I’m doing this series in the middle of the COVID-19 issue and there is a similarity in how we feel about risks in childbirth and COVID.
1) We can be terrified that we’ll catch COVID or have a ‘risk’ in pregnancy/birth and that death will ensue.
2) We poo-poo this virus and any risk.
3) We do everything we can to avoid COVID or pregnancy/birth risks and hope like hell we don’t have either
4) We may catch COVID or have a pregnancy/birth risk and have no idea what to do about it and hope like hell death doesn’t happen
Yet pregnancy and childbirth are very, very different from COVID. As you can read in the two links below there are many ‘risks’ in pregnancy and birth.
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/delivery-complications#complications
https://medlineplus.gov/childbirthproblems.html … list of 12 ‘problems’
Here is where the childbirth conversation has gotten so bonkers since the mid1970s and continuing to today. To simplify the confusion let me put it this way.
1) The Natural Birth Movement pretty much has a slogan: ‘Pregnancy and childbirth are normal (natural and physiological) life events that rarely require medical care’. Added to that: Birth is safe unless proven to be otherwise. These two fundamental mission statements are what has led to the present Childbirth Trend … Birth Plans (say ‘no’ to medical interventions that are imposed on women and unnecessary) and Direct Entry Midwifery because a ‘nurse midwife’ is a Med-wife and not a ‘true’ midwife. In other words, if pregnancy and birth rarely require medical care then midwives don’t need to have medical training and women should just trust birth.
2) The Medical Profession pretty much has a slogan: ‘You never know what your birth will be like’ and ‘You won’t have a root-canal without pain relief’. Basically, the medical profession doesn’t want women to ‘suffer’ so they provide medical pain relief. And, the medical profession does assessments, monitoring and procedures as a way to determine ‘risk’ and to try to reduce or prevent ‘risks’ from becoming problems. Birth is safe after the fact.
Risks are confusing. What to do about risks is more confusing. Having any control over risks is less confusing when we have even the simplest skills to cope, manage, work with, deal with, handle, stay on top of and feel in control of ourselves when risks are part of life.
People who live with all sorts of risks do better when they have skills that help them cope. Skills come in many forms.
I’ll talk about the Birthing Better skills developed in the early 1970s by hundreds of ‘high-risk’ families and what they did.
www.birthingbetter.org