Midwives say women should pay for epidurals

[TheDullWitch]

At least £500 a baby it says here

big, big respect Greensleaves. please don't let this ruin your weekend.

Damn, I'm astounded that so many women are medically induced and NOT offered stronger pain relief - when it's so well-known that contractions brought on thru chemical induction are much stronger than those brought on thru spontaneous labour.

G&A's a joke. It just make me feel like I was suffocating. Pain relief my ass!

Greensleeves How awful.

How much to be saved????? by cutting out necessary help.

it's the lack of mobility & giving birth on the back that up the use of forceps etc - why not give the pain relief & sort out the over use of medical interference - have birth chairs, have doulas, have the walking epidural. Make one m/w per mum.

How much saved here????? much better & mums will get better service as well.

My DP's mother trained as a midwife in the 50s. She never practised largely because of the savage way she saw the women treated. This was before husbands were alowed to attend.

It was not unheard off for women to be slapped when they screamed too much.

that doesn't surprise me at all - I had my baby last year and was told to keep quiet while I was pushing. Needless to say I didn't take any notice... They also kept trying to get me to lay flat on my back while I was experiencing excruciating lower back pain with every contraction. I had to keep saying no - which just increased my panic, and did not help me deal with the pain effectively at all. At one point they even threatened to bring out the stirrups! Hideous hideous hideous...

I remember watching a TV program just before I had DD1. A woman was in labour having her 3rd child, having had epidurals with her 2 previous births. It turned out just when she needed her epidural, that the anaesthetist had been called in to the operating theatre for an emergency C. Section and wouldn't be able to do her epidural. She had to give birth using gas/air etc. You didn't see the birth but afterwards you saw her in bed, holding her baby, crying her eyes out because she was so sore.

If women have to pay, how many are going to end up like this lady, remembering the pain more than the joy of their new baby.

Is this another skew in the media presentation? Epidurals do cause the need for greater intervention, and it is a valid debate. But framing it as though women shouldn't have the right to one, should be forced to go through the agony of childbirth without any hope of one is just pandering to peoples ignorance prejudices about women and childbirth - the 'squat down in a field and push' lot.

How about another call for drug free dentistry, or phasing out general anesthetics for those who can't afford one? Local anesthetics for men having the snip - the operation is certainly not life threatening and they'll be in and out in a jiffy! Who cares about he pain, right!?

I wish I'd had an epidural with dd2 (like I had for dd1)...I ended up having a crash caesarean, with a general anaesthetic which definitely meant a slower recovery for me.

MT, this is the RCM's press release. Not sure where the £500 figure comes from.

they weren't sure what caused my bp to drop (80/40ish - they thought my uterus has ruptured and couldn't take a risk) but if I'd had an epidural it obviously would have been much calmer..and i could have seen dd2 straight away. i was a bit out of it tbh, but dh was terrified. my lovely calm consultant just said "shall we get this baby out?"

yes, lockts, a csection is normally done under a regional anaesthetic - epi or spinal - b/c a GA increases the risk that the baby will suffer respiratory distress at birth due the drugs used.

lockets, when i had dd1 they just topped it up when the decision was taken to do a c/s (she was becoming acidotic) and the whole experience was really calm, dh made sure I held her first I still managed to bf etc with dd2 but I had an awful lot of pain and had a fair amount of morphine in the first couple of days!

(btw, i'd had the epidural because I vomited almost constantly during my labour and by the time i reached 4cm i was so dehydrated and exhausted the pain had become unbearable)

Not afrikaans, that is oliphant

Bollocks! Wrong thread

Me too, Lockets! Why did I just read this thread? I know I couldn't have coped last time without my epidural (ended up with emergency c/s anyway). The pain when it fell out was so excruciating I thought I was going to die. The relief when it was correctly re-fitted was immeasurable. This time around I would only go for a VBAC if I could definitely have another epidural if I felt I needed it. If I'm going to get attitude from the midwives/doctors for asking for one, I'm going for an elective c/s. My well-off friends with indy midwives are so much more confident about their births than I am. Maybe if I had one-to-one support I'd feel the same.

I'm sooooooooo cross by this.

In labour, they tried convincing me I was 3cm and it was going nowhere and I had to go home. The pain was excruciating and I said NO five minutes later they realised I was 5cm and may have to have a caesarean...

I'd seen a total of 7 different midwives at this stage, including a horrid man who gave me pethidine and paralysed my leg for 48 hours.

When it came to 10cm dilated and ready to push midwife was - you guessed it. Helping someone else!

I had an epidural, and about 5 top ups. True I had to have ventouse, but the person (not midwife) who came to lead my labour in the last 5 min said ds head was too big and would always have got stuck.

She (midwife) buggered off shortly after the birth, and did'nt come back for three hours. Hadn't shown me how to feed, and I had a small baby pouting at me, who was shortly to be very poorly.

I - like last time - want to try this time again with no epidural, although I will hiss and spit if that male midwife or the one there during my labour come within 50 feet of me this time. But if it came down to it, and after 30 hours of labour I needed an epidural, £500 won't stop me shouting at dh 'JUST GET YOUR CHEQUE BOOK OUT'

However, we would be able to ill-afford it. And I would have to blame the nhs for why my newborn was in lidl nappies and charity shop baby gros.

The RCM press release is more measured but it does mention charging, which I find absolutely insane quite frankly. The tabloids will have a field day with this.

I wish they would MT, it might teach the RCM not to take the piss so royally

Another crazy birth story

Greesleeves - OMG! I'm sorry. That really does sound majorly traumatic. I'mn not surprised you haven't complained. I had really rough, rude treatment from a female obstetrician during my first miscarriage which upset me beyond belief. I always meant to complain but could never quite find the words nor revisit the episode for long enough without getting upset.

I wonder how many women don't complain about horrible treatment.

God Greensleeves, I didn't read all the posts and missed yours. The pain of childbirth is bad enough without complications such as yours and no one should be forced to endure that pain if it's too much for them. I was 'over' contracting and had to wait 4 hours for an epidural but didn't experience the horror you went through. It's just despicable, that midwives of all people should be suggesting this. It may be a crass analogy but childbirth is the closest many of us in the western world will come to genuine mortal fear and the agony of death. That's how I experienced it anyway, on a physical and emotional level. I'm a different person for experiencing it, a better one too hopefully in my capacity to understand what pain actually is - and that was even with a bloody epidural. With a big baby, believe me, it doesn't touch the sides when it comes to pushing it out! (I don't want to frighten anyone - I'm glad I have experienced it too!)

I find it just unfathomable how such agony can be viewed by institutions as acceptable. People go to casualty with cits and bruised, broken bones and get pain relief. There has long been a developing problem in a patriarchal NHS system to push the birthing process through a well established, standardised system, which has led towards more C-sections being performed. If there has to be a debate it needs to be centred around the attitudes of the consultants and midwives in changing a mindset which believes that just because childbirth is a 'natural' process which (today) is not normally fatal the pain doesn't matter either.

I had my head full of natural childbirth ideas before I actually went into labour but when it came down to it I didn't think twice - in fact it didn't come soon enough. Sorry, I'll shurrup now.