October 2011 issue of Freedom's Phoenix magazine - fr33aid

Birthing Choices: Doctor’s Intervention
or Mother Nature's Intention?
By Catherine Bleish
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FINDING out
I was pregnant
was one of the
greatest surprises
of my life. I
vividly remember
the moment
I realized that I
could see a plus
sign forming on
the pregnancy
test. My heart
pounded loudly
in my ears and
neither John nor I could believe it was true. In
fact,we bought two more tests just to be sure.
Even the digital test agreed, "pregnant".
We weren't ready for this. Our lives were full of
instability; a product of our non-stop schedules
and workaholic natures. I was barely keeping
my head above water financially, a choice I had
made when I decided to focus my life on activism
instead of continuing to climb the corporate
ladder. I knew one day my priorities would
change, but I thought I’d have more time to really
create the ideal environment to raise a family.
I quickly realized that I knew little to nothing
about the process of growing a human being inside
of me, let alone birthing or raising one. I
thought back to what I had been taught about
reproduction growing up and remembered it
being surrounded in fear and shame. We are
shown disgusting, disfigured genitalia in school
as we are taught to avoid sex. Women are pressured
by the medical industrial complex their
entire young adult lives to poison their bodies
with birth control. We're told its immoral to
have children if you're not married (an institution
that ends 50% of the time in divorce, which
is GREAT for children!).
No wonder John
and I were nervous,
we had
been indoctrinated
by a society
that surrounds
the idea of reproduction
in
fear and shame.
It didn't take us
long to realize
how backward this was - every parent I spoke
to told me what a blessing children are and that
honestly, no one is ever ready. After the initial
shock subsided we dove into research and began
talking to our close friends that were also parents.
One of the first pieces of advice I got from
a dear friend was to watch the documentary, The
Business of Being Born, by Ricki Lake.
We found the video on Netflix and settled in for
an evening that would change both of our mis-
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guided perspectives dramatically. Ricki Lake
became a birthing activist after her first birth
didn't go the way she had hoped. In the hospital
she was pressured into unwanted interventions
and felt that birthing could and should be so
much more. She began attending conferences,
talking to experts and decided to have her second
birth at home. She actually shows the home
birth video in the documentary and I must admit,
it had me in tears.
In this riveting documentary Ricki contrasts several
hospital and several home/birthing center
births. It was the difference in how the babies
reacted upon being first brought into the world
that convinced me to further explore "alternative"
or "natural" birthing options. The babies
born in non-hospital environments
seemed much
more calm and were instantly
put into their
mothers arms to nurse
and bond while the babies
born in hospital environments
seemed to scream
and cry as they were
flipped around, examined,
and poked and prodded by
medical personnel wearing
space suits.
While I expected home births to be more serene
and calm than hospital births, I was surprised
to find that they are actually more safe as well.
Did you know that over one third of the births
in the United States take place via Cesarean
section? This extremely intense and invasive
medical procedure was at one time only used in
very serious medical emergencies where the life
of the baby or mother were in danger. Today, it
appears the dramatic percentage of woman undergoing
surgery in order to deliver their babies
may be in part due to the high intervention rate
during early labor.
According to a 2010 USA Today article, over
44% of the women who attempt vaginal delivery
are induced, meaning they have their labor
artificially stimulated by a drug such as pitocin.
CNN reports that nearly half of those women
(undergoing induction) will give birth via Cesarean
section. This is striking when compared
to the Cesarean rate for women who wait for
spontaneous labor, a consistent 6-8%.
With such a high Cesarean rate, one might wonder
why these interventions are used so frequently
in our society. From my research there
seems to be five major trends regarding medically
unnecessary (non-emergency) interventions
into the birthing process.
One: The woman goes to the hospital entirely
too early and the hospital pressures her into
some sort of intervention in order to speed up
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