Birthin' Babies!
I’ve got no beef with getting more information about the process of labor and delivery. Dads need to be there and they need to be helpful.
My problem with the Birthing Class industry, though, is that it has been hijacked in many cases by a rather extreme cabal of natural-birth boosters. And I’ve got a big problem with them.
Let me start by saying that my wife is a tube jockey, a gas monkey, or whatever else the cool kids call anesthesiologists these days.
See, I’ve lost the argument already, at least for some people.
That’s because, in the minds of the natural-birther crowd, anesthesiologists are among the worse pimps in the labor process.
Not only have they gone through the “character-warping educational methods” of medical school (as natural-birth star Cara Muhlhahn put it in this excellent NY Mag article that Matt linked to in his Tantrum), but they are also the ones offering pain-reducing epidurals that–depending on which batshit, untrained, unregulated and completely unaccountable doula is running your birthing class–either increase your risk of C-section, delay labor interminably, reduce your bond with your child, poison your baby’s blood, run the risk of paralyzing you, or prove that you are a coward.
Each one of those assertions, of course, is demonstrably untrue. And my wife has heard them all, from patients or from friends of ours who learned it in birthing classes.
Unduly harsh on the doulas? Perhaps. There are good doulas and conscientious midwives. But consider this sobering paragraph from the NY Mag article about the presumptive hero of the home-birth movement:
Muhlhahn calls St. Vincent’s her “backup hospital.” About 10 percent of her patients end up transferring there during labor. But her relationship with the hospital is not exactly formal. “St. Vincent’s is her dump,” says one former obstetrics resident who’s treated Muhlhahn’s transfers. “She could say any hospital is her backup, because no hospital is ever going to deny a woman care. She’d bring her patients in, holding their hands, find out we were going to have to do a section, and then she’s out the door. To me, that’s a dump.” Other doctors on the floor have referred to her transferred patients as “train wrecks.”
My wife did her residency at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt on w. 59th Street–the same place where she gave birth to both our babies. St. Luke’s/Roosevelt has both a regular delivery floor and, a floor or two below, a natural birthing center that has attracted plenty of the well-heeled and the famous, including Ricki Lake, who produced the anti-hospital film The Business of Being Born after she had this experience:
During the birth of her first son, Lake was crestfallen to be transferred from the birthing center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt to the labor and delivery ward after her labor stalled.
My wife wasn’t there when Lake was, but she was there for plenty of other women who went through the same thing. For whatever reason, they aren’t able to deliver in the natural birthing center. So here they come upstairs, about to give birth to their child, the most wonderful thing to happen to them in their lives, and they are absolutely crushed because their birthing plan didn’t turn out the way they wanted. She’d see weeping mothers, angry fathers, deflated midwives, all of whom had been bullied by the natural-birth movement into thinking that they had somehow failed.
This is not just ruining what should be a great arrival. It is, as my wife puts it, anti-feminist. It’s women judging other women for the choices they make. It’s telling women that it’s their responsibility to endure a crucible of pain when the world’s most awesome Advil is just a minute away. You think it’s progressive, but its reactionary as hell.
More than anything, it’s a gross over-correction. No doubt that the old mid-century methods–knocking a woman unconscious with ether and then yanking the kid out with forceps–were barbaric. And I’m no apologist for today’s hospitals, either: I’m sure many of the labor and delivery policies are guided in part by cost and liability concerns. But not at the expense of the health of the mom or the child.
And isn’t that what it’s about–having a healthy child? To have many more specific expectations than that is to fetishize the means at the expense of the end. The goal is to have a healthy baby that you will love and raise right, not to prove your toughness or the correctness of your politics to your neighbors in Park Slope.
By the way, I don’t have a financial interest in this fight–my wife hasn’t done anesthesia for obsterics since she finished residency last year. But she did need tremendous medical intervention after the birth of our son in 2008. What we were expecting would be a low-risk birth–the kind many people would try to do at home–caused her to nearly bleed to death after delivery. The natural-birth crowd would probably find a way to blame what happened on the pitocin–she had to be induced–or the epidural. What actually happened is that she passed an 8-lb child through her cervix, something inherently risky and unpredictable (remember how before there were hospitals lots more women died during childbirth?). When things started to go awry, a phalanx of caring and competent nurses and doctors swept into the room, and as I stood aside with my newborn son and watched helplessly, they saved her life.
They saved her life. Can a doula do that? What if this had happened at home? Would the preciousness of our politics help me raise my children alone? You can see why I have little patience for people like überquack Michel Odent, who asks blithely whether humanity can survive obstretrics.
I know, I know, this is a Dad Blog, which means a Dude Blog, and as a Dude I have no right to weigh in on the politics of childbirth. But I doubt my wife is alone in the way she feels. There’s a vast number of women who come into this process not knowing what exactly to think. It’s no small injustice that they emerge from the modern Birthing Class cowed by the braying and irrational voices of the natural-birth extremists.
