I met a friend for breakfast this morning at a lovely little cafe on the shores of a local lake. My friend is a
Calmbirth practitioner and I have had 30 years in private midwifery practice. We are both passionate about sharing information and exploring ideas about birth and parenting with couples. Our conversation involved a lot of animated discussion on the subjects dear to our hearts, including why women chose the care they do.
How women and their partners think about the birth of their babies and choose their care provider and their birth place is intriguing. Women who sought out my midwifery care wanted to know who was going to be with them during their labour and birth, so building trust and understanding during pregnancy was an integral part of their plan. They wanted to ensure privacy and be in control of what happened to them and their baby. They wanted continuity of care into the postnatal period for support. How their baby was born was something they considered deeply; they wanted their babies to be born gently, into a loving environment and for themselves to be as involved as possible. These parents desired to be the first to touch their babies; they sought minimal intervention and to discover the sex of their children themselves. They were fully aware that their baby was a conscious being who participated fully in the labour and birth experience.
According to my friend, women who access her services don't realise there is any other choice but private or public medical care. They didn't consider public maternity care and didn't generally know about midwifery models of care. As they are generally privately insured, they want to "get their monies worth" by employing an obstetrician and having a private room in the hospital. We discussed the way that employing a surgeon usually means you will end up with interventions and surgery.
I told my friend about a video on birth trauma that
Gloria Lemay had shared on Facebook (see below) and a post
Birth Abuse by Navel Gazing midwife. Routine obstetric management of birth is shown in the video. The video is a compilation of clips are from women's own birth videos collected by a chiropractor and made into this short film. For those not habituated to medical care at birth, these scenes may be distressing, so please take care of yourself when watching this information.
Warning: If you are pregnant, it may be best to give this video a miss as you are better off watching beautiful birth films that inspire and support your birth vision.
Birth Trauma from
Centre Quiroprà ctic Molins on
Vimeo.
Both those items and the accompanying comments have really troubled me. That women still emerge from their birthing experiences feeling like they have been abused is a dreadful and indefensible underbelly of maternity care. I left the public system thirty years ago to go into private midwifery practice because of the abuse I'd observed. I've written about that in my
master's dissertation.
My friend told me she had been very roughly examined vaginally during the birth of her first baby and how devasted she had felt after that experience. She told me that she felt it was the beginning of her slide into severe postnatal depression with that child and the source of the tremendous fear that she felt with her second pregnancy. My friend said that she didn't stand up for herself at the time and as she was a midwife she 'should have'. Then she said something that really illuminated the whole issue of birth trauma and abuse for me. She said "I should have stood up for myself, but I didn't have the words to do it..."
I thought about the way that women trust their health care practitioner to do the right thing by them and believe their practitioner has their best interests at heart. Obviously, when the practitioner is rough, or behaves differently to what the woman expects, the woman goes into a shock-like biobehavioural state and has a
cognitive dissonance experience. Cognitive dissonance experiences are usually difficult to put into words at the time.
A comment on Navel Gazing midwife's blog explored the
Roots of birth abuse. The comment sheds some light on the reasons why birth abuse occurs. The big question is how do people (partners, family members, midwives, obstetric nurses, doulas, registrars, paediatricians etc) accept these atrocities committed in the name of obstetric 'care'? Mind you, there is conversation in the various tea rooms across the land that revolves around these issues and I know many doulas lament what they observe in labour wards.
Perhaps in the main, the focus of wanting the baby 'out' and 'alive' means the 'how' and the 'why' pales into insignificance until we 'wake up' to the actual brutality of what is accepted as routine obstetrical management. Until we wake up, we are blind to that reality. Blindness to anything other than that which the person is focused on is called
'inattentional blindness'. An explanation for inattentional blindness can be found in the latest research on how certain neurons
actively suppress visual data streaming into the brain. This research informs us that we are only aware of approximately 1% of what's going on around us.
My friend and I discussed ways to provide information to women and men about birth options and ways to raise consciousness about birth choices and effects. How do we help this generation of parents to understand that abdominal birth and vaginal birth are not equal; that the choices they make for their care will have profound effects on the outcomes and their experiences? How do we create a culture where violence against women and babies, even that form of violence couched in terms of 'obstetric care' is unacceptable? How do we lay the foundation of kind, respectful woman centred care in maternity services? How women are treated in their most vulnerable state during childbearing provides a template for how society treats women generally. How do we help parents recognise and engage with the spirit and consciousness of the child that is embodying and being born?
