As told to Helen Vnuk.
Everyone expects you to be happy if you have a healthy baby. The culture we have is, ‘Oh well, your baby’s fine, you’re fine.’ It’s just so much deeper than that. There are many more levels to birth trauma.
Three years ago, when I was pregnant, I was diagnosed with early-onset hypertension, so my blood pressure was a little bit high and I had some oedema in my legs. That was managed with medication really well.
But the obstetrician and the hospital staff were pushing me to induce at 35 weeks, which is really early. It was a battle between my intuition and my body, and the medical system.
All your questions about childbirth, answered by Mums and Non-Mums. Post continues below.
I am grateful that we have amazing medical care in Australia. But in my experience, I was absolutely terrified, because I was told every day for three weeks, “Your baby will die if you do not induce.” I just said, “He’s fine, I’m fine. It’s being managed with medication. You’re frightening me.”
I finally gave in to being induced at 38 weeks. They had to induce me three times, and my labour after the last induction was three days. I wanted to give birth to him naturally. I was lucky I had my doula there because she was a wonderful advocate.
Top Comments
I really think birth traumas are made worse and more prevalent when we establish a situation wherein a woman's "intuition" and beliefs are elevated to the same level as evidence-based medical knowledge. The author felt pressured to have an induction, based on the fact that she believed everything was OK, despite the contrary being told to her by medical professionals. Medical professionals don't go out of their way to scare patients for fun - if they had genuine fears for the baby's safety, they are obliged to advocate for measures to protect that safety. Worth pointing out that the child was born healthy, *after* the mother remitted to an induction. Had she held out and waited for labour to come on naturally, the outcome might have been very different.
There are also issues that are unavoidable that are often held up as contributing factors to birth trauma. For instance, midwives working 8-hour shifts. It's simply untenable to expect anything different - having one trusted midwife put in a three-day shift, for a single patient, would be economically unviable, not to mention plain dangerous. I agree that continuity throughout a birth would be ideal, but it's not realistic in a lot of cases. However, if expectations are built to the contrary (ie if parents expect the impossible or unfeasible), then I can see how disappointment that one's wishes weren't met will often manifest in trauma retrospectively.
"Birth trauma" just devalues the decades of study and experience that medical professionals in hospitals have. Babies die everyday in Australian hospitals because women refuse to take medical advice. How about a story about them? Or the midwives who have to deal with the aftermath of seeing women explaining to their waiting families that the baby died because she refused a c-section.
I'm sure we would hear about these stories. The media loves nothing more than scaremongering and mummy shaming.
I would say that claiming babies die "every day" in our hospitals due to poor decision making by parents is a bit of hyperbole. However, the general premise is true: the "parents' instinct knows best/is as good as or better than medical knowledge" is incredibly prevalent, and does lead to a lot of disagreements, and often poor outcomes when personal beliefs are substituted for medical advice.
I myself work in an area that doesn't involve infants or babies, so it's slightly easier to bear when it's a matter of an adult making a poor decision for themselves. It almost certainly leads to a bad outcome for the patient, but it is their prerogative to ignore advice, and it's only them that directly suffers the consequences. It's really different when it's an adult making a poor decision that impacts on the well-being of a minor or unborn child who can't advocate for themselves.