The Mule

I once read somewhere that the goal of psychotherapy is to reveal the secrets we are keeping, even from ourselves. We all do this. We all keep a few bits of reality out of sight, sometimes because they are painful, but more often, perhaps, simply because to acknowledge them would be a difficult admission of a lifetime of misguided beliefs, misdirected energy, and mistakes. We see this a lot with the birth issue. Sometimes it's as if simply talking about birth in a positive way is too much for people to tolerate. The cultural attitude that birth is dangerous and downright unpleasant has become so engrained that many people seem to no longer see it as an attitude at all - they see it as a solid FACT. To challenge this would involve accessing ways of thinking that, whilst they may exist, are completely beyond everyday awareness, like rooms in a mansion that have been put under dust sheets and long forgotten. In the media, journalists with the power and influence for positive cha...

On average around 20% of UK women have their labours induced, some for medical reasons, others because they are 'post dates', that is, they have gone a certain number of days past their EDD (Estimated Due Date). How many days your care providers will 'let you' go past your EDD before pressuring for induction varies from trust to trust, but often women find that conversations about induction start on or even before their EDD, with 'sweeps' being routinely offered to encourage labour to start, and difficult to navigate meetings arranged with Obstetricians in which women are talked to about 'increasing risk'. Getting to the bottom of the actual reality of the risk of going past 41 or 42 weeks is tricky, mostly because so many women don't actually get this far. Midwife Thinking has a great article here about the balance of risks a woman contemplating agreeing to induction must consider. Many women feel under enormous pressure once the conversations...

Every generation likes to think they're free, and often only the clarity of hindsight reveals just how restricted they actually were. My mother, for example, thought, like many women in the 1970's, that it was the very pinnacle of freedom to have her labour induced, to be able to choose on which day of the week her baby came, and to be in a hospital which offered 'state-of-the-art' care for her and her baby. Looking back on it now, she can see just how far from freedom she truly was: shaved, enema'd and pethidined, with no formal talk of consent, and later, ushered sternly back to bed by Matron as she wandered the hospital corridors, drug-hazy and looking for the baby they had taken from her. Nearly forty years later, that baby - me - is pregnant for the third time, and wondering - am I free? Do I have full freedom of choice to have the birth I really want and need? Can I feel assured that anything that is 'done to me' in the name of medical science will ...

This article has now been published in the Huffington Post. Tapping into the twenty first century zeitgeist is easy, and a bit fun - you just have to tap into Google. For example, enter ‘very scared of’ … and you’ll see the top four things that people are very scared of, right now, like this: Many women are scared, afraid, terrified of giving birth. Some – as many as one in ten – suffer from Tocophobia , a morbid fear of giving birth that leads them to seek elective caesarians if they can. Others, while they may not have a diagnosable psychological disorder, are still extremely anxious and fearful about the task of bringing their baby into the world. It’s not really surprising that so many women feel this way. The media portrayal of birth ranges from the rather ridiculous soap opera version – 'woman looking terrified and sweaty delivers baby in pub drama' – to programs like One Born Every Minute – 'woman looking terrified and sweaty begs for dru...

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...

If you gave birth recently, did you feel you had real freedom? Freedom to choose where you gave birth, who was present, what interventions took place and how you delivered your baby? Were you given access to all of the facts needed to make your choices truly informed? Who was the most powerful person in the room at the moment of birth? And did the experience leave you feeling exhilarated, disappointed, or downright traumatised? These questions are currently being considered on behalf of all mothers as part of a global movement to ‘take back birth’ and reclaim women’s power in the birth place. ‘The freedom in a country can be measured by the freedom of birth’, states Agnes Gereb , the midwife currently imprisoned in Hungary and held up as ‘the epitome of the very worst of what’s happening in birth today’ by the makers of Freedom for Birth , a UK based film about human rights in childbirth to be globally screened on September 20th. Over in the US, where caesarian rates are more tha...

Recently I wrote about the products marketed to girls and what the Bailey Review refers to the increasingly 'sexualised wallpaper' that surrounds our children today. I like the way this idea of 'wallpaper' neatly acknowledges that the imagery that surrounds us can and does have a huge impact on the way we think, feel and live our lives. This got me thinking about other wallpapers, fabrics, and trimmings that decorate our world and the way in which they might be impacting on us, either consciously or unconsciously. Pregnant with my first child, about five years ago, I was terrified. My whole life I don't think I had ever heard anyone say a single positive thing about the act of giving birth, and to me it seemed an impossible horror. I knew that I absolutely had to do it, and often compared my situation to a person about to parachute jump from a plane, only they - lucky bastards - actually had the option to duck out at the last minute, which I didn't. I wasn...

This week on the blog I'm running a Birth Story Special.  Yesterday I published Michelle's story , of a planned home birth that ended in an emergency caesarian. Today I have decided to share the story of my own first birth, also a planned home birth, that evolved into a hospital induction and forceps delivery.   NICE guidelines  state that induction is likely to lead to a labour that is more painful, and more likely to end in epidural, instrumental delivery or caesarian. And yet i n the UK today around 20% of births are induced.  Many women find that they are coming under pressure to accept induction from around 40 weeks, and often there are confusing messages regarding the safety of continuing the pregnancy beyond their due date.  Of course, there is not a great deal of hard evidence about what happens if women are left to go into labour spontaneously beyond  41 or even 42 weeks, as most women are not 'allowed' or encouraged to get this far. Many wom...