Why Natural Childirth is Not Important

My goal is not for everyone to have a natural birth. Of course I believe that, in cases where everything is going smoothly, mothers and babies will be safest if medical intervention is avoided. However, there are times when things go wrong, making intervention necessary (though it is important to remember that not everyone's definition of "necessary" is the same). Holding an intervention-free birth up as The Ideal Birth sets a woman up for failure if complications occur, which is something she has no control over.

I recently followed an online discussion among student doulas about the use of the term "cesarean birth." Some women wanted cesareans to be recognized as births and some women felt that a cesarean is never a birth because it removes the mother from physically participating in the birth process--since birthing is a verb, and a women having a cesarean is not acting, but being acted upon, it can't be a birth. This lead me to re-examine my definition of what birthing entails.

What does it mean to give birth?

When we use to birth as a verb, we are usually intentionally distinguishing to birth from the more traditional to deliver. In the sentence, "The woman birthed her baby into the midwife's hands," the woman is the subject, actively performing the verb. However, if we were to say "The midwife delivered the woman's baby," the midwife becomes the subject of the sentence, implying that delivery is something the care provider does and not the woman. Yes, words really do have power. Once could say one of the purposes of birth education and advocacy is to help women be empowered to birth their babies instead of having them delivered.

It is true that part of the power of an unplugged birth is that women's bodies are in control and not the machines. A birth without immobilizing pain medication, in which the mother can use positions that are comfortable to her, is truely birth in which the mother is "active." But is natural childbirth the only birthing?

If a woman becomes exhausted and decides she wants an epidural to help her relax and get some rest and goes on to push her baby out, we still call it a birth, even though she needed the help of medical professionals and drugs. Some would say, "Of course it was a birth, it was vaginal." But what if that same mother has her labor slow down and needs pitocin to keep her contractions going and isn't able to push effectively with the epidural and chooses to have the doctor use a vacuum? Is the mother still birthing the baby? Is that really much different from a mother choosing to have the doctor perform a cesarean when the mother feels it is medically necessary?

To birth refers to what a mother does to bring her child from her womb into the outside world. Now, does her body have to do this all by itself in order for her to participate in the process? Not necessarily. I believe birthing can be about more than just he limited definition of pushing your baby out. Being actively involved in your birth can also include deciding that your body needs help from a professional, medications, instruments, or yes, even surgery, to bring your baby into the world. In such cases, the birthing is not in the pushing, the birthing is in the choices. I believe that if it is the woman's choice to have a cesarean--she actively decides that enlisting surgical help is the best way for her baby to come into the world, then she is still giving birth.

Natural childbirth is not important. A woman being involved in the decisions about the medical care of her and her baby--that is what is important. Helping women avoid feeling assaulted because they were not involved in what happened during their births--that is the goal. What I do--this blog, becoming, a doula and childbirth educator--that is what it is all about.

Understanding "Painless" Childbirth

This post is inspired by a recent conversation on my natural childbirth forum, as well as a few birth stories I have read from Hypnobabies moms who were surprised to find that their pressure waves felt "painful" to them. It also is a response to something I stumbled upon while browsing the archives of a natural childbirth blog, in which the author said she would not want to have a painless birth.

So, what is up with "painless" childbirth?

A few women are rumored to have "painless" births without special preparation. I think this is probably pretty rare, but the fact that it happens is notable. The majority of women who refer to their births ans "painless" or "pain-free" are women who used hypnosis.

I think this is something that is commonly misunderstood, and I admit I didn't understand it when I was preparing for my first birth. I read the book Hypnobirthing by Marie Mongan, and listened to the CD that came with it a few times. As I understood it, Mongan was teaching that all "pain" in childbirth was a result of the fear/tension/pain cycle, meaning birth will not be painful if you are not afraid of it. I believed that what we experience in birth is a direct result of what we expect, so I chose not to expect pain. I was really oversimplifying things, and I was in for a rude awakening.

