unassisted pregnancy / birth

[spotty_dog]

Alison -- were you in the hospital or a birthing center attached to the hospital? My cousin delivered at a birthing center and I think it was relaxing and for the most part what she wanted (except the driving to the hospital part). And she had the benefit of it being attached to the hospital in case she needed some rapid intervention.

I delivered in a hospital L&D ward that called itself a birthing center.

Christine, I had an amazingly easy labor and birth. At no point did the thought of asking for pain relief even begin to cross my mind. It was hard work and no doubt, and unlike anything I've ever been through, but it wasn't scary or unbearable. I was chit-chatting between contractions right up through the pushing stage. I freely admit that I was insanely lucky, my labor pattern was just about as kind as you could ask for with just eight hours of labor and a steady ramp-up of progressive, dilating contractions. But I also think that being well-prepared helped, and that some of my choices helped encourage that easier labor pattern.

For what it's worth, I had a birth plan (couched as "birth preferences") but it was underlined by faith in my midwives. I was flexible about it (and indeed, a lot of things didn't work out precisely according to "plan") but writing it helped me and the staff and my husband to have an idea of what I expected and what was going to make me comfortable while in labor.

Which is more painful--the pushing or the contractions?

My younger self once fantisized about the natural birth thing. After losing 2 babies (one at 6 mos gest, one at 7 wks) and barely making it to 7 months with the dudes, that fantasy had completely faded. Modern medicine was the only thing that allowed us to have children and I became immersed in it. When the dudes were born and the nurses told me I could hold them, I was honestly shocked/stunned. I started crying saying, "really?! really?! I can hold them really?! In my ARMS?!!!"

I honestly cannot fathom anyone not using a safety net of any kind when dealing with this issue.

Jodi

[DCJenn]

Man, that Moscow airport was dirty. and the free beer at the Red Carpet Club in Frankfurt made all the difference in mommy's attitude before the six hour flight to Dulles.

Sum total of my 'birthing' experience.

Jenn

[madeintaiwan]

The strange thing is that as I get closer to the birth, I become less scared. I am trying so hard to have a postive outlook on birth, and to not think of it as a horrible thing. I just keep telling myself that women have literally been going through this since the beginning of time. "I can do this! yes,I can!!"(got that from Nutty Professor, I am soooo corny!)

For me, when you're in labor you don't have time to worry about being scared. The contractions are just coming. When you are getting ready to push and are pushing you might start thinking about things and how the baby really has to come out. I think you have to be open to all the possibilities. I was induced at 40w1day (they broke my water) and was in labor for 21 hours, pushed for 3 and had a c-section. I labored without meds for 8 hours before I got meds. First I got iv meds, which I don't recommend, they made me loopy and weird. I got the epi a couple of hours later. I was so relieved when they said c-section. My son was 10lbs7oz. I couldn't be more thankful for modern medicine. With my daughter I didn't even bother doing a vbac, I knew she was huge too. I went in for my lovely scheduled c-section at 38 weeks ( he usually does them at 39 but we begged since DH was on Winter break) and DD weighed 8lbs12oz. Dh's aunt is into the whole holistic thing which is fine. My mother swears by CHinese herbal medicines but she also believes in western modern medicine too. I just know that if I wasn't in a hospital when I had DS, one of us if not both of us would have died. Back to my point, everyone has a their own experience, in the end all that matters is that you're healthy and the baby is healthy. If you need drugs, you need drugs. If you don't, you don't. It's not test of courage. You'll do great.

The IV narcs they'll give don't really help with the pain, they just make you loopy enough that you don't really care so much about it. I had them w/both deliveries, and with the first I was really unhappy about it, b/c I expected them to make it stop hurting. With the 2nd I knew what to expect, so was able to let it go a little better.

After receiving my epidural I wanted to be pushed around on my bed to solicit collections to build a monument to the person who invented them.

[madeintaiwan]

After receiving my epidural I wanted to be pushed around on my bed to solicit collections to build a monument to the person who invented them.

I couldn't believe I waited so long to get one.

[madeintaiwan]

My friend had IV drugs instead of an epi, and said she was completely out of her mind! She was so loopy she didn't even realize that she had a new baby and was just kind of looking around the room aimlessly giggling. But I wonder how much those drugs help with the pain, she is the one who described it as just really bad cramps.

