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.
I had my first without epidural: I hated the pain , it was horrible. Second was with an epidural: was amazing and I had my baby without suffering. I can’t understand some women who refuse the safety of modern medicine choosing to suffer : if a man was delivering a baby i bet he would have latest pain control ! Having a baby is dangereus for mother and baby . Better be in a hospital with proper qualified staff and obstetrician available. Both mine were in a hospital.
You don’t think men would choose to simply power through? I’m pretty sure “no painkillers” what be the default option. There is an increased risk with epidural, though it’s very small, which is why my wife elected not to, despite my objections.
So many of my ancestors died during childbirth & most of their babies died. The odds are so much better when hospital births are used. My three hospital births in the late fifties were straightforward & uncomplicated. In those days mothers were kept in hospital for a longer time than now & I’m sure the mothers were better off from the extra rest.
Great article and insights. I, like yourself birthed 4 babies without medical intervention, just support and encouragement from midwives and obstetrician on one occasion. It was early 70’s and husbands/partners were discouraged from attending. Fortunately for me/us we were able to experience these fabulous experiences together.
These were small country hospitals so maybe a little less dogmatic in their approach. Mothers need to be heard!!!
its a bit like drinking 10 beers at the pub and driving home You might make it home you might not
Great article Mandy! I was at my sister’s first birth (home birth)which was in the UK. It was inspiring! Her next birth ended up a rush to hospital where she lost a huge amount of blood(Healthy baby though). She possibly would have lost her life if she wasn’t taken to hospital. I only had one birth. For 4 (full on) days I tried to give birth at home. On the 4th day I decided that at the rate of my dilation it could take a week easily to birth my baby. I wasn’t at all worried about my baby. I knew she was strong and so was I, but 3 days without sleep gets to you… at the hospital I was given a new midwife and a few drug options. I ended up with an epidural (which I swore I’ll never have). Had 3 blissful hours sleep (first in 4 days), woke up to a fully dilated. Epidural was off and I birthed my healthy baby 1/2 hour later. My hospital experience was a good one. The midwife a dream and I went home that night. But I still think that home births are magic and women should choose to birth in anyway they feel is right for them and be fully supported.
Cats and rats and elephants do it all the time, no problems. Perhaps they’re just not so f*cked up. You people.
But with humans there is a twist…..literally. That turning of the baby is where the problems come from. Otherwise, it works just like a goat. The staff told me it’s a lot more complicated, but it wasn’t. Even the pre and peri natal issues are the same, and the same farmers tricks work to fix them.
We are not goats, nor cats, rats or elephants. Nor is birth universally incident free for any species.
We got our species nomenclature, “homo sapiens” from supposedly growing more intelligent and larger crania. From sciencedaily.com:
“ In hominids, upright walking evolved 4-5 million years ago. The human pelvis was affected by these changes and evolved accordingly to better serve the new pattern of movement. Later, after bipedal movement had long become obligatory, brains evolved to increasingly larger volumes. With that change, the head size of neonates also increased. The growing heads, however, had to be delivered through pelvises that were earlier adapted to upright walking. This is the reason for the lack of space in the modern human birth canal during childbirth, which we have to live with today. The evolution of these patterns remains to have severe consequences. Women in developing countries, who do not have access to modern medical care or cesarean sections during birth, still suffer from high mortality due to childbirth.”
Evolution continues, it never stops.
Yep – it’s thought we’re getting bigger heads.