More Thoughts on Research

The comments on Homebirth Research: Another Side of the Story have been interesting. Thank you to everyone who has shared your thoughts or other information you found about the study. I think the letter to the editor from De Jonge that one anonymous commenter shared was interesting, especially the point about how the methods of data collection in the study may have inflated the perinatal mortality rate in the low risk group. If she is correct in this assessment, I believe it does call the validity of the study into question.

That said, I think that the Evers study raises a lot of questions that require further research.

• is midwifery care, with referral to obstetric care if complications arise, optimal care for low risk women?
• are there specific aspects the midwifery system in the Netherlands that are suboptimal (such as, protocols for intervals to check the fetal heart rate, as mentioned in the paper, or as one response to the study pointed out, the use of midwives assistants to watch over women until close to time of birth)?
• how might midwifery care be improved to result in better outcomes?
• how might collaboration between midwives and physicians be improved to result in better outcomes?

I think that many questions such as "Is homebirth safe?" or "Are midwives or obstetricians better caregivers for low risk women?" are questions that may never be fully answered with research. There will always be people who find a flaw in a study's design or some other way to discredit it, because most people have basic beliefs about birth that are not easily changed. There will always be people who focus (some because it is their job) on the cases where things go wrong and work their hardest to save those lives. There will also always be people who want put their primary trust in either a divine design for the process of birth or its thousands of years of improvement through natural selection (whichever is their belief, mine is these former) and who prefer to use the technology of the past hundred years or so as mostly a back-up. Most people find ways to dismiss "evidence" that does not support their basic view while accepting that which is in line with it. It is human nature.

The answer to safety in maternity care is not to convince one side that the other is "right." The answer is respectful collaboration. This is not the first time I have talked about this. In October 2010, I committed to make my blog a doctor-friendly zone, and I hope that I have held true to that promise. I believe now, as I did then, that peaceful dialogue between doulas/activists/midwives and obstetricians and other hospital providers is essential for improving our maternity care system to protect the lives and and best meet the needs of mothers and babies. I believe that hospital and out-of-hospital providers could learn a lot from each other, which I think could help improve the safety of the practice of homebirth and care in transfers, as well as improve the environment and the options available to women in hospital birth. I have started to see dialogue opening up a little more in the past months, as more physicians are creating online presences and the internet is becoming a larger platform for conversation. I'm curious also, to see where the upcoming Home Birth Summit will lead.

Will We Ever Reach Peace in the OB v. NCB war?

I'm considering removing my RSS subscription to MyOBsaidWhat?!? I used to read all the comments and sometimes comment myself, but lately I've realized that it is steeped in negativity, and I'd rather focus on the positive. Reading there, it becomes easy to assume that all doctors are unhuman douchebag stabby-hands. Of course, the "Thoughtful Thursdays" are wonderful examples of what to say to a woman, but because they are featured once a week, they come across as the rare exception in a world of horribleness. If any doctors show up and make efforts to defend their profession, they are almost always met with hostility by people who know nothing about how they practice medicine or treat their own patients.

I was recently surfing a blog called OB/Gyn Kenobi, because I thought the name was really clever, written by an anonymous obstetrician who calls herself Dr. Whoo? I haven't read a lot on her blog, but I can tell that she believes in individualized patient care and recognizes that the issue of liability in the American legal system is a huge problem for her profession. I came across one post where she expressed a lot of frustration about how the natural birth community views obstetricians, automatically assuming that they are all the same horrible stereotype. She points out that in her current practice, there is a split in philosophy between the older generation and her own younger generation.

My personal experiences corroborate her observations, as the OB I saw during my first pregnancy before switching to a midwife group, was an older doctor, and he had a "my way or the high way" attitude, complete with continuous EFM, mandatory IV infusion, NPO, and pushing on your back only. He believed that episiotomy is necessary for about a third to half of all women and that all women change their minds about wanting a natural birth when they are in labor. The OB/Gyn I saw in my second pregnancy was younger and was nothing like this--she was supportive of low-intervention birth if all was going well, and had attended many unmediated labors. She almost never did episiotomies, and actually encouraged me to write a birth plan.

It is wrong to define obstetrics by extreme negative examples. There are great OB/Gyns out there. I'd like to hope that there are a lot of them.

One of Dr. Whoo?'s most compelling points is this:

Perhaps the most disheartening thing, is that there can be no real dialogue between the two philosophies, so jaded are our particular perspectives.

I appreciate that she acknowledges that the obstetric side has a jaded perspective, too. This is evidenced by some of the comments on the post:

The fan page looks good so far. You might want to include links to things like: Mothers in Medicine, pages where people can get real information about Ob/Gyn services (other than the doctor hating, "busness of being born" websites)

Condescending, much? Here is another

go to alldoula.com I went there trying to figure out what a doula was. They are very anti-OB and also are giving very bad advice to pregnant women.

