Politics of Birth Archives - The Good Birth Project

Follow Friday | About Birth

While there is no shortage of online resources for new parents, not all advice is created equal. That’s why I thought it’d be helpful to share with you two of my favorite and most trusted resources on all things birth related. Do you have a go-to resource, not on this list? Let me know in the comments!

1: Rebecca Dekker | I consider Evidence-Based Birth one of the MOST IMPORTANT resources for expectant parents. Rebecca Dekker, a nurse researcher with her Ph.D., did a TON of research as a result of her first birth experience (which was not good).

Evidence-Based Birth provides us all with the most current, high-quality research evidence around birth practices When you want to know what the evidence REALLY is around any subject/issue in childbirth, go straight here. Print the research evidence one-pagers to bring to your OB/Midwife to start the conversation when they tell you something is “routine” or “best” practice.

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2: Birth Monopoly | BirthMonopoly.com was started by Cristen Pascucci, former public affairs person turned into birth rights advocate, after her not good birth experience (see the pattern here?). No pressure, but It would be really good for you to have a sense of your rights and options in birth BEFORE you go into the hospital.

Here are a couple of examples (quoting Cristen here) of where care providers (maybe unaware of the legality) are violating your informed consent (which is often confused with the consent form). They present things as routine procedures and not optional:

“Okay sweetie, I’m going to give you your IV now.”

Ok. First of all, “okay sweetie” is patronizing and infantilizing. You are an adult. Next, do you want an IV? Were you told about the pros and cons of an IV as well as the alternatives? Have you consented or politely declined an IV as a result of this conversation?

“Now, if you haven’t progressed in another hour, we’ll get you started on something to help you along.”

Wait. Why do I need to progress in an hour? And what is the “something” you’d like to start me on? What are the pros and cons of holding off? What are alternatives we can try to move my labor along if we’d like to do that?

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BONUS: This Brazilian OB dances with his mothers in labor to bring the baby down! Anyone danced with their OB in labor???

From “Natural Childbirth” Devotee to Doula | What I Learned As A Young Mother

I once was a “natural childbirth” devotee. I was teaching Lamaze classes before I’d even had my own children. I fit the perfect prototype; grew up in the 60’s (minus the drugs), vegetarian since sixteen, attended Hampshire College at the beginning, wore only sweaters that I knit myself and raised my black lab, River, before I became pregnant with my first.

I approached my labor as serious training. I had danced professionally for a living so I took ballet class every day, swam a mile and ran through my fifth month of pregnancy.

I labored for thirty-six hours, the last ten of which were driven by Pitocin. I made it through every contraction, fighting my way through the pain. This was familiar. Give me any physical challenge and I could and would make my way through it. But I was adamant with everyone in the room that there would be no drugs.

I never made it past three centimeters after all that work and ended up with a C Section for “failure to progress”. I’ll never know if I had tried an epidural as a last-ditch effort to avoid a C Section if I would have slept and dilated. If only someone had helped me connect the dots that I would ultimately have an epidural for a C Section so why not give it a try beforehand?

Dogma. I learned so much about my own dogma from my first birth. My dogma around no drugs left me without being open to utilizing a tool that might have prevented my C Section.

From then on, when helping people prepare for their births, we talk a lot about staying flexible in order to make decisions that are aligned with your goals, especially when things aren’t going the way you imagined.

I refer to what I call the “leaving no stone unturned” question. Ask yourself – when you are in labor, what does leaving no stone unturned mean to you around what you are willing to try in order have the birth that’s right for you? It also means trusting yourself to know when you feel you’ve tried enough for you.

Another way to look at it is this: if you were able to have hindsight in advance of your birth and ask yourself “what would have happened if…?”, and then try to take care of your “if’s” in advance. It helps to alleviate second-guessing yourself at the other end.

What would one of your “ifs” be?

Altered States…

I am now being invited to attend the births of my eldest daughter Indy’s friends.

Wow.

These are the same girls (now women) who sat at my kitchen table in high school eating homemade chocolate chip cookies while we discussed birth control and heartache.

Those who come to the house for Good Birth Class (instead of meeting online – I DO work with Millenials) now sit pregnant, on the very same couch they made out on. Talk about altered states…

Last month, I had the honor of helping to usher in baby Jack. Jack’s mama, Molly, has been Indy’s best friend from the time Molly was 18 months old. I helped Molly’s mother labor 27 years ago to bring in Molly’s brother.

