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?!

A lot of midwives say young women are more scared of birth than ever before partly due to One Born Every Minute.

I desperately wanted hypnobirthing to work, I worked hard at it but when it came to it I had a long traumatic birth ending in emcs and sepsis. I would’ve died along with my baby without that section.

I felt great shame at having failed to have a natural birth. The rhetoric I had been inundated with was very much that if I worked hard enough, tried enough, practiced enough then I could avoid intervention. Which was not true. It contributed to my pnd.

Breastfeeding was very difficult, after much fobbing off over several weeks I saw a midwife who told me that the problem wasn’t with the latch etc but that I had been very ill and my baby knew that and it was forming a block between us. All I had to do was tell my baby I was better now and she’d be able to feed.

What absolute bollocks. There was an undiagnosed tongue tie.

Bertrand probably wants to know why I didn’t complain- the midwife was in a position of power, and I was ill, weak, extremely vulnerable. I didn’t have the strength to challenge her. I passed on my concerns to other midwives and HVs I saw who I hope took it further.

But don’t blame women for not complaining about their poor care. In an ideal world everyone would but not everyone has the strength at such a difficult time and once they have recovered it is encouraged to put their bad experiences behind them and move on.

The shocking thing is that there doesn’t seem to be an avenue of complaint that does not involve the woman concerned doing it at a time when that can be difficult or impossible. I refuse to believe that these people’s colleagues don’t know about the bad practice they are exhibiting- but they just close ranks.

Omg what idiots just ignore the lot of them. As long as the baby arrives safely that's all that matters. If they are making you feel bad it is a reflection of THEM and not you ❤️

I do think that a big problem is our (society’s) attitude that if you make the “right choices” and do your “homework” then you have a direct impact on outcome. Like when you are at school and if you do as you’re told and work hard and tick all the boxes and this leads directly to good exam results. Having a child (the whole of parenting really) and in particular pregnancy and birth really confounds that “input leads to output” mentality. I was a “good girl” who always did what I was told at school, and it can be hard to unpick and get away from that “if I do my hypnobirthing practice and tick all the boxes etc then my birth will be like this”. There is so much uncertainty and conflicting risk factors (plus actually very little is known about why and how labour starts, progresses etc) that it’s not surprising that women seek a way to feel control, when actually it may be impossible to feel that way.

“ it can be hard to unpick and get away from that “if I do my hypnobirthing practice and tick all the boxes etc then my birth will be like this”. Couple that with women being taught by people who aren’t teachers.. We need to somehow change the narrative to “If I do my X practice and tick all the boxes I am doing what I can to maximise my chances of getting the birth I want, but if circumstances mean I don’t get that sort of birth, the breathing and relaxation i’ve learned might still help me through the birth I do have, and with my recovery afterwards” Bit long winded though.....

My birth plan was "whatever works/is needed".

@EvilEdna1 I really agree with what you said here, these stats are available on which.co.uk and should be promoted more :
'' The reasons why there are relatively few straightforward first births in the UK are complex which is why I think it's a good idea to be realistic with pregnant women and invite them to look at the stats for emergency c-sections, assisted births etc."

This is a really interesting article on this subject:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/05/natural-childbirth-report-midwife-musketeers-morcambe-bay

@HerSymphonyAndSong that’s a great post

More real natural births would also mean that more babies and mothers die, because that is nature. We medicalise birth because we want more mothers and babies to survive. It's been so succesful that people have forgotten that it can literally be a life and death situation.

Yes it's quite telling that interventions/c-sec are described as the 'worst case'. Surely the worst case is that mum and baby both die?

But even induction was said to be the worst case, but what can you do if the baby doesn't come. So that's your own fault too, you didn't go for a walk, and eat enough curry Well I walked everyday of my pregnant and I bloody love curry and still my baby was born eventually after 2 days of inductions on 41+6.

No wonder PND is so high when professionals don't give out realistic information.

I fully agree that birth has been overly medicalised in the past (stirrups, overruled on drugs, c-sections etc) but my issue with the NCT isn't that it isn't woman-led, it's that it's woo-led.
We had a short section on breathing exercises, but most of it was 'visualisation' exercises and focusing on positive thinking.
The only mention we had on c-sections in six weeks was throw away comments about wanting to avoid them. Same with inductions. Best avoided and that was it. I ended up going three weeks overdue and had both induction and c-section. Fortunately, I'd done my own research but there was no preparation from the NCT on it.
There was a longer discussion on how some women orgasm during birth than either of those things.
I have no doubt that our instructor was a lovely person and meant for the best, but I do think that unless you went in knowing there was a lot of woo, you might not know that you were woefully unprepared for childbirth.
My DSis planned a home birth and had it go horribly wrong. Even after she'd been in agony for over a day, the midwife was all 'positive thinking' and 'you can still do it'. Fortunately, my DM put her foot down and overruled her, and took DSis to the hospital where she ended up having a c-section. There was some kind of blockage meaning she wouldn't have been able to give birth naturally. All that agony for nothing. If she'd kept going, both she and her daughter would be at risk.
Too many women are having these experiences and imo part of that is the natural birthing movement pushing the pendulum too far the other way.
We do need woman-focused births, but they need to be evidence-led and reality-based. Anything else just leads to women and their babies hurting unnecessarily.