That almost makes me ashamed to call myself a doula. And this one

Do any of these doctor bashing twits realize that just a few generations ago women DIED from "natural" at-home childbirth (the only kind going, back then) on a regular basis?

I would be remiss if I didn't address the fallacy of the "women used to die and now they don't" argument. You can not compare statistics from different time periods and assume that one change in that time is the determining factor in the change in statistics. Natural birth advocates know that hosptials and interventions have benefits and save lives in certain situations. That is why women who plan to birth at home have a plan for transfer to the hospital if complications arise. The burden of reaching out the olive branch of peace is really on us because we need obstetricians. Modern homebirth, though significantly safer than homebirth in antiquity (due to sanitation and better midwifery knowledge and emergency medications that can be given in the home), can never really be safe without hospital back up. All too often, women who transfer to the hospital from a planned homebirth are met with hostility for choosing not to use the hospital and then needing it after all. The truth is she needed you all along, just in a different way than you wanted her to need you.

We need to focus on what we have in common--a desire to improve birth for everyone. We may have different opinions about how that can be done, but we will never get anywhere if we keep making this a war. Division is hurting us, and hurting mothers and babies. We cannot afford to alienate all of the the obstetricians our there who care deeply about mothers and babies and make birth their life's work! Just as there are various types of natural birth advocates, each obstetrician is an individual person. Many of these people are caring and sensitive and we push them away with our belief in an extreme stereotype. It is bigotry, and I am done with it. I am committing now to make my blog a doctor-friendly zone. I want better care for pregnant women and their babies and that is only going to come about with peace and collaboration.

Elective Cesareans as Commentary on a Failed Birth Model

A recent article out of Australia, Fear of natural birth driving one in three mothers to cesarean, addresses the issue of maternal request cesareans. I feel that this article misrepresents the issue by placing so much of the burden of rising cesarean rates on maternal request. The author doesn't site a source for the "research" that supposedly supports this, but research can be misleading in what they categorize as "elective cesareans." Sometimes such cesareans are actually "doctor unofficially recommended" cesareans and not "maternal request." Also, elective repeat cesareans are different from elective primary cesareans because of the factor of having a uterine scar. However, there are women out there, while I don't know how few or how many, who do actually request their first cesarean.

While I have strong opinions about what constitutes safe childbirth, I respect the rights of all women to make their own choices about their births. It appears that in reaction to the strong natural childbirth presence on the internet (where many women get support that they do not get from their doctors, families, or local girlfriends), there are now websites with the purpose of promoting elective cesareans as a viable birth choice.

Many birth advocates (perhaps myself not exempt) are guilty of using fear of cesareans as a springboard. I realize that most of the stuff out there is attempting to dissolve some of the fear that surrounds c-sections, and I don't really have a problem with that. I would prefer for women for whom the benefits of having a c-section clearly outweigh the risks to be able to go into their cesarean birth without fear. As I have said before, I am all for lessening fear in all types of birth. However, what good does it do to attempt to make vaginal birth sound scary in order to make c-sections sound less scary?

The September 2009 opinion piece at Pregnancy Zone, The Benefits of A Cesarean Section Delivery, which one of my friends at an online community recently shared, is one such attempt. The article was bombarded by comments from women who disagreed with the point of view of the author and criticized her approach of using generalized claims without evidence to support them. I think the two sides of this argument are starting out with different basic assumptions that prevent them from effectively communicating with each other.

The author of the article is assuming that the alternative to a cesarean section is the typical medical model hospital birth. On the other hand, most of her opponents are likely working from very different construct of "vaginal birth" (such lack of understanding is quite common in internet mommy wars). I'm not going to argue about whether the claims made in the piece are true, but rather to look at her characterization of vaginal birth and what that says about our maternity care model and birth culture.

In the "No Labor Pain" section she brings up three kinds of pain associated with vaginal birth: contractions, perineal stitches, and hemorrhoids. When discussing contractions, she assumes that all women see birth as a necessary evil to get over with in order to get a baby. She compares being in labor to recovering from surgery. She assumes that "most" women receive episiotomies (and don't have a choice in the matter) and seems to feel that stitches in the abdomen are preferable to stitches in the perineum. Even without episiotomy, there are a lot of women who assume tearing is inevitable. The author also assumes that hemorrhoids are common in vaginal birth. So, in this author's view, a woman who has a vaginal birth not only has "labor pain" but also a painful, messy recovery involving a sensitive area.

The "Dignity and Privacy" section assumes that all women giving birth are dehumanized and violated, mentioning the presence of a multitude of medical strangers doing vaginal exams and being in a "less than flattering position for any number of hours." At best, this birth sounds like pseudo-surgery, and at worst like sexual assault and torture. No wonder women want to be disconnected from this.