Again, wow.

In the midst of all of this, I am keenly aware that we are currently living in an altered state…

What keeps me afloat in these unsettling times are the babies; the reminder of this continuity over millennia, of the repetitive renewal and infinite possibility that comes with each birth.

I need to say this. We need to protect our mothers and babies. We need to safeguard their health and their passage in our communities, our country, our continents and our cosmos.

Birth is sacred and it preserves our humanity. It is the key.

Peace on earth really does begin at birth. I see it there every time…

Let me know if you want to talk or have coffee. I am here.

My Black Panther Days of Labor and Delivery Are Back

I’ve seen childbirth in this country go through some real changes. By the time I got involved, the childbirth revolution of the 60’s and early 70’s had already established (in most places) that women could have their husbands or partners with them in labor and delivery and they could choose not to be drugged; the birth of (forgive me) Natural Childbirth

In the later 80’s and 90’s, we childbirth educators were teaching expectant couples to beware the pitfalls of routine procedures like IVs, continuous fetal monitoring, artificial rupture of membranes, laboring in bed, pushing flat on one’s back, episiotomy, repeat cesarean section, and how to advocate for themselves.

The birth plan was created. We encouraged people to list their “preferences” around which birth procedures they wanted and which they wanted to avoid in advance of labor and delivery. Seems reasonable, right, not to have to have some discourse on the nature of episiotomy while you’ve got a human head pressing on your rectum?

Couples were hiring me as an advocate then; to make sure that the things they didn’t want done weren’t and that the things they did were. And I endeavored to do so without creating any conflict in the labor room, which was an industrious goal given hospital politics.

And while we worked so hard for and won the opportunity for women to create the childbirth experience of their choosing – doctor, midwife, hospital, birth center, home birth, unmediated, medicated and VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean), there are a ton of mixed messages out there – from all sides.

In this medical/legal climate, we tell OB’s “We’re hiring you to give us a perfect baby and a perfect mother and if you don’t, we’ll sue you”. (This is partly how we all have come to make some sense of the fact that the practice of obstetrics in this country has become so industrialized and full of interventions.) The inherent message to expectant women is that the OB’s are not to be trusted.

The prevailing message from the childbirth community to expectant mothers is that natural birth, now referred to as “normal” birth, is the “best” birth. We’ve gone way beyond the great, International Childbirth Education Association’s (ICEA) slogan, “freedom of choice based on knowledge of alternatives”. The pressure on a pregnant woman today is to do so much research on childbirth before she has her baby that she could write a doctoral dissertation. And if she doesn’t, she is not being responsible. A woman needs to know all the risks and benefits before she makes any decisions (otherwise she can’t make an informed decision and that’s bad). She is to advocate for herself, even if she is not sure what she is to be advocating for or knows how to do so. A woman is irresponsible if she has a planned cesarean section or chooses an induction or an epidural, no matter how she arrived at that choice. We judge each other for how we give birth, how we parent, whether we stay at home or go back to work.

Here’s what I’m protesting now:

It’s unfair to presume that evidence based medicine means that it’s best practice for every one of us. It’s unfair to presume that every woman is in a place where she needs or wants or is capable at that time of “physiologic birth”. It’s unfair to presume that every woman needs or wants the “journey” and is better off for it. It’s unfair to promote that the best way to give birth is “normal” birth. Normal according to whom?

If we are really going to make a difference in maternity care in this country we have to ask and listen to what each individual mother needs to feel safe and secure. We need to respect each woman’s own perception of her threshold for pain and not presume that if she had only done enough research and/or had the ”right” support, she would do without medication. We need to meet each woman just where she is in her life and not dismiss her choices because she just doesn’t know how empowering a “normal” delivery is. We would emphasize that it is “better” to do whatever – breast feed, bottle feed, practice attachment parenting, let your baby cry it out, stay at home, go back to work, have your baby in daycare or in-home childcare, better to do anything because that individual mother has come to determine that it is better for her. We’d empower each woman by helping her figure out what she wants for herself and support her efforts to get there, not presume that we know what is better for her because we have the evidence based research to prove it.

We have to really listen. And to truly listen, I believe, is to do so without agenda, judgment or dogma.

The new revolution? It’s not really any different than the old one – it’s still about tolerance, respect and trust.