wasn't there and hasn't seen my notes feel like it's OK to educate me on what happened and why it all went wrong?!

I'm sorry, OP. People like that are idiots. I think it's a version of the "just world" fallacy - they can't bring themselves to believe that it used to be common for women to die in childbirth (and still is in some places), so they convince themselves that it can only go wrong if the mother fucks it up or has the wrong attitude. I was fairly well inoculated against that kind of thing because my mother had a natural birth followed by a tiny little funeral with her first baby.

Are you currently pregnant with your second? If so, I wish you and the baby a safe birth and a lots of joy getting to know one another.

I despise this ‘over-medicalising’ of birth mantra. I’m absolutely delighted to have had children in an age where there is plenty of medical help and intervention available. People have forgotten that until this ‘over-medicalisation,’ having children was extremely risky for women and infant mortality was very high. Meditation etc. is nice to have (if it works) as a complementary technique but give me modern-day medicine any day.

YANBU.
Sorry for your experience OP
It can be really hurtful to hear these things when you’re at your most vulnerable after having a baby. Even if it’s true that it was avoidable (which it sounds like it wasn’t?) why say it?! It’s not like you can do anything about it ‘oh ok I’ll just shove DC back up there and breathe them out this time’.

I had traumatic first and easy going 2nd births. Ultimately I got two healthy and happy kids and the further away in time I get from their births the less important it becomes how they entered the world, ultimately what I think these ‘natural birth brigade’ people forget is that most mums don’t get pregnant to
Have a birth experience, they get pregnant to have a child.

I suppose to give them the benefit of the doubt, some births have been over medicalised. Pushing back against this has helped make some positive changes in hospital practices. But your birth, as you now know, was not one of these! And many of us on here know that things happen during childbirth that are truly beyond our control. In my case I'm confident that better breathing wouldn't have stopped me getting sepsis.... However, I am also pleased that dim lighting and aromatherapy were on offer because I also believe those did help me get contractions going again.

For the person who decided to "educate" you she may have meant no harm. Perhaps she just fell prey classic psychological "attribution bias" which I won't explain badly but which is worth a Google, and couldn't recognise the role that luck actually played in both her birth and yours. Maybe she genuinely thought she was helping somehow.

It's a shame that so many of us end up feeling bad about our births not so much due to what happened but due to other messaging about what's good and bad. I really hope this stops some day!

Thanks. Your poor mum @Alcoholtolerancegonetopot

I think what frustrates me most is that I come from a medical family, not a load of hippies butt is so easy to get swept along with the obsession for a natural childbirth.

I am currently 37 weeks pregnant and for some reason this trauma has suddenly reappeared and made me panic.

I think I just needed someone to say to me at the time, 'you were really unlucky, but it's behind you now.' Instead of making me feel that my pain was self induced by being crap at child birth.

And as for pain relief... when I dislocated my shoulder no one had a blind bit of interest in my choice of pain relief or whether I meditated my way through the pain...why is childbirth so different?!

I should add, that I do believe that meditation etc. helps and I wouldn't discourage anyone from doing anything that keeps them calm and confident. Of course it helps.

I just wish that people were't in denial at the occasional need for modern day medicine

Op some people just don't get it. Women die in childbirth, babies die in childbirth.
We are lucky to live in a country were medical treatment is available and few women and babies die.

If Docs don't think intervention is necessary they will generally leave to too it. But it's one of those things, slightly better to intervene too soon and come home with a baby than the alternative.

You have my sympathy OP - I've lived in a country where medical care was sketchy and only available to those who could pay. I spoke to women who had lost babies in childbirth because they had no access to medical help. I was very grateful to be able to have DD in the UK - it became apparent a couple of weeks before she was born that any attempt at labour would kill her; needless to say, I had a c-section. I wasn't thrilled to be told it was necessary, but I was very glad I had that option and left hospital with a healthy baby. As far as I'm concerned, a healthy mother and a healthy baby means a successful birth; I hope you can feel the same too.

I had similar with a nutter I met after I had my first. She was furious her birth had not been the candles and home water birth she had planned. She was over 40 and it was her first birth we both had emergency c sections. I pretended to be sympathetic but wasn’t as my secretary had her baby a week before us and he died in labour.

Every birth is " natural ". Babies are delivered vaginally, sometimes with assistance or by section. That is it.

These people talk bollocks. Childbirth is painful and dangerous. Anything that makes it less so has to be a good thing

I'm with you. My first was born in the same circumstances. His cord was so tightly wrapped around his neck they had to cut it before I was able to deliver his body. He was blue at birth but the fact that there were so many highly trained medical specialists in the room meant he survived unscathed.

While I appreciate the benefits of hypnobirthing and the like, I am certain it wouldn't have saved his life.

My own sister suggested similar to me after the birth of my son.

He was prem and in foetal distress. Had an EMCS, he was rushed to NICU.

She was talking to me about it and asked "but if they'd given you some time to have him naturally..." ... I said that I'd rather be sliced in two every day of the week rather than take any risks.

I know women who don't feel like a "real woman" after birth interventions. It's shit for them.

I think there is a worrying 'we know better' attitude in some natural childbirth circles. Which maybe came from a genuine need to put women more in control of their hospital births than they were in the past but has resulted in some women feeling like they have failed because of decisions made by doctors.

For ages I have felt really upset at the decisions that prevented me for delivering the way I wanted to. In actual fact I should have been thanking the doctors for saving my baby's life.

Thank you, Huncamuncaa. I think what I've learned from my family's experience is that stillbirth is like a bomb going off in a family. The aftershock is still continuing even though we (the younger siblings of the baby who died) now have kids of our own. If there's a choice, you do the thing that results in a healthy baby coming home, because the alternative is unthinkable.