What does the fact that there are women who view vaginal hospital birth as less desirable than cesarean surgery say about how our system treats vaginal birth? Has our system really made birth so clinical, unknown, and scary that major abdominal surgery sounds preferable to a normal human process?

If birth is just a clinical baby extraction, it does make sense that women would prefer to do it through their bellies instead of their vaginas. But this doesn't make sense to women who see labor as a rite of passage, a challenge to rise to, or even a joyful experience that doesn't have to be painful. Natural birth advocates know that with the right kind of care, vaginal birth with an intact perineum or with very minimal tearing is very possible and that vaginal birth doesn't have to permanently damage the vagina. For women who understand humanized birth, it is sad to realize that women think vaginal birth has to be demeaning and rape-like. With sensitive, respectful care, when women choose their own labor positions and choose when they have vaginal exams (or not to have them at all), vaginal birth can be dignified, private, and even empowering.

Perhaps the question physicians should be asking themselves is not, Should we perform cesareans at a womans's request? but, What have we done to vaginal birth to cause women to request cesareans?

The Fear Problem

Fear of the Unknown

It is normal to fear the unknown. For most first time pregnant women, birth is a huge unknown. Not only have we never done it, we may not even have ever seen it done. In North America today, I think it's highly unlikely that the average woman has ever been at a birth before giving birth. She also won't see uncensored images of vaginal birth in any public media. So, unless her school showed birth films in health class (mine didn't) or she takes a childbirth education class, seeks out birth videos on the internet, or watches a birth documentary such as The Business of Being Born, she may not even have seen a baby birthed before she is expected to do it. As I discussed in a prior post, some women seem to think that viewing a birth would disturb them, so they don't seek out any birth videos.

Add this that the fact that virtually every pregnant woman reaches a point in her pregnancy where, looking at her much-changed body, she realizes her baby is going to have to come out, but to her it just seems impossible that it could. It really is an unbelievable thing, even for those who have seen it and done it. That's kind of the miracle of it. Much of the medical system, however, seems to believe that it really is impossible without their help, and they are also afraid of the rare and very scary things they've seen or heard of going wrong, and they pass that fear on to women to add to their fear of never having done it and thinking there is no way her body can do something that seems impossible. Medicalization of birth also increases the "unknown" factor--it is something for educated doctors and nurses to know about, not average women.

Fear of Pain

It is also normal to fear pain, because pain is usually an indication that something is wrong, and we find it unpleasant. Our young pregnant women has heard others talk about how birth was painful for them and that they would never think about doing it without medication (or they did and it was a bad experience), and this just compounds the fear. She has probably seen birth shows on cable TV, which edit birth footage in ways that focus on the dramatic, because they are in the business of making exciting television, not of educating women about what birth is and can be. She probably has also heard a few stories of births where there were complications--maybe a vacuum delivery or an unplanned cesarean. She may fear something going wrong or having something strange done to her. Many women also feel fearful when they are in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, as is often the case with birth today.

Effects of Fear on Birth

We know that fear causes the body to release chemicals that can stop the birth process. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective--a tribal woman wouldn't want to give birth if a tiger was chasing her, but as is explained in the book Birthing From Within (not a hypno-friendly book, by the way), the body doesn't know how to distinguish between real and imaginary tigers, it only knows fear. Fear also increases our perception of pain and prevents us from enjoying birth.

So, what is our average (and now thoroughly terrified) first-time pregnant woman to do?

Most likely, she'll figure that she has a highly-skilled doctor and well-equipped hospital that will keep her and her baby safe because they're the experts, and she'll decide she will get an epidural, so she won't need to worry about pain. It is likely that her preparation won't go much beyond this. She will still have other fears to deal with, though. For example, what if she's afraid of needles?

Fear of Needles

Fear of needles is pretty common. I see nothing unreasonable about having a fear about a sharp object penetrating one's skin to introduce foreign substances into one's body. I realize that needles do a lot of good in medicine, but the idea of them is just disturbing to me. It is sometimes fear of needles that leads women to seek out natural childbirth.

My Answer?

The best answer to the fear problem is childbirth education. And by childbirth education I don't mean most hospital-sponsored classes where the woman learns a little (but usually not enough) about what is going on in her body, what routine medical procedures to expect (without letting her know she has the right to refuse all of them), and that epidurals are usually safe and not anything to worry about. I mean childbirth education that is free to tell you what the hospital doesn't want you to know.

Most natural childbirth classes address fear in two ways. They tell women that they can give birth without medication, just like women did before medication existed, and teach them pain coping techniques which helps increase their confidence and overcome their fears about pain. Some of these techniques rely on freedom of movement, so these classes usually encourage women to consider declining unnecessary routine medical procedures that interfere with movement (such as IV fluids and continuous monitoring). They also address fear of the unknown by teaching about the natural process of birth, as well as explaining how medical interventions might affect the process and giving information about the risks and benefits of these procedures and encouraging women to choose for themselves whether to accept them or not. Feeling like they are involved in decisions about birth helps women feel less afraid.

