My Outlook on Advice and My Vision for Birth

I think that every pregnant woman is keenly aware of how much advice is thrown at you from every different direction. Well-meaning advice, fear-based advice, good advice, ridiculous advice and so on. My Cherokee way, influenced heavily by my father's style, has been that you always listen respectfully to all advice given to you. But, you need to follow your own intuition and common sense to identify if that advice is meaningful to you. This always reminds me of one of my favorite Buddha quotes:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Giving advice is the same way. I am very unlikely to give advice unless it is requested; Even in my experiences and in this blog, I feel that fertility, pregnancy and parenting are intensely personal experiences. No one can tell you what your experience will be like. You may find commonality with some, but you will always differ in other ways. In this blog, I will share all of the information I learned, what resonated with me and where I chose to go with it on my journey. I do not expect that it will resonate the same way for everyone, but my hope is that they will feel encouraged and renewed for their own journey.

One of the biggest worries in my mind during the second trimester was when I thought forward to the birth experience. I had learned my whole life that this would be ridiculously painful, that it is incredibly hard for women to accomplish and that horrible, horrible things can naturally happen during it, including immense pain, tearing, an episiotomy, hemorrhaging and death. I watched all the movies - birth looked either comedic, with the women completely losing it, or birth was completely frightening and dangerous. Needless to say, this scared me. But that intuition I had started trusting told me something different. I started thinking about other cultures who had babies without all these medical interventions. My own mother had me (and I was around 10 pounds) without an epidural and lived to tell the tale. Watching my closest friends go through their own birth experiences and coming out on the other side unhappy made me really think about these beliefs I had internalized. Was this how birth was supposed to be? Or is there another way?

I had watched some documentaries on birth - things like Pregnant in America and the Business of Being Born. I was pretty dismayed by the statistics; while the World Health Organization recommends no more than 10 to 15% Caesarean sections for all births, we in America are easily twice that rate. What I learned from this research (and there were many articles on the topic) was that medical intervention in the U.S. had increased dramatically in women's birth experience for three main reasons that I garnered: 1) convenience - it is much more convenient for OBs to schedule the birth, rather than wait for the mother to progress through labor, 2) fear of lawsuits - performing medical interventions means that you tried everything to prevent a problem, and 3) money - medical interventions pay more than letting the mother have her baby naturally. Many OBs blame the moms; they say they elected for a c-section, for inductions and for epidurals. While I do believe that this occurs, I think that if your vision of birth (described above) was the cultural one we have been fed our whole lives AND your OB suggested that your birth might be dangerous or painful, then of course, you would opt for medical intervention. Now this isn't to say that the medical interventions aren't necessary for some women and that we aren't incredibly grateful that they are there. It also isn't to say that all OBs and doctors have it out for women and are blatantly irresponsible - there are many that are absolutely wonderful and supportive. But something is toxic in our culture if we are closing in on 40% C-Section rates, as well as incredibly high induction and epidural rates, all which carry significant medical risks. Why were these rates so low just a generation ago? The history showed us that even though grandma and mom could handle large babies, this generation could not - we are told immediately to have a C-Section because of the risks. The newest thing I had been hearing from everyone was "Your fluids are low, so we have to do a C-Section or an induction." Again, this is just blatantly not true - ask any midwife, the World Health Organization or an OB in a country with low C-Section rates (which by the way have LOWER infant and mother mortality rates than us). All of the way we in the U.S. handled birth felt wrong to me. Birth to me felt like it should be an extension of what I had experienced in pregnancy - not all fun and enjoyable, but something that I could find meaning in - that I could experience to the fullest and be satisfied with at the end, no matter which way my journey took me.

Then I happened upon the Hypnobirthing of Connecticut website where I watched videos of women giving birth in a calm, relaxed and positive way. I watched the first video and I literally started crying. Now, I don't think that hypnobirthing is for everyone even though I love it intensely and I will talk about it in another blog post, but what impacted me so much at that moment was the images of birth being healing, spiritual and transformative. I wasn't convinced that there was no pain involved, but just to see that it was possible, at least for some women to have a positive and empowering birth experience led me down a path of complete change in my life.

I reflected on these two experiences. Our typical one was being molded to hospital bed with needles in you, in a horrific hospital gown, feeling exposed and humiliated with people looking at you, putting their hands inside you and telling you what to do with your body and your baby. I could not help but reflect on my previous sexual assault history and realize that that experience was not only likely to make me feel dis-empowered, it was likely to re-trigger my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that had been at bay for years. The other possibility was to have a birth where I felt empowered, calm and safe - that could potentially heal my past trauma, could connect me with my body, baby and husband in a way that I had never felt before. I decided that night that I would seek this latter birth. I was not naive; I knew that it was a possibility that things could go wrong in a labor, that I may need medical intervention and that the ideal birth may not be something I could achieve. But I would not let people use fear, coercion and rhetoric against me in order to take my power away. Been there, done that. Not doing it again.