The very idea that over-stretched medical services would perform unnecessary interventions is utter lunacy. NCT might as well be wearing tin foil hats with that idea.

The thing is, stress makes childbirth harder. So giving birth in a relaxed environment is better. Home births are statistically safer than hospital births for straightforward pregnancies.

Depends what you mean by unnecessary though doesn't it. They induce huge and ever increasing numbers of women and the evidence that is necessary is patchy.

I have known women be strongly recommended induction for 'big baby' when when NICE guidelines recommend not to induce for that reason alone. Baby was also not big in the end. Necessary is often in the eye of the beholder.

If an NCT practitioner does not cover caesarean birth in a course and this wasn't years ago please feed that back to the NCT.

Both my NCT course and hypnobirthing course kept on telling me to ‘use my BRAIN’. Anytime anybody wanted to do an intervention you need to ask them what the benefits, risks, alternatives are and if you do nothing. I wrote this down on post it notes and recited it beforehand. It went like this:
‘What’s the benefit of being induced?’
‘Well you’re thirteen days overdue and your placenta might fail and the baby might die.’
‘Ok then.’

‘Why am I being moved to the labour ward? I want to be in a pool reciting my affirmations on the MLU.’
‘Because your baby is distressed and we’re worried about the heartbeat and we might need to do a emcs otherwise she might die.’
‘Ok then.’

‘What’s the benefit of being put on the drip?’
‘Well your labour is going very slowly and your baby has been distressed for a while now and she can’t be in labour for too long because otherwise she might die.’
‘Ok then.’

‘Why are you using forceps?’
‘Because you and your baby are exhausted and her heartbeat has dropped dramatically and we need to get her out ASAP otherwise she might die.’
‘Ok then.’

So I asked a lot of Bs. Didn’t ask any Rs, As or INs. Oh well. Maybe I didn’t do my breathing techniques properly.

@Littleoakhorn I don't think doctors intervene for the fun of it exactly, but there's also a liability culture to be contended with.

If there's any slight indication of a problem, like a blip in heart rate, in a hospital the temptation is to intervene because the risk of being accused of negligence seems worse than the risk of intervening unnecessarily. There's a lot of grey area.

Guidelines on birthing practices change all the time. I had a vbac recently, I didn't want a cannula as is routinely required. I found out nice guidelines had been published but not yet implemented saying cannula should not routinely be put in. So use of a cannula was not supported by the evidence but still advised by the hospital.

So giving birth in a relaxed environment is better.

I'm relaxed in a hospital, with staff,equipment and meds.

I didn't cry,scream,swear ,panic or anything. I even fell asleep for a bit,read my book,joked with OH etc., got really really really tired(so tired there's a lot of stuff I don't quite remember). Didn't stress when I was wheeled out to get DD out(I was really out of it) or when someone kept insisting i sign permission for whatever donation.

DD still got stuck(meconium in waters,heart beat low etc) and had to be pulled out by forceps, all grey and not breathing. That's when I started panicking and got stressed.

"Come on baby,breathe!"

Now that's something I'll always remember.

The first question before BRAIN is 'is this an emergency?' if it is then there is no time to engage BRAIN.

The first example about induction is a prime example of medical staff using fear tactics to get compliance by the way and NICE makes it clear that sort of language should not be used. It's also crap to suggest there that, in the absence of other worries, the chances of a placenta failing after 13 days suddenly shoots up. It would have been more useful for them to give you the stats on that. It's a better out than in policy which you might choose to go along with or you might not if you had the facts and were not scared witless.

@EvilEdna1 I know the statistics of still birth suddenly shoot up when you are 13 days late. But they do go up. A close family member had a still birth over thirty years ago. She still cannot talk about it. I was not prepared to risk it.

Sorry meant to say do NOT suddenly shoot up.

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

100% this!

I think in some ways yabu and in some ways yanbu.

Let's start with the natural birth brigade. Apparently it's all about positioning and whale music... all will be well. Clearly a right load of old nonsense. Some people have amazing natural births but there is a massive element of luck involved.

Onto the other side, doctors see the issues and the complications. They believe in the ability of medical intervention to overcome all.

So I have a friend whose whole family are doctors and think hb is nuts (I had a hb with dd2 fwiw). With her 2nd child her waters broke with meconium and she hung around for an hour waiting for her in laws to look after ds1 (mil was an obstetrician) before going to hospital. When she arrived at hospital she was 9cm and unsurprisingly baby was in distress. They'd have died in a hb... ok then 🤦🏻‍♀️.

Both sides talk shit I reckon, including doctors...