If you’ve had a difficult birth in the past, or are preparing to give birth at the moment, you may want to read this post with someone you feel able to talk to about any feelings that arise.
When we hear about birth we often hear two very distinct stories – that it’s either terrible, or wonderful. People talk about birth ‘horror stories’ that leave women and their families suffering, or they talk about the beautiful empowering experience of birth. When we talk in such dichotomies, there’s little room for those in the middle whose experience is often a little bit terrible and a little bit wonderful (and sometimes a little bit exciting and a little bit terrifying and at times even pretty boring). This can leave many people feeling unable to talk openly about their experiences – and whether birth is terrible, wonderful, or somewhere in the middle, we know that it can leave a huge impact on us. It’s the entryway into our parenting experience, and if we come out feeling that it hasn’t gone the way we had hoped, it can mean the start of that journey is complicated.
A year ago, I set up an organisation called Make Birth Better with my colleague psychiatrist Dr Rebecca Moore. We’d noticed this black and white way of talking about birth and wanted to provide a platform to showcase the wide variety of stories and experiences that exist around birth – from both parents, healthcare and birth professionals. We also noticed how few birth stories exist from people who, research shows, might face additional stigma from maternity services such as Black and Minority Ethnic women, same sex couples, trans individuals, non gender conforming people, those with physical or learning disabilities, women living with disadvantages. It’s only by showing how varied birth can be that we can start to speak about every kind of birth story.
Over the past year, we’ve met with women, partners and professionals to ask them what they felt could make birth better. While often antenatal education and stories about birth focus on the women or birthing person’s responsibility to educate and empower themselves, we heard stories about how ineffective preparation can feel when you enter a system which is, in itself, traumatised. Overstretched and overstressed maternity services can feel like they are reactive, rather than proactive, with midwives often dealing with more than one person in labour simultaneously, without time for a loo break let alone to learn about a person’s birth plans.
We’ve started to create a new story around birth. One which includes not only the woman or birthing person and her partner, but also the staff who will travel that journey with a family. And if we’re to include staff, we also need to include the systems that exist around them – the teams which support them, the organisations which treat them with either kindness or blame. If we begin to see birth not as a solo affair but a collaboration between all of these different layers of the system, then we can create a new narrative. That includes all of us too, of course. So that we not only share the different and varied birth experiences that we have (being mindful of any parts that could be emotive), but we ask to hear others’ experiences too. Then we can hear about births that are neither horror stories or fairytales, neither black or white, but full of colour.
If you’re reading this currently preparing for birth, do take a look at the online resources at www.makebirthbetter.org and take a look at the Positive Birth Movement, Association for Improvements in Maternity Services & Birthrights. If you’re reading this and you think you might have some symptoms of trauma following your birth, do take a look at those resources too as well as the Birth Trauma Association who have an active peer support group on Facebook.
Emma’s new book ‘Why Birth Trauma Matters’ (Pinter & Martin) is published on 11 July.
EDITED BY MNHQ Emma will now be coming back on Thursday at midday