Fear of Medical Interventions

However, the downside to teaching about medical interventions (both in classes and other places such as books/films/internet groups) is that sometimes this education has the unfortunate side effect of creating fear of medical interventions. So, fear of pain, birth, and the unknown, are replaced by fear of hospitals, pitocin, and iatrogenic complications. Remember, fear interferes with birth, no matter what the source or intention. Going into birthing with any kind of fear is not healthy. And there is always a possibility that a woman will need medical intervention in her birth, and if that happens, we don't want her to be afraid of it. I recognize that fear of pitocin had negative effects in my own first birth.

I want women to be able to make birth decisions without fear. The presence of fear makes it difficult to use the other things we need to make decisions--our logic and our intuition. Sometimes natural childbirth sources are guilty of some of the same fallacies as the medical side of things. Those who believe in liberal use of medical technology in birth will focus on a few rare complications as reason why a woman shouldn't choose a homebirth, a VBAC, minimal monitoring, no IV or heplock, etc, while ignoring the majority of births that go right. Natural birth advocates sometimes focus on the rare scary complications of epidurals and cesareans, without mentioning that the majority of women who choose an epidural or need a cesarean have no major problems. It is important for women to understand the risks of interventions, while at the same time understanding that there are times when the benefits of these interventions clearly outweigh the risks.

Overcoming Fear

I feel that the best type of childbirth education would present information in a way that doesn't scare women, but provides them with unbiased information that allows them to make informed, and not fearful, choices. Good childbirth education also has ways of helping women overcome their fears. Hypnobabies includes a fear-clearing exercise that works very well for this. Some other ideas can be found in this post by Felice at The Gift of Giving Life.

Moving Beyond the Mommy Wars

Whether it's breastfeeding vs. formula feeding, cloth vs. disposable diapers, cosleeping vs. independent sleeping, or stay-at-home mom vs. working mom, it's inevitable that people find ways to judge each other in motherhood. Perhaps it is because we tend to define ourselves by our choices, that we tend to take these things so personally.

The judgmental attitudes begin even before we even officially become mothers, during pregnancy and birth. Pejorative rhetoric abounds in comment threads on internet articles and blog posts regarding birth issues such as midwifery, homebirth, VBAC, and high cesarean rates. One term that is often thrown around is selfish. It's "sefish" to try to avoid medical intervention `because it's putting your experience above the safety of the baby, it's "selfish" want pain relief because *that's* putting your experience above the baby's safety, it's "selfish" to want to avoid a c-section out of fear of surgery, it's "selfish" to opt for a c-section out of fear of damage to the vagina, it's "selfish" to have a homebirth because of the risks, it's "selfish" to schedule an elective induction because of the risks, it's "selfish" to go past 40 weeks, it's "selfish" to want a homebirth, it's "selfish" to want a care provider you know at your birth, it's "selfish" to want a VBAc...the list goes on.

The truth is that having a baby is one of the most unselfish things a woman can do. Women usually make their choices based on what they believe is best for their babies and for themselves. There are differences of opinion on what actually is the best choice, but it is never selfish for a woman to want to be involved in decisions that affect her and her baby. It is also not selfish to enjoy the process by which your baby comes into the world. Many women really enjoy natural childbirth and find it empowering and rewarding (and no one should automatically assume they are not one of these women). Other women choose to enjoy their birth using pain medication. I have given birth both ways, and enjoyed each in its own way. Neither was selfish.

Natural childbirthers are often accused of having elitist attitudes. They say that we think we are better than them because we had a natural birth, and seem to think that the only reason we did it was so that we could rub it in their faces that we are superior. Although I do see some of the elitist attitude, I feel our motives for sharing our stories are being misconstrued. It's not meant to be a "look at me, look at me, I'm so awesome because I had a natural birth and you didn't" thing. It's meant to be a "I did this, it was awesome for me, and it can be for you, too" thing. I think it just doesn't come across that way because of knee-jerk defensive reactions, which are then met by more defensiveness, and a bunch of angry name-calling ensues.

As natural childbirth advocates, we are sometimes guilty of labeling everyone who doesn't make the same choice as "uneducated about her options." This is not always true, and even in cases where it is, it is insulting. People don't often listen to things that people who insult them are trying to say. Women who seek to "advocate" for natural childbirth will not get anywhere with name-calling. The more we respond to insult with insult, the more everyone will be insulted. I would like to hope that we can rise above the petty "mommy wars" and share our experiences and information in ways that don't belittle, accuse, or insult.