Childbirth: Why are we going back to the medical Middle Ages?

It’s not long ago that half of all mothers and infants died in childbirth, writes Claire Harvey. Then along came modern medicine and now mortality rates are wonderfully low. So why hit reverse?

It’s not long ago that half of all mothers and infants died in childbirth. Then along came modern medical practice and now mortality rates are wonderfully low. So why hit reverse? (Pic: iStock)

If you don’t fear childbirth, you must be crazy. It’s the most dangerous time of a healthy woman’s life. It’s the moment at which she’s most likely to lose her child.

But women are being prodded and persuaded to believe childbirth is low-risk, and that if you’re afraid, you’ve been sucked into the “medicalisation” of birth by evil doctors.

That’s official NSW Government policy. It’s called “Towards Normal Birth”, where “normal” means reducing the use of pain relief, electronic foetal monitoring, “unnecessary interventions” which might include forceps or suction, medications to induce or speed up contractions and caesarean sections.

It’s a giant con. It’s completely anti-feminist. And it’s time women stood up to it.

“Towards Normal Birth”, which has just been rolled out to all hospitals across the state as a mandatory policy directive, means that every day, women are being denied pain relief by hospital midwives who tell them they don’t need it, that the anaesthetist is busy, that they don’t need any instrument assistance, that 40 hours of labour is normal, that the body knows what to do.

I’m lucky; I’ve had two great, healthy births with outstanding medical professionals.

But I personally know at least two dozen women who feel their births were scarring, deeply traumatic, frightening experiences where they were not heard in their requests for assistance or pain relief; where staff had an ideological agenda that overrode their very reasonable requests for explanation, pain relief or the attention of a doctor.

Women are being prodded and persuaded to believe childbirth is low-risk, and that if you’re afraid, you’ve been sucked into the “medicalisation” of birth by evil doctors. (Pic: iStock)

This week we discovered one infant has died and two others have been disabled by faults with oxygen at Bankstown-Lidcombe hospital. I feel desperately sorry for the parents, and for the clinical staff involved with those births; they were badly let down by the equipment that is supposed to help them save lives.

Those deaths should be a reminder to all of us — and most importantly to the bureaucrats driving the “normal birth” agenda: childbirth is a knife-edge moment. The stakes are huge. Babies can and do die, despite the best intentions.

Being afraid is, I think, the only sensible course — but we have a health system that tells women that fear is not legitimate; that fear itself will make birth slower, longer, more difficult and less likely to be “normal”.

I was absolutely terrified before the birth of my first child. Terrified. I was scared of the pain, the improbable physics of it all, but most of all I was scared of death; of leaving hospital with an empty capsule, coming home to an empty nursery. Part of the problem was I knew too much. I’d attended two births as a support person for girlfriends in labour: one was a single mum, and the other whose husband was unavoidably detained overseas.

They were both natural, drug-free and non-intervention births conducted in hospitals. And they were both absolutely horrendous.

Childbirth is a knife-edge moment. The stakes are huge. Babies can and do die, despite the best intentions. So let’s do our best to minimise that risk. (Pic: Thinkstock)

It’s rarely acknowledged how wrenching it is to watch someone else give birth: watching that descent into deep distress and suffering, while completely unable to help in any meaningful way.

I’d also watched way too many episodes of “One Born Every Minute” during my pregnancy, sniffling into the cuffs of my old hoodie, arms wrapped around my belly. I had no illusions about what birth was going to be like, physically. And I knew the very real risks of ending up with a dead baby.

Another friend of mine, Felicity, was 10 days overdue with her first child when she realised the baby had stopped kicking. Her midwife kept reassuring her. She was wrong. An ultrasound confirmed Felicity’s little girl had died in the womb, and she had to give birth, knowing she would never hear that first, life-affirming cry.

We all flew to Felicity’s home town for the tangi, a Maori funeral ritual that went for three days. The perfect baby lay in her open coffin. Her father made the most moving speech I’ve ever heard: “Every dad wishes two things for his daughter: that she would never suffer a day’s pain, and that nobody would ever say a bad word about her. That must make me the luckiest father on Earth.”

The truth was too hard to face: we should not be here. This baby should be alive. She should have been induced and delivered safely, in a hospital, with whatever medical intervention it took to bring her into the world safely.

It’s not so long ago that half of all mothers died in childbirth, along with half the infants. Then along came forceps, suction, sterile delivery rooms, handwashing, gloves, instruments to measure critical changes in blood pressure and heart rate, ultrasound imaging, emergency caesarean sections — and now the mortality rates are wonderfully low.

So, naturally, the NSW Department of Health is frantically trying to hit reverse: to take us back to goldfields days (when, incidentally, it was common for women to drink an entire bottle of whiskey while in labour, and just as common for them to die).

Just like with vaccination and with fluoride, a group of activists with very short memories have forgotten why medical advancements were necessary. They want to take us back to the medical Middle Ages.

It’s a scandal.