delivery

Perhaps not the best item for the childless girl in the crowd to comment on, but I tend to agree with this:

We need to celebrate birth as a normal event, not a surgical condition in waiting,” he says. “We need to give pregnant women the care and the support that they rightly deserve in this country.”

I’m not saying we should go back to home deliveries. But I don’t think we treat pregnancy like a normal event these days, either. By wanting to control absolutely everything, do we actually make it harder for everyone?

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Véronique adds: Being allowed to give birth at home is not considered “going back” in any way. In fact, when I moved from Quebec to Ontario and was able to give birth at home with a qualified midwife – as opposed to the “self-taught” midwife my Quebec friend had to use. Call me over-regulated but “self-taught” is not something I want to see on any of my healthcare professionals’ resume – I saw it as progress in healthcare. I had three children at home and three in hospital (one baby with a family doc, one with an Ob-Gyn and one with a midwife). Each experience was unique but the home births were by far the most beautiful and empowering experiences of my life.

In any case, I find it interesting that we are now talking about giving women freedom of movement during childbirth to reduce our ridiculously high c-section rate. My oldest daughter has seen the birth of two of her siblings: one at home with no medical interventions and one in hospital with induction and constant fetal monitoring. The attending obstetrician, when it was all over, asked her what she thought of witnessing the birth of her baby sister. Without missing a beat she said: “It looked a lot easier when she wasn’t lying on her back!” She told me recently that when she saw the hospital bed her first thought was: “How is she supposed to move around on a bed that small?”

So basically it makes perfect sense to a 13-year-old girl with no medical training but gynecologists are still wondering…

I have the great privilege of living a life of leisure these days, recuperating from a minor surgery on a generous dose of Tylenol 3. As if looking and talking like a boxer who had one fight too many wasn’t annoying enough, we’ve added uselessness to nuisance by moving the TV in my bedroom where I can indulge in endless re-runs of A Baby Story on TLC . I have a love-hate relationship with A Baby Story. It portrays a very one-dimensional image of labour and delivery: Woman goes into labour, woman gets epidural, woman naps while man paces around the room, woman gets pitocin, woman turns beet red as she pushes with her face instead of her lower body (which she can no longer feel), MD thinks “baby never gonna get out” and orders life-saving c-section. The End.

Today however, I found myself watching an unusual episode of natural labour on TLC. And by “natural” I don’t mean the kind where the mother isn’t wearing any make-up. I mean the drug-free, noisy, sweaty but oh-how-elating kind of labour. I don’t know if it was the codeine or the sleep deprivation but I found myself huffing and puffing and cheering the mother on. When the baby was finally born, I started to cry. It was so intense and powerful; I could not believe I had also done it. Me? That strong? Five times??? No way!

What would happen if we started seeing childbearing and childbirth as empowering rather than debilitating? If a woman’s ability to bear and deliver children was seen as a capital instead of a liability? If childbirth was seen as an integral part of women’s dignity rather than an obstacle to the realization of their full potential?

I wonder.

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Tanya adds: You know, I have to agree that the most powerful moment of my life was the hour’s worth of pushes it took to deliver my daughter. Despite the epidural (I opted to look up to women who delivered naturally rather than be one of them), a woman often becomes acutely aware of her reproductive power at the climax of the labour process. Women really are amazing, as cliché as that may sound.

Birth control

Ladies, do you know what your bodies can do?

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