Great Things About Birth
1 All that huffing, puffing and sweating does wonders for the skin.
2 You get your wardrobe back.
3 Everyone says how clever and wonderful you are, when the baby does most of the work.
4 At last you can join the other mothers round the table who used to stop telling their birth stories when you walked in the room.
5 You have instant rapport with every mother on the planet.
6 Without drugs, you get the most tremendous hormone high.
7 With pain-relief, you get to try different drugs legally.
8 In labour, you can act out being ‘the ultimate Diva’.
9 You come the closest you’ll ever get to being God, bringing forth life.
10 You get a baby to keep at the end.
I promise not to wave joss sticks, play whale music or bombard you with photographs of women in labour and babies being born. There is no free video of ‘Stephanie’s Labour’ on offer (which instantly put a stop to my husband attending another antenatal class). The only graphic pictures are painted in words, which, in their reading, I hope will give you a clearer picture of what you want. Cartoons from my talented Times colleague Jonathan Pugh also attempt to lighten a subject that you may feel is unlightenable (little do you know yet that if you could only laugh your way through labour, your birth might be trouble free).
After my first baby, I used to joke to the newly pregnant that ‘birth was over-rated’. I had had a typical ‘natural’ birth with plenty of medical intervention – IV drip, syntocinon to strengthen contractions, foetal monitoring, epidural, stitches, syntometrine injection to deliver the placenta. I didn’t understand why medics and midwives were intent on this sort of delivery as being the holy grail for women. OK, I got to leave the hospital earlier than the women who had caesareans, and I didn’t have to wear the ugly white legwarmers to prevent blood clots, but I was still waddling around with the rest of the ward, feeling like I had been bucked off a rodeo bronco.
I laughed cynically at the tales of Sheila Kitzinger describing birth as a giant orgasm, and at my friends who were forgoing pain relief for a more intense experience. I had yet to understand that while my delivery was described as ‘vaginal’ (an adjective I loathe, so I have kept its use to the bare minimum in this book), there was little that was ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ about it. (‘Normal childbirth is now the recognized medical term for birth without intervention; ‘natural’ is out of fashion.) I had had glimpses of what it might have been like – giggling uncontrollably with my girlfriend Lisa in the delivery room and connecting strongly with my midwife before the epidural needle was put in – but nothing that suggested an epiphany.
Well, the epiphany came at my second birth, driven not out of desire for something better but out of fear of something worse. When my doctor told me at my 30-week check-up that one of my twins was lying across my stomach, and therefore I would have to deliver them both in an operating theatre with 12 people present, I froze. And when he announced that the first could be delivered normally and the second by caesarean section, I didn’t sleep properly for two weeks. My dreams were full of glinting knives and open wounds, with people watching me perform an impossible act. There must be an alternative, I thought, falling back on a journalistic habit of researching the subject over and over, calling hospitals and organisations, speaking to anyone who would listen. I knew I didn’t want the huge upheaval of a major operation followed by newborn twins and a demanding toddler to care for. Where would family bonding fit into that? I felt resentful that I was being railroaded into something that I didn’t want or felt I needed. And now I understand that a bad birth is not one that ends up with an emergency caesarean, but one where you feel coerced into something that you don’t feel you need. My doctor’s prognosis was a frightening ending to an easy pregnancy. I was deeply unhappy, and set about on a journey to get the birth I wanted – a journey which inspired me to write this book.
Knowledge and support were my two weapons in the fight to do it my way. And, having achieved it, assisted by two remarkable midwives, I now understand that a good birth is the best present a mother can give herself. The less intervention from other people, the quicker the recovery (the quicker the recovery, the better for all the family). For all my talk of ‘birth being over-rated’, I suddenly understood that it was under-rated. Thousands of women are being denied the opportunity to have a really good birth experience because they are unaware of the politics of pregnancy. They don’t know they have rights despite current hospital protocols, shortage of midwives and cultural indifference to their plight.
Because of this indifference, the spiritual and psychological effects of being prodded and poked in hospital, or monitored like a bomb that is about to explode, have often been overlooked. The darker side of a poor birth experience may be mentioned in hushed whispers to health visitors or close friends, but new mothers are often so overwhelmed by the demands of looking after a new baby, or so grateful for its safe arrival, that they are unable to speak out for themselves at the time.
When a birth goes well, however, it is an ‘uplifting’, ‘empowering’ and ‘intoxicating’ experience, as all the birth stories in the second part of this book affirm. Someone who has felt in charge and in control of her birth is in a good frame of mind to bond with her baby, to nurture, nurse and wallow in those precious twilight few days that follow the beginnings of life. A good birth produces hormones, especially when breastfeeding, that shore up a woman’s reserves and help her to feel confident about herself and her own judgement for days, weeks, months and years afterwards. If a mother can look back at the birth and think, ‘Well, I certainly gave that my best shot,’ then she can take that confidence into dealing with the scraps in the playground that follow.
This book argues that mother and baby are so closely entwined from the beginning of the baby’s life, that anything that is good for the mother, is good for the baby, too. I don’t buy a doctor’s diagnosis that a pregnant woman is being ‘selfish’ if she wants something other than the standard hospital fare. If she’s looking after herself, she’s looking after her baby, too. It’s not for nothing that the flight crew on board an aircraft tell parents to put on their own oxygen masks first before helping their children.
The birth stories told here are all experiences with positive outcomes. This is not so the book joins the shelves of cuddly toys and sentimental parenting magazines, where impossibly beautiful models nurture perfect babies and tell of their hospital deliveries with exclamation marks and phrases like, ‘and then he just popped out!’ My view is that women will be given enough warnings and negative advice throughout their pregnancy from well-meaning medical professionals and tactless strangers without hearing more from me. I am neither a medical professional nor, I hope, a tactless stranger, just someone eager to pass on the advantages of getting it right first, second, third or fourth time around.
The women interviewed have all held on to their sense of self in spite of being bossed about by the establishment. Their stories are deeply personal and many are told in detail, sometimes with milligrammes of blood loss, in the hope that they might inspire others to try for something better. Some of the women have given birth abroad, in Spain and America, countries with even higher intervention rates than Britain. I hope their positive experiences will build up your confidence, as a few good birth stories did for me when I was casting around for alternatives to my twins’ birth.
There is nothing to fear from reading any of the following chapters, only something to gain. It may be the knowledge that a contraction at its most painful peak lasts only 90 seconds, or that labour might stop suddenly on arrival in hospital because of the rush of adrenalin that comes with being moved to a new and unfamiliar place. The experiences include my own, because my own fight to have my twins normally challenged most of the so-called ‘birth rights’ that are accepted as standard by our National Health Service. Like all the other stories included, it has a positive