For me, premeds I had tons of back labor and the contractions feel like the worst menstrual cramps I have ever had in my entire life ( I get them bad, I used to lay there tucked in a ball). But for 8 hours I did my breathing and in all honesty when I finally broke down and sobbed for drugs I had no idea it had been 8 hours. The iv, makes you loopy and "takes the edge off." Whatever that means. I say if you're going to go for the drugs, go staright to the epi. Everything was fabulous post epi, until they turned it down so that I could push. But it actaully feels good to push. They wanted me to rest and I was like, no let's push again.

so happy to have ithat you don't care.

yes ma'am.

i can't say how long my labor would have lasted w/o it - but I don't care. we did not notice a marked slow-down or anything. both of my labors were 15 hours total - basically 1/2 time no epi , 1/2 with. I pushed for 12 minutes w/#1, 8 minutes w/#2, so the lack of 'feeling' didn't hurt my ability to push at all.

[mommax3]

I think it can slow things down if you get it too soon, particularly with your first baby. Ask your doctor if he/she has a typical benchmark after which you can get the epidural (usually around 4 cms.) and then try to stay upright and walk as much as possible until you get to that point so that things will be progressing at a good clip before you get it. My first epidural was very dense and it was hard to push......BUT I had an 8 pound 11 oz. baby, so it is hard to tell if it was the epidural that made things difficult, or the large baby! I was in labor about 14 hours with my first.....3 hours of that was pushing and I had an epidural for about 8 hours of that time. You already know the story of my second delivery. With my 3rd, my doc (DH's "partner" at the place we were stationed) broke my water at an OB appt. on a Friday because I had been having light contractions the whole previous night and DH was off that weekend.....we decided to take advantage of that since there were only two OBs working at that time. I went straight to the hospital from that appt. and got hooked up to the Pit, got a great epidural, pushed two or three times, and had my baby! I didn't tear, either......first time I got that lucky. Made all the difference in the world in how I felt afterwards. Which reminds me, sms, I don't think that episiotomies are routinely done anymore. DH wasn't trained to do them unless it looked like a patient was going to tear in a particularly unlucky spot.....then he would cut to relieve pressure on that area. I first gave birth 11.5 years ago, and there was no mention made of an episiotomy then, either. There may be regional differences in this, but I think the prevalence of this is WAY down.

Sally

I'm an intervention girl all the way!

ETA: a relaxing birth to me is knowing I have good people there to take care of me and my baby should anything go wrong. I a belt and suspenders kind of gal.

I agree completely. I could never have a home birth. I'd be too focused on what could go wrong to concentrate on the birth, as opposed to the UCers who can't focus in a hospital.

And I agree with Kris. I didn't "plan" to get an epidural, but I also didn't "plan" on 60 hours of labor.

Does an epidural make labor longer? I've heard it can. For me, I dilated 5cm immediately after receiving it. It helped me relax (obviously) and let me catch up on the sleep I'd missed over the previous 2 and a half days or so. In my case, it didn't hinder pushing. That was the 'easy' part (to answer another question, the contractions definitely hurt more), it only took 15 minutes or so.

[Cumberland]

I would still choose to have a homebirth if it werent illegal in Georgia and the transferring hospital is the one where my DH is an ob resident I think childbirth has been so medicalized, and part of that is that women have been taught to fear it, when really the majority of births are uncomplicated. Its kind of ( remotely) like our fear of plane crashes- they happen so infrequently but everyone hears about them and that is all that they ( as in me) can focus on while flying.

There is a world renowned midwife with little formal training, named Ina May Gaskin- she wrote an extremely popular book called Spiritual Midwifery. She has delivered thousands of babies on a farm in Tennesse, and her colleagues still do, with amazingly low complication rates. I think the whole UC thing is a little crazy, but homebrith with a trained birth attendant is what has been the norm for thousands of years, and still is in many countries. In Holland, women are encouraged to give birth at home, and hospital births are less accepted. There are definitely some anthropology/sociology lessons in this discussion...

[Malpka]

Exactly Sue, and in these countries the maternal and fetal outcomes are MUCH better than in the US. My MPH is in Maternal and Child Health. One of my professors was a midwife before she was a PhD and we had 3 MFM fellows in the class. It made for lots of interesting discussion, and all could agree the statistics comparing countries with good modern healthcare that use homebirth midwives for standard care and only send into the medical system women who have a medical need have the very best outcomes for mom and baby. Of course, these are also countries with much less obesity and drug use, better nutrition, better educations, and kinder postpartum and maternity leave policies- but I digress. The US on the other hand is tied with developing countries like Poland for maternal and infant outcomes- pathetic.

