I had heard and read enough hospital horror stories about women being pressured to medicate when they might otherwise be fine going natural. Especially as a woman in the “advanced age” category I knew that in the eyes of the medical community I was considered higher risk just by being over the age of 35.
I was determined.
I queried everyone I could think of who had seen or experienced a successful natural birth: my OBGYN, my doula, friends, family members, random women in the grocery store who had babies.
“Did you have a natural birth? If so, what do you think helped make it possible?” Most women I talked to did not have a natural birth, though many had planned on it. I was curious about this and decided to go directly to the professionals
“Of the women who give birth in this hospital, how many actually go on to have a natural birth?” I asked My OBGYN during a pelvic exam.
She scribbled something in my chart, and then peered over her glasses.
“Not many”, she said without blinking. I pressed her for numbers, actual statistics. Surely they track this stuff.
Nope.
“I don’t know, maybe one in ten women.” She seemed bored with my question like she had heard it too many times before. She went on to explain that many women intend to have a natural birth but end up caving when the pain becomes unbearable… Or the baby has other plans.
“You should be open minded.” She cautioned. “A natural birth is not always the positive experience people make it out to be.”
My jaw tightened. I felt a fleeting impulse to wrestle her to the ground.
“You see a lot of women and a lot of births. Can you often predict the kind of birth experience a woman will have, just by talking to her during these exams?”
She looked me in the eye and nodded. “Occasionally people surprise me”.
After that appointment I became obsessed with numbers: Odds, birth statistics, natural birth percentages. This surprised me, as I am just not a numbers person. I have always hated them. I also dislike rulers, graph paper, measuring cups, decimal points, and hash tags. They remind me too much of math, a subject that has troubled me since elementary school.
Suddenly, now numbers had become purveyors of truth, hopefulness and certainty. They signaled how hard (or not hard) it would be to believe in myself, my support system,my baby and the birth professionals surrounding me. Were the chances of having a natural birth really as low as people were telling me? Did I have the audacity to try anyway? Was it true for women who had already planned to have a hospital birth, or was it the case for women who had originally set out to have a home birth, but did not? Let’s measure and see!
I asked my doula for her perspective. Her numbers were better than my OBGYN, but still surprisingly conservative. Roughly, one in five women she worked with went on to have a natural birth. I was shocked. Why were the numbers so low? Haven’t women been giving birth naturally for centuries without medical intervention? Was it really that hard? A male friend of mine reminded me that women and babies have also been dying in labor for centuries, and it was not until the advent of modern medicine that those figures dramatically decreased.
During my third trimester a close friend of mine who was also pregnant, lost her baby at 28 weeks. Another friend of mine lost her baby just days after it was born. The news shook me. I cried often, burring my head in my husband’s shoulder as dark, wet patches formed on his sweaters. I clung to the railing a little tighter as I teetered down the icy steps of our house. Everything in the world seemed precarious and uncertain; especially death and life. As a pregnant women, both are likely possibilities at some point in her productive life. This is the part of pregnancy people don’t often talk about: miscarriages, still births and traumatic births, though they are quite common.
But at no other time in a woman’s life is the dance of death and life so intimately intertwined as during pregnancy. For the first time in my life I felt truly mortal. Not fragile, just soft, tender, vulnerable.
Each time I stepped one foot off the curb of a side walk, was a gamble. Death. Life. Death. Life. The scales could tip either way at any moment. This feeling only increased once my son was born.
At my next prenatal check-up I decided to up my line of questioning.
“On a purely psychological level, assuming that mom and baby are healthy, and both capable of having a natural birth, what do you think enables those few women to have a natural labor?”
My OBGYN: “They are hard headed. Once they set their mind to something they don’t back down”.
This did not sound exactly positive, unless, you’re talking corporate takeovers, or brutal contact sports.
My doula had a softer perspective. “Surrender”, she said.
“You have to be able to surrender the illusion of control. Women who have natural births are not afraid of losing face or looking foolish in front of their husbands, the hospital staff and however else is present for the birth.”
My prenatal yoga teacher was even more specific. “Imagine pooping in front of a room full of people while they watch. If you can do this and stay relaxed enough to not close off your [anal] sphincter then you can have a natural birth. The experience is pretty similar”. The class was silent.
So stubbornness and willingness to be un-apologetically uninhibited; even brazenly antisocial, was what was required to increase your chances of having an natural child birth; to be able to give yourself full permission to put away the ruler, and throw away the mask.
Cool. Child birth was beginning to sound like fun!
