And what I learnt from it.
I was a very 'chilled out' first time mum and didn't attend my first antenatal class until I was 35 weeks pregnant. It was here I learnt about the 'Cascade of Intervention' that occurs once care providers begin to offer augmentations to your birth. By this I mean induction of labour and pain medication. While these are thought of as societal norms, it was the first time I had been educated about the detrimental effects they could have on my birth, baby and bonding.
Then this happened...
You might say the midwife presenting the class was a bit of a hippy, but something she said really stuck with me. She said that the birth of my baby was my opportunity to know my true strength as a woman and tap into my innate feminine power. Wow! Something about that idea resonated with me so deeply. Not only could I give my baby a better start to life by staying intervention free, I could also empower myself with a truly transformational experience. So I was set. I wanted to have a natural birth. I began to do my own research and enrolled my husband and I in natural birthing courses to give myself the best opportunity to succeed. When the day, or should I say evening, finally arrived for the birth of my daughter, it happened in dramatic fashion. My waters broke Hollywood style as I rushed down the hall to the bathroom. I found myself calling, 'Don't slip in the hallway!' to my husband as he drowsily came to the realisation that our baby was coming. One of the other realizations that came with that gush of water was that I had meconium. My daughter had already done her first poo in utero. This meant I needed to go into the hospital straight away for monitoring and any hope of a water birth was off the table. But I could still have a natural birth. As soon as we were admitted to the hospital we were seen to by the attending doctor. She proceeded to talk about the necessity of induction and risk factors to the baby. I am so lucky that my husband came to all the birthing classes with me and knew exactly what I wanted for this birth. He went into bat for me, hard. I wasn't able to think clearly at this point and would have been very easily influenced by the perceived authority of decision making the doctor presented herself with. My husband, armed with all the latest research, questioned her reasoning and found that it had not much more behind it than we 'should' do it. Still today I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for his strength in that moment. So we waited. There was no risk to me or baby and my labour was allowed to progress naturally. As time went on, I began to progress but not as fast as the hospital staff would have liked. And as labour became more intense they kept offering me different interventions and medications to 'help' me along even though I had stipulated in my birth plan that I did not want interventions. I tried for as long as possible to refuse, knowing deep down this was not what I wanted for my baby or myself. Throughout the process, I was using gas as a pain management tool, it was working sufficiently and I was satisfied with that. But my contractions still weren't hitting the time frames dictated by the hospital and talk of my baby being in distress begun to occur. The midwife also expressed his (yes, I had a male midwife) concerns that I would be too tired and too weak to continue for much longer. So I agreed to have synthetic oxytocin. This is the drug typically used to bring on labour in women who have a scheduled induction. I was given it via a drip to strengthen my contractions and give them more consistency. Well, it definitely worked! My contractions became so intense and frequent that I was in more pain for longer with shorter rest periods to prepare for the next wave. But I still wasn't dilating. Even though my contractions were now meeting the hospital's expectations, my cervix wasn't. I had 4 cm to go. But by now, I really wasn't coping with the pain of artificial contractions. I was still dead against an epidural, but the next step was morphine. At this point, my resolve had started to break down and my husband just wanted to support my decisions, so we went with it. Within 10 minutes of the injection, I was fully dilated and transitioning into the birthing stage of labour. Within what seemed like no time at all, I could feel the head of my baby travelling down the birth canal. But right as I could feel her crowning, I stopped. I was scared. I could feel that I was going to tear and I stopped trying to birth my baby. This was something I hadn't worked through. And it got to me right at that pivotal birthing moment. My midwife then started to use fear tactics of his own to try and get me to re-engage in the process. Which I guess worked in the end because before long I was holding my baby girl. I was exhausted, doped up on morphine and in a complete daze. After the obstetrician had briefly inspected her for signs of ingested meconium, the midwife put my daughter on my chest and she was perfect. She found her way to my breast unencumbered which was so lucky, as the morphine hadn't had time to reach her and she was awake enough to attach on her own. I did it. Not exactly the way I had planned, but I did it.
As the birth of my second baby drew nearer, I began to reflect on the birth of my daughter. What did I love about the birth and what did I want to do differently? I was so proud of myself and my husband but I knew that I really wanted to have my son completely intervention free, so I had to look closely at the moments that I would change. Regardless of how I was treated by hospital staff, there is one thing that only I control that I needed to seriously work on. Fear. If we go back through my daughter's birth story, there are four pivotal moments where my fear was the primary cause of a less than satisfying outcome. The first was fear of the hospital. I hadn't consciously addressed the fact that I associated hospitals with illness, injury and death. I didn't feel safe there and as I was in the public system, I had not met the hospital staff in charge of my care even once before. I know now that this caused my 'failure to progress'. The second was fear of harm to my baby. I didn't trust my decision making. I was so afraid that if I didn’t do what the hospital staff wanted, I was putting her at risk. And this was only compounded by those dreaded words of ‘fetal distress’ being thrown around. The third was the fear that I wasn't strong enough to birth my baby naturally. As labour progressed and more options were given to me to 'make it easier' the more I doubted my capacity to do what my body was designed to do. The fourth was the fear of pain and injury. I knew there would be pain associated with birth but I didn't think I would be so scared of it that I would literally stall my own labour. It's amazing to think the body has the power to stop what seems to be the unstoppable. So I had released so much cortisol and adrenaline during my labour that it signaled to my body that it wasn’t safe to birth. And to be honest, a lot of this fear was born out of incorrect societal beliefs that had been subconsciously weaseling its way inside my head for years. The screaming women giving birth on their backs, legs high, on the TV or the horror stories we women feel the need to tell each other when we see other pregnant women. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way.
There is a growing movement of women who understand that birth is not a medical event. And the more naturally it is allowed to occur the better the outcomes will be for mother and baby. It reduces birth trauma and promotes higher levels of bonding and birth satisfaction.
It is so easy to buy into the societal belief that women aren't strong enough to birth their own babies. But the fact is, that simply isn't true! We have so much innate strength and body wisdom to draw on. We just need to release our conditioned fears and step into our power. Women have been successfully having natural births for literally thousands of years! Why is it that in the last 100 years we've been made to feel like we can't?
Overcoming this idea became such a passion for me that when I fell pregnant with my son, I knew I had to do things differently. I worked on my body, mind and spirit to find my true nature, my true birthing strength and gave birth to him at home in the shower. I literally birthed him on my hands and knees and pulled him to my chest myself.
But that’s another story for another time.
I just want you to know that if I can, you can. You were made for this.
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