Birth is magical. It is powerful and wild and beautiful and scary and miraculous.
Until it’s not.
When things go to shit, it happens fast and when your baby dies, your life is changed forever, but not in the way you were expecting.
When the story of the Mullumbimby mother who lost her twins in a ‘wild birth’ delivery broke last week I thought, here we go. Here’s another opportunity for mainstream media to turn someone’s pain and grief into clickbait. A woman and her partner lost their twins. They have been shamed in the media, blamed, and their private loss is now in the public domain. On every level that is unimaginably awful. I hope they are ok. I hope they have loving support around them.
Death is never the plan, but yes, it has always been part of birth. But it’s been an ever-diminishing risk. In 1902 you could expect 82 baby deaths for every 1,000 medically-assisted births. Now it’s just three. Women also died six times more often. So with those improvements why are women turning back to the risks their great-great-grandmothers faced? Because many no longer trust the medical system.
The Select Committee on Birth Trauma in NSW last year received over 4,000 submissions and had some pretty shocking results. Of the 97% hospital births one third were traumatised by their experience. We have record intervention rates. Women talk again and again of lack of consent, of not being listened to. This committee has been called the ‘Me Too’ of childbirth.
This has not been my experience. I need to be transparent – I’ve had four uncomplicated births. I was a low-risk pregnancy who delivered one baby at Randwick Royal Women’s and three babies at Mullumbimby Birth Centre. I delivered with the assistance of a midwife, or an obstetrician, who just smiled and let me get on with it. I delivered a posterior baby with no intervention. And I’ve had two beautiful drug-free water births with nothing but love and encouragement from my partner and the midwife. I had the kind of experience that should be available to all. Beautiful, supported, non-invasive, midwife-led care. I went home an hour or so after my births.
I’ve been reflecting on why we focus so heavily on birth. I’ve had friends who had caesareans say they feel like failures. One woman I spoke to even had a friend say to her ‘it’s sad you never got to experience birth’. What? Why are we so bloody judgy? It’s too much pressure. Birth is not a performance. It’s the process we go through to deliver our baby. A live healthy baby should always be the desired outcome, not a rite of passage reel for Instagram. It’s like being focused on the wedding and not the relationship. We all birth differently. Our bodies are different. Some, like me, could do it in a corn field. Others need more support. Some may need intervention. Shouldn’t we have the right to know? Isn’t the key to all of this not just consent, but ‘informed’ consent? That goes for anyone who attends a birth: doctors, midwives, and doulas. And that means that pregnant women are given the maternal autonomy to make their own decisions.
To prepare for my first child I attended a home-birth class. Once I’d delivered I realised I knew nothing about caring for babies. How to get her to sleep, what to do if she was sick, how to care for myself. As a mother of five kids I now realise that the birth was just the tiniest part of the experience. I had studied for months for a three-hour birth and was embarking on the next 18 years without a clue.
I believe we need to put baby safety and a mother’s autonomy at the centre of all our birth models. Knowing baby’s position, that the placenta is not over the cervix, how many babies you are having and if you are anaemic (likely to haemorrhage post birth) or if you have high blood pressure is imperative to maternal and infant safety.
While doulas can provide beautiful personal care they don’t do this more ‘medical’ stuff. The deep knowledge and training of midwives can only make the process safer and give a pregnant person more options to be in control and make informed choices so they don’t lose control later on. Or lose the baby.
We should be able to make our own choices around how we birth our babies, and that is going to look different for everyone. There is no perfect model because hospital births, home births, free births can all include egos and personalities that are so attached to an outcome it can get in the way, and end in tragedy or trauma. As someone who has been in labour I know how vulnerable you are. But I do know that healthy baby delivery is always the number one objective.
The real learning from my point of view, is not mother blame, it’s eliminating coercive care. Yes trust your intuition. And your midwife. They’re not in opposition. They work together.
Listening to birthing women, giving them the information they need to make informed decisions on how to deliver their babies has to be the way forward. If that was happening, if intervention rates and experience of medicalised birth trauma wasn’t so high, we wouldn’t be seeing the rise of free births. And hearing the heartbreaking stories of what happens when it goes wrong.
So let’s listen to this moment, and get it right.
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