100% Of Pregnant Women Will Give Birth PDF

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100% Of Pregnant Women Will Give Birth

Something changed in childbirth in the 1980s … women started judging their own and other women’s births.

That’s right. Women finally had ‘choices’ and able to create a Birth Plan. There grew an active Natural Birth Movement that was loud and organized and brought about wonderful opportunities for other pregnant women.

Just think of the childbirth conversation from my viewpoint as Director of Common Knowledge Trust and gave birth first in the 1970s and my last in 1982.

In 1970 in the US, there was a 4.5% Cesarean rate. That’s right. 95% of us labored and had a vaginal birth. We all had ‘natural’ births even though most of us birthed in a hospital with heaps of medical assessments, monitoring, and procedures (interventions).

How did 95% of birthing women do? Well, here’s the reality. ‘Natural, normal, and physiological’ births actually mean ‘anything that might happen could possibly happen’. Remember that sentence.

In 1970 when 95% of us labored and had a vaginal birth, we could love the experience or hate it. We could cope well with the naturally occurring pain of labor contractions or ‘suffer’. We birthed with risks that either had a good outcome or a tragedy. We felt treated well by birth providers or not.

In other words, we gave birth one way or another. Women got on with parenting and moved past their birth experience with very little shame, blame, guilt although some experienced trauma.

When I gave birth in 1982 everything had changed. Now women were saying:

‘I had a natural birth, YOU had a medical one’ (We began to judge one another)

‘My daughter was my Cesarean. My son was a home birth’ (We began to judge our children’s births!)

‘I wanted a natural birth but I was induced’. (We began to judge ourselves)