I had all that bullshit from the NCT first time around. One person didn’t even sit through the c-section bit because she believed it would give her negative thoughts and she ‘wasn’t going to have a c-section’ (spoiler: she did).

My baby was going to come when he was ready and I was going to refuse induction. At 14 days overdue my placenta started to fail so it’s a good job that induction happened. I was going to ‘breathe my baby out’. 36 hours into labour breathing was not cutting it so I finally accepted some pain relief. Breastfeeding was also going to ‘come naturally.’ After nine weeks of hell I finally sought help from a BFing practitioner.

I think the concept of natural birth is wonderful and I have breastfed all my kids into toddlerhood but I think the NCT puts unrealistic pressure on women and in some cases is dangerous. It’s full of well-meaning but non-medical people who have probably had easy births themselves.

Honestly I think NCT groups have a lot answer for in making women feel crap about the way they give birth/ feed baby etc.
I'm so sorry they made you feel so bad for something you had no control over and so pleased the medical professional who were with you made the right call.
I know it's easier said than done but try not to worry too much about your upcoming labour. My first ended in a forceps delivery in theatre as DC was wedged. My husband told me afterwards that the consultant actually moved me on the table while delivering DC1 they were that stuck.
DC2 was much more textbook.
Wishing you all the best.

I had an ELCS and loved my over-medicalised birth. The NCT class made it sound awful, but I knew that about NCT going in so I simply disregarded it.

I had an induced birth in a labour ward but it was pretty natural and a pretty great birth. Unfortunately on the way out a combination of my sons giant round head and a short perineum caused a 3rd degree tear. I did everything 'right'...avoided the epidural, gave birth on my knees and not back and it still happened. I'm kind of having to get used to a different idea of birth this time...a remote maternity ward or home birth just wouldnt be an option as realistically even if I dont decide on a section I need to be close to theatre for a tear repair. No matter how much scented candles I have or lavender oil.

I really couldn't care less this time about the birth. I worry about definitely being away 2 nights as I'll miss my DS but I certainly dont give 2 hoots whether it's a 'natural' birth. I'd rather have a medicalised birth than lifelong faecal incontinence in all honesty!

JaniceBattersby - the pressure on women to refuse inductions really concerns me. Obviously, pregnant women retain their bodily autonomy and should be able to refuse any intervention once they've been given all the information. But the hypnobirthing classes at my local hospital really pushed the idea that inductions are just an invention of mean doctors who don't want their golf schedule interrupted, and you have to turn them down if you want to bond with your baby. The problem with that is that our local maternity services are massively under-resourced and understaffed, and I know anecdotally of several local women whose babies died after they went significantly overdue, with inadequate monitoring being a factor. Encouraging women to reject medical advice in pursuit of a perfect birth when services are too underfunded to provide a proper safety net is criminal, in my view.

Totally agree OP.

1st DC: really long difficult birth ending in forceps. He was a good size, utterly stuck in the back to back position and actually we were very lucky in the end. I actually felt that the midwives under-medicalised the situation. Debriefing myself, I looked at the stats around various factors around the birth and there was a strong likelihood that a c-section would be necessary and if that had been acknowledged at the start of things going wrong, things might have been better...

2nd DC, in optimal position for delivery and as easy and natural as it gets...

3rd DC: due to DC2 I kind of thought we’d get away with a home birth...shaped up to be in the optimal position too...was looking forward to a straight forward and easy birth. Then we went a little overdue and I started to worry about being over-medicalised just because of being over and missing out on an easy natural birth. But long story short, arriving at hospital late in labour, feeling like it was unnecessary to be there, had much the same experience as you -cord 3/4x around her neck, hands up by her face tearing me badly. She needed resuscitation, I needed management of haemorrhage. So glad we were in hospital, so glad. She’s fine, I’m fine. But after DC2 and the pregnancy with DC3, I could have been very easily persuaded to stay at home and avoid all those medical people...who actually ensured that she survived unharmed and my bleeding stopped before it became hazardous.

800 women die every day from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth, worldwide.
That’s “natural” childbirth for you. Still think it’s so great, NCT people?
I’m a retired anaesthetist, who has not only spent 36 years taking women to theatre for caesarians to save their, or their babies’, lives, I also owe my youngest child’s life to the crash team in labour suite.
By all means have your hypnosis, whale song, chanting and candles - but when the shit hits the fan, don’t waste time arguing with the obstetrician trying to save your baby.
And don’t for one moment believe that you “failed” at labour. However you produced your child, you succeeded. Every mum should feel proud of herself - don’t let the NCT rain on your parade!

I don’t know if it’s very common but it happened in my case and it appears to have happened in your case too OP that no-one (medical) actually explained what happened during your labour and childbirth to you. Your mum knew, presumably because she is a medical professional and knew enough to realise what was happening/ understood the lingo. But none of the medical professionals that attended your baby’s birth actually took a minute to explain to you what had happened. I had the same situation. My mum is a midwife. She wasn’t with me during the birth but she knew how to read my notes and it was only due to her doing that that I knew a) that my son had been resuscitated and b) why!

I really think there needs to be far more communication with mothers about what has actually happened to their bodies and babies during childbirth. I know you can request a birth debrief afterwards but that really shouldn’t be necessary! It should happen before discharge as standard procedure.

I agree! The debrief sounded over the top or for someone who had been under general anaesthetic. I wouldn't have asked for it. My head was all over the place at the time but it would be nice to know the facts!

I feel duty bound to add that my NCT class did not push a particular kind of birth. They were very clear that they shouldn't do that. The narrative on natural birth is coming from more insidious places, in my view, and if we just point the finger at the NCT we miss the big picture and the chance to change things for the better. That's how I see it anyway.