Without fail, every time I’ve strongly held a belief, life has served me a painful lesson to aid me in loosening my grip. I wanted a home birth, a natural birth – the ideal. Instead, I wound up with a code blue emergency caesarean.
The gulf between these two realities served up a unique kind of insight. One in three Australian women will experience birth trauma. Credit: iStock I had concerns about hospital setting interventions, and with good reason.
According to a recent inquiry into birth trauma in Australia, one in three women identifies their birthing experience as traumatic, while at least one in 10 women experience “obstetric violence” in hospital settings. Expensive and fraught with its own risks, I opted for a home birth. While the medical health system approach seemed to focus on everything that can go wrong, homebirth practitioners almost glossed over birth-associated risks altogether – each vying for a coveted “I told you so” crown.
My homebirth midwife was a wild-eyed political animal who fiercely believed in the right to an autonomous and natural birth. What she lacked in sensitivity, she made up for with grit. Her activist edge seemed reasonable when faced with the extreme medicalisation of birth at the other end of the spectrum.
Loading When my baby presented as a footling breech, my pro-home birth midwife found herself in a clinical hospital environment with an equally obstinate pro-intervention obstetrician. The circumstance sparked an ideological battle that played out over the course of my labour. Instead of wise or nurturing guides, I got blunt-force objects forwarding their respective agendas.
As the two women spat venom at one another, I was entirely abandoned. The obstetrician immediately wanted me to have a caesarean. The midwife continued to encourage me to birth vaginally.
I was in labour, in pain and caught between two worlds. Unfortunately, neither seemed too concerned about the people enduring the experience – me and my unborn baby. My midwife audibly tutted when I yielded to the obstetrician’s petition for a C-section.
I chose not to let her into the operating room, yet the ideological war marched on..
