Deep Breathing is the key to Easy Birthing !!

Hullo, all, I'm back again! What better thread to break my Hipforums fast! Some thoughts, based on my experiences.....

When everything is perfect; healthy, well fed mama, well positioned baby, ample pelvic room, good prenatal care, relaxed calm environment, birth goes perfectly, 95% of the time. In Maggie's case, an android pelvis, which is basically a pelvis which is shaped more like a mans, normal, physiological birth is impossible. There is simply not enough room to let even a small baby out. Without a c-section, you have a dead baby and a severly damaged, if not dead, mama.
In an out of hospital birth, with a skilled attendant and a low risk mother, the morbidity and mortality rates for both mama and baby are actually better than planned hospital births with low risk mothers. Real, true, honest to God emergencies are rare, and most complications send out red-flags long before there's a train wreck. And real, true, honest to God emergencies can happen anywhere, home, birth center, and hospital. And even though hospitals have tons of life-saving equipment, babies, and mamas, die in the hospital as well,and sometimes the baby, though still alive, is severly compromised. Our local hospitals' NICU has on average over 50 babies, born in hospital, any given night. Many make it through just fine, but some do die, and some live with severe disabilities. Being in a hospital didn't save them, and in many cases (iatrogenic infections, prolapsed cords from artificial rupture of membranes, fluid in the lungs from c-sections, jaundice from medications, bradycardia from narcotics, etc, etc,) being in the hospital is what caused the problem. And some babies die for no apparent reason, those still born, perfect, beautiful babies whose deaths have no explanation.

Now, I am NOT a "home birth at all costs" sort of midwife, and I will not hesitate to transport to hospital if I feel the situation is beyond my skills and training. And I do appreciate and take comfort in knowing that there is a hospital near by with epidurals and pitocin and a fully equipped OR with skilled surgeons available, and I do make use of them when it is necessary. I see the value in all interventions, as a useful tool that can make a wonderful difference in outcome when used judiciously. I also recognize that a live, healthy baby and mama is the ultimate goal. So, in my practice, I carefully screen each mama individually, refer out those who are too high risk for an OOH birth, start out with no interventions, and after careful consideration of risk vs benefit, apply each intervention as needed. Most of the time, birth goes perfectly, with me needing to do nothing but wait, monitor baby's heart rate and wrap the baby in a towel when born. Sometimes I have to use my skills, and check dilation, and baby's position, and move mama around, start an IV of fluids or antibiotics, or recussitate a newborn. Even more rarely, I have to pull out my bag of tricks and really manage a birth, like with a shoulder dystocia or a post-partum hemmorage, and sometimes I have to recognize when this just isn't going to work safely and bring mama to the hospital because she really NEEDS the pitocin, or the fetal monitor, or the epidural, or the vacuum, or the surgery.

Just got called to a birth, so I'll finish this later!

Love ya, mean it, gotta run!

 

regardless of the horror stories you always hear about dead babies, the fact remains that 80% of the things that go wrong in childbirth in the hospital can be directly attributed to doctor interventions. There is a study at the WHO website showing this scary statistic, it's a pdf file I came across in my overzealous information-gathering prior to having a vbac. Sure, there really are people who need to give birth in the hospital, nobody is denying that. But there are many more people who have had things go wrong because they were in the hospital, myself included. And bringing out that dead baby scare tactic doesn't help anything, it only invalidates my feelings of trauma and inadequacy that were caused by the birth of my first child.


All my midwives did during my vbac was sit and watch quietly. They did doppler baby's heartbeat at several different times, to make sure she was handling the contractions and labor well, and then they left me alone to give birth the way my body knew how.

 

I have three children, and two of them were born vaginally, no pain meds, no epidurals, just deep breathing and visualization. One of my twins had to be taken by cesarean section.

 

Hey, Brighid. So good to see you back. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, Most of the time birth goes well, most of the time problems will give out red flags. Thank you.

As for the dead baby story. From what I heard, there may have been some red flags in this womyn's pregnancy, but she was a "home birth at any cost" advocate. She claims that there were NO red flags, I have heard a nurse who used to work for the doctors and midwive who attended her say otherwise. I think, although birth usually goes well, with no need for intervention, there are people who think that ALL problems with birth can be avoided by not going near a hospital, and I simply can't agree with that. The reason I posted a dead baby story is that I am still mourning this child, who didn't have to die. I have a right to care, despite her mother's "home birth at any cost" (and what a cost) mentality. I originally thought that this womyn was hoping to get pregnant. I have heard since that none of the midwives or home birth doctors in oru area will attend a home birth after an unexplainable fetal mortality, so she has chosen NOT to have any more children, because, from what I can see her "birth experience" is so important to her. I don't get that. Not at all.

If one can have a beautiful, non-interventionist, healthy vaginal birth, I think it is wonderful. But that doesn't say that there will always be situations where medical help is a neccesity. Not ALL births, but, in about 1-2-% (maybe less) of cases, you don't know until you lose the heart tones, that's all the red flags you get.

In my own case, the flag were there. I met Ina May a number of years ago, and she told me that without doing some exams while I was pregnant, she couldn't say for sure, but if what I said about my pelvis and labor problems were true, and she could verify them with an exam, if I had come to the Farm, I would have been one of the few who she would have sent to the local OBGYN for a hospital delivery.