It is hard for me to say what I really want to say in this thread, because I don't want to make anyone posting in this thread feel like the way reading most of these "look at the freak show on mothering.com" threads have made me feel. I will just keep it simple by saying while I don't think UC/UP is the best choice, I really understand why someone would seek to avoid the cascade of interventions birth in American hospitals offer. I feel like I have my foot in two communities in my life. One group of mommy friends are the crunchy granola types and the others are dawkters wives. Of all my crunchy friends who were planning homebirths (with midwives) most have had uncomplicated births, and a few have transferred into the medical model for needed care during their pregnancies or births. Of the regular old dawkter wife friends, I can think of any number of uncomplicated pregnancies that took a bad turn at birth. The scheduled primary c-section for a "big" baby who turned out to be 6lbs 10 oz, the failed conveinance induction that resulted in a c-section with an incision that became infected, the big whopping episiotomy that never healed correctly and now causes "both" kinds of incontinence etc etc.

Don't get me wrong. I love Obstetricians. I am married to a really great one who still moonlights as staff OB. I just trekked cross country with my ill-behaved children to visit 3 or 4 of my closest friends who are OB's. These friends will also admit that fear of litigation and hospital policy drives a lot of the way they manage births of patients. Many of the aspects of hospital birthing (like continous fetal monitoring) are not even ACOG standard of care and have been shown to change no outcomes except to raise the c-section rate! They also agree with me that there are many instances where a planned homebirth is a very safe and appropriate choice for delivery.

With my first homebirth (2nd child), I had the care of a well respected midwife. Every peice of equipment and drug for postpartum hemmoraghe that is in a L&D room was in my home (midwife brings with her). If things were to have gone south at my birth, I could have been at the hospital from my location in less than 5 minutes. How long do you think it takes to ready the OR and round up the Anesthesia? Best of all I did not have to expose my baby to all the fun resistant germies crawling the hospital. I was not strapped to a bunch of apparatus to monitor my labor, because I had real people supporting me using intermittent monitoring. I could move from room to room and position to position to be at my most comfortable. I could drink real fluids and eat lightly for energy. My birth was a beautiful, private, and empowering FAMILY event. I needed absolutely no recovery (much like my low intervention hospital birth with a CNM my first) and again had no tears. My OB husband was amazed and won over. He said that birth is the one that taught him the most out of any he had ever attended (including the birth of our first in the hospital). He said residency in a inner city hospital with the highest level NICU and serving an extremely high risk population with lots of social issues taught him everything he needed to do when a baby or mother needed medical attention, and the experience of birth in the light of homebirth taught him how not to do anything and wait when there is no real reason to be doing anything but just that- waiting for a healthy woman to give birth to her own baby.


Anhoo, just my thoughts. I think birth is a highly personal event and people should RESEARCH their options and make decisions that work best for themselves. And maybe just try to withold judgement a little when others decisions don't match their own.

Thanks for joining in on this one Rebecca & Sue. Poor Alison was having to try to hold up for the "crunchier" side of things on her own.

In my original post, I did say that I have no problem with homebirth, as long as the parties were responsible in covering themselves with regards to appropriate medical intervention if needed - which clearly you did. In the same breath I made very clear that homebirth is not the way I'd choose to go.

My main concern is with the "unassisted" varieties of it. Yes, as you said in your post - you could be at the hospital in 5 min., and yes, if I were already in a hospital, an OR team would take about 5 min. to gather. You have the advantage that your doc (OB) husband could call ahead, people would take him seriously, and they would ready the OR while en route. UC'ers would not have that assistance, would have to be evaluated upon arrival, all the while the "things going south quickly" would continue to go south.

The observations (from many) that birth has become "overmedicalized" are probably right. I can completely see the spector of malpractice driving the way a birth is managed. I'm lucky that I had simple births - in hospital, in a way I was comfortable. The presence of a NICU down the hall was too important for my peace of mind for me to do anything other than what I did.

[spotty_dog]

Thanks for joining in on this one Rebecca & Sue. Poor Alison was having to try to hold up for the "crunchier" side of things on her own.

I agree, thanks. You both made really well-stated points.

I think women need to be able to give birth where they feel safe, whether that means safe from unnecessary interventions or safe because emergent interventions are close to hand. For some women, even observation is one intervention too many for their comfort level, which is where my empathy for UC comes from.