When I started having contractions (I refer to them as "contractions" here because that is what I called them at the time--I didn't buy into the idea of changing the words then) I admitted that "they hurt," but it was very manageable. They went on for quite a long time, going away and coming back, and then I was given a very low dose of pitocin, and those contractions really hurt. I was still able to cope using movement and deep breathing for a while, but I was really miserable. I do recognize that there was a psychological element to this pain. In my mind, something external (pitocin) was inflicting pain upon me, instead of it being caused by my own uterine muscles contracting. This, as well as exhaustion and pressure to dilate due to risk of infection, made it much harder for me to cope.

I think that I, as a first timer, espoused a common misconception about painless birth: believing that your birth will be painless just because you've heard of it and believe it's possible. I didn't think I needed to do anything to have a painless birth; I thought it would just happen because birth is not "meant" to be painful (right, Dr. Dick-Read?)

My understanding of this changed when I did the Hypnobabies program for my second birth. I don't know if there is really a difference in the two programs' views or if my experiences caused me to have this new understanding. I don't know if birth is really "meant" to be painful or not, but I do know that it involves a stimulus that the majority (at least in our culture) of women's brains interpret as "pain," which is generally experienced as a negative thing. Good hypnosis for childbirth provides a system for changing your mind so that the stimulus is interpreted as not painful, so that it can be experienced more positively. For me, with my second birth, experiencing it positively involved a conscious choice on my part.

Both Hypnobirthing and Hypnobabies use a technique of renaming some of the words commonly used in childbirth. This is a strange practice and, I admit, it's a little cumbersome at times, but many women find it helpful to avoid negative associations their subconscious may have with the words. One example is avoiding use of the word "pain" and using "discomfort" instead, because it is not as negative of a word. Some could argue that "painless childbirth" is about semantics, but it's really about what you choose to believe.

I believe that most women who have unmedicated births are able to find a way to experience the stimulus of the sensations of childbirth as not a bad thing, even if they do experience them as painful. In embracing a "pain with a purpose" ideology, women are choosing to tweak their understanding of the word "pain" (which is usually a negative word to describe a sensation that occurs when the body is being harmed) to include a kind of pain that is good. This essentially means changing the negative connotation of the word "pain" to be positive in this particular circumstance, while with hypnosis, we simply change the word, eliminating the negative connotation altogether.

I think some people, when they hear "painless," assume that means not feeling anything--that the "hypno-anesthesia" would be like an epidural and make them numb. It doesn't work this way. Hypno-anesthesia is very strong endorphins. It's like when you cut yourself or you twist your ankle and at first it hurts a lot, but then it doesn't hurt as much, that's endorphins. They soothe and dull pain, but they don't take away sensation. With a pain-free unmedicated birth with hypnosis, you would still feel your baby being born, it just wouldn't feel like pain to you.

Sometimes the talk of feeling "only pressure and tightening" in Hypnobabies leads women to expect that birthing waves will feel just like Braxton-Hicks waves. This is not true either. Braxtion-Hicks are just tightening sensations, for me, birthing waves (and also the pre-birth waves that can occur irregularly for weeks before the actual birth) have an extra level of intensity--what I now call a "downward pressure" which signaled to me that my uterus was now working to begin moving my baby down instead of just flexing itself for the exercise.

One of the changes in the new 6th edition of Hypnobabies is the re-recording and re-naming of a track that used to be called "Painless Childbirth" to "Easy, Comfortable Childbirth." Hypnobabies appears to be moving away from using the word "painless," which, considering all of the misconceptions about it, I think is a good move. I feel like "comfortable" is a more accurate description of how Hypnobabies helped me. Whatever sensations I felt (some of which I may have called "painful" under other circumstances), I knew they were normal and was able to not be afraid of them, which allowed me to feel calm and confident and not out-of-control or panicky (except during the cervical lip and the pushing, but I have theories about that). I wouldn't say I was "in pain," because for me, being "in pain" never involves that degree of serenity and self-composure.

I know there are some women for whom surviving the pain of childbirth provides a sense of accomplishment. It makes them feel like they are "hardcore." I, on the other hand, am not "hardcore," nor do I want to be. I can get a sense of accomplishment from seeing that I did something most people experience as very painful, and it was mostly comfortable to me, and I did it with my mind!