The Mule

Pregnant women are offered medical interventions so often that it's almost hard to imagine getting through an entire pregnancy and birth without having one. Whether it's injections, induction, or an intravenous drip, there are so many choices for women to make, and often they feel, quite understandably, that the best choice is to place their trust in the experts, who are, after all, offering them 'evidence based care'. But if midwives and obstetricians are offering 'evidence based care' - that is to say, they are making their recommendations based on good quality research - why then does the advice that individual clinicians offer, and the policies that individual hospitals and trusts implement, vary so greatly? A new report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) suggests that the disparity between hospital statistics has finally come to their attention, although I'm not clear why it has taken them so long to notice informat...

Freedom for Birth, a new documentary film about human rights in childbirth, was screened in over a thousand locations across the world last Thursday, and I was there, keen to take part in a 'Mother's Revolution' supported by leading lights from the field - Ina May Gaskin, Sheila Kitzinger, Michel Odent - all calling for women to 'take back birth'. The film took as its focus the plight of Agnes Gereb, the Hungarian midwife currently under house arrest for attending women in illegal home births, and the related case of Ternovszky vs. Hungary, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that every woman has the right to choose where and how she gives birth. Quite clearly, there are some circumstances in which the compromise of freedom and the violation of human rights are tangible, for example when imprisonment is involved, or, as in another case touched on in the film, a woman's baby was taken away on the grounds of negligence because she has refused med...

This time three years ago, my first baby was just a few days old.  And I can't help but recall the story, now worn thin with telling, of how she was born eighteen days past her 'due date'. Expected on the 21st December, it was to be a long and more than usually stressful festive season, as the days and nights of waiting wore on.  At a time of year when I was more inclined towards numbing myself with a mixture of socially acceptable 11am sherry drinking and, if that failed, a spot of monstrous overeating, I found myself nearly ten months pregnant and able to do neither.  Ladies and gentlemen, this was The Christmas I Cried.   When not lying on the sofa surrounded by used tissues, I spent my time eating pineapples, running up and down the stairs, going for bumpy car rides, having acupuncture, and drinking large amounts of castor oil, which, for those of you who are curious, tastes like melted tea lights, and makes you shit through the eye of a needle.  Th...