Natural - v - Caesarean - a new thread

[JoolsToo]

sorry to be bossy but can we carry on here?

I'm for natural when possible

Eeeeww Joolstoo!

Gwenick: perhaps that is because of women's unrealistic expectations of a "good birth experience" ?

Again, the stats is difficult to interpret. Is more of a risk to develop PND after a truly elective c-section. Where a c-section for whatever reason is booked in advance and vb never attempted. Or is it when (like I did and suffered from PND afterwards) you spend 30 hours in labour, it becomes critical and ends in a c-section? I personally think it depends on the recovery and how tired you are afterwards. I guess reocvery might be easier if you haven't spent hours in hard labour before a major operation. Also, perhaps some women get PND because they hoped for Vb's and feel like they have failed.

It would be lovely to think that all women go into labour informed and prepared, but often they don't and at that point, what a consultant offers them is what they will take.

Someone very close to me had a baby recently and laboured for eight hours in hospital. When the pain grew unbearable, she was told, by the consultant, she would have to wait 4 hours for an epidural (not dilated enough for one) or she could have a c-section. She took the section. That makes me cross. I believe it is much easier for the hospital in terms of time management/bookkeeping to have such a planned birth. They often have no interest in helping a woman through her labour when they can't be sure of how long she will take, when the baby will be born etc.

If you have a deep psychological fear of labour and the 'indignity' of it, then obviously a section would be right for you. But for me, with a dislike of medical procedure, a section would be deeply undignified whereas a natural labour gives me a real sense of achievement. This is MY OPINION ok, not a statement of fact

but MP - that 'fact' is based on ALL CS's not just emergency ones!

And where is that idea born?

morningpaper.... there are deaths in CS because it is a serious operation.... YES IT IS THANK GOD getting to be a very safe operation but it remaisn an op.... they can also (seriously) damage internal organs ... the bladder is a common one ! and there are women (not many but it does happen) who end up with a hysterectomy as well!
And bad choldbirth can leave women in derie states too... not trying to be one sided here !

I have read somewhere someone say that at least you don't end up with incontinence if you have a CS....HOWEVER older women (50+) have the same rate of urinary incontinence regardless of the way they gave birth. I got this from:
Fynes M, Donnelly VS, O'Connell PR, O'Herlihy C. Cesarean delivery and anal sphincter injury. Obstet Gynecol 1998; 92: 496-500.

Well it was the NCT classes for me.

And bad choldbirth can leave women in dire states too

This thread is a good method for contraception do you not think?

Actually women who have had 2 sections have better pelvic floors than women who have had 2 natural birth, but by the time you get to 3 sections they are in the same boat

and also a very confusing thread.

Don't get me wrong, I am not an advocate for the liberal use of c-sections. But I think that this emphasis on a 'good birth experience' is a terrible lie, born of our desire to be consumers for everything.

The idea of 'choice in childbirth' is also a lie. For the majority of women, the only choice is between agonising torment and drugs.

As has been said many times before, women should be encouraged to want a baby, not a birth.

Ha ha mistresmary, I'm not having any more so I can talk about childbirth, watch it on tv, all with not a care in the world! Mp, wot, NCT classes made you incontinent?

morningpaper, surely women have wanted to have a good birth experience for centuries, rather than something that is born out of our consumerist culture?

morning paper that seems right.

Enid: a good birth experience has traditionally been a live baby.

Agree, wickedwaterwitch, I love knowing that for me it's all just theoretical now!

but I know plenty of women who have babies with few or no drugs. And they are all quite normal. So it can't be that unusual/black and white (torment or drugs), can it??

They probably had relatively easy and troublefree labours then Enid.

but I think that a lot of women do have relatively easy and trouble free labours, don't they?

obv its always bloody painful, she adds, hurriedly.

Yes they do. The lucky ones. I was lucky ones myself and managed without much pain relief at all. But my labours were very different all times.

Statistically only 3% (a trawl of google) of women have no pain relief.

I'd imagine that for most of the other 97%, it's the last thing they wanted but felt they had no choice.

I'd also imagine that of that 3%, lots of them found it torture.

joining into a very interesting discussion here, but just picking up on what Morning Paper said

"But I think that this emphasis on a 'good birth experience' is a terrible lie, born of our desire to be consumers for everything. "

is interesting and definitely something to do with the moral arguments that arise for or against the different choices that women make. The other thing that I am finding (I am 34 weeks pg with my 1st, and have been listening to a lot of conflicting but well meaning advice from lots of friends with children and differing birth experiences etc) is that as women we have been gaining more and more control over our lives for the past 10, 20, 30 years, and I think there are a lot of us who expect we should be able to control our birth experiences as well, which of course we can't. So should any of us being going into the whole labour experience determined to have it this way or that? Surely our increasing control freakery is more or less guaranteeing us either to be potentially very disappointed (even traumatised) if/when things DON'T go according to plan, or feeling that we desperately need to justify our decisions (to the point of moralising it) to other mothers (or whoever will listen), even though there should be no need to justify these things at all?
And on a slightly different but related note, this morality and justification goes beyond the cs vs vb scenario to competitive use of pain control ("she did it just with gas and air", ergo, she did better than someone who went for the "soft" epidural option)....
This thread is ensuring I stay on my very steep learning curve!