Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth & Modern Maternity Care

This is a post I wrote long ago, when I was writing up my birth stories. I have long meant to publish it, but got distracted by the intense debates between the author of this book, Pushed, and some folks in the Interweb world who are staunchly against home birth.

My review--Pushed is a good read. It's a sort of expose about how obstetrics works today and I appreciate the Jennifer Block's candor.

If you are at all interested in childbirth and have often wondered why the hell a woman would choose a home birth, this is one of those reads that will explain. Alongside Ricky Lake's documentary, this book is a sort of treatise about what needs to be fixed about the baby-delivering system we have in place today. The main problem appears to be that instead of women just laboring however they labor and having their babies (with intervention being for emergencies), hospital staff are worried about time constraints, convenience, and of course, how much insurance will cover. It's less about the woman and the baby and more about 'gettin' 'er done'.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"In posh Livingston, New Jersey, physicians say that virtually all of their patients receive Pitocin to either induce or augment labor. 'Once you're admitted, my feeling is that we should be advancing our cause,' one physician there told me."

"It's convenience for the physician mainly, but convenience also for patients," says Simpson. "And absent any data to tell them that it's not OK, they say, 'Well, maybe I'll have my baby this day or that day.' I firmly believe that mothers are not informed enough to know that this is not a good idea, and that any woman who has the right information would not want to have her baby induced." Inducing tends to create longer, more difficult, more painful labors in general, and it ups a woman's chance of C-section by two to three times." (This is from a doctor who isn't so enthused about the baby-on-demand method of delivery.)


"With induction, doctors don't need to wait for their patients to go into spontaneous labor, says Simpson, which 'is not in their best interest. Think about it from a physician's perspective,' she says. 'Let's say you have a very busy practice, and you're trying to have a quality of life, maybe you've got a young family, you don't want to be running out every night to deliver a baby, or not coming home in time for dinner, missing everything that your child is doing. So what happens is you try to get all the births in between 9 and 5, and to do that, you have o make sure nobody goes into spontaneous labor; and to make sure of that, you have to induce them all early. Or let's say this is the day you have to be on call, it's best then for you to induce three or four people on that day because you can get them all done at once. Those three or four people aren't going to call you on the weekend, they're not going to call you in the middle of the night, they're not going to interrupt your office hours, they're not going to give birth any time that's inconvenient."

You should probably read it. 

Fear Is Like A Mouse

I read a book once that described all the emotions that could slowly tear you apart inside as animals. Fear was a scurrying mouse, taking small bites out of things and nibbling away at your confidence.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/mice-stem-cells-101209.html

I think fear hurts us in so many ways. It prevents us from taking risks, from fully enjoying ourselves, from doing things that might hurt. This post was originally supposed to be about fear of childbirth and how it affects childbirth, but I feel like there's so much more to say. The trick is figuring out how to let mind prevail over matter. Easier said than done, right?

In this article, women who were scared of giving birth ended up spending more time in labor. What a great irony. "The study also found that mothers who feared childbirth were also more likely than unafraid women to need an emergency C-section (11% versus 7%) or assistance with instruments such as forceps for vaginal delivery (17.0% versus 11%). Overall, about a quarter of women who feared childbirth delivered without any obstetric interventions, compared with nearly 45% of women who were not afraid."

Fear also produces chemical and physiological changes in our bodies: “Mental stress is associated with physiological arousal and release of stress hormones. During labor, high levels of stress hormones may weaken uterine contractility and thereby prolong labor in women with fear of childbirth."

So let's stop psyching ourselves out, right? Let's do some yoga, spend some time with no distractions, let's journal and calm our minds so that we are not so afraid.

Anyway, I feel like I can take this information and apply it to my life, aside from childbirth. I think fear generally makes things worse. We are paralyzed and guarded instead of forthcoming and open. I guess the whole point of this post is that I need to be less afraid and more willing to really live life, whatever it has to offer.