Meddling Kids

I just read a great article over at ScienceBasedMedicine entitled “The Mother Is The Factory”. It’s a look at the origins of the natural childbirth movement. I admit my own bias on this one, as I never understood why a woman would choose to endure pain when the option to remove that pain was so safe, widespread, and inexpensive. But that said, it’s not my body that my four babies were pushed from, so my experience is merely an outsider’s view.

My ex-wife went the natural route with the first child and used the services of an anesthesiologist for the rest. I think she’s very happy to have gone the natural route, but I know the experience was a lot more enjoyable the other times. I remember her saying that she wouldn’t go for natural dentistry, so why would she go back to natural childbirth?

The article is quite interesting and talks about the tie between natural childbirth and eugenics. I hadn’t been aware of the tie between the two, but it’s quite interesting. I read once that one of the reasons why natural childbirth had been promoted so often was the notion that women deserved the pain as it was God’s divine punishment after original sin, but I have no idea of the validity of that statement.

I have many friends who are very dedicated to the concept of natural childbirth, and this is in no way meant as a slap to their faces, any more than it’s meant as an insult to my ex-wife for having gone that route for one of our children. As I’ve said, as I am sans-vagina, I cannot tell anyone what is best. My interest is merely in promoting the understanding of the origins of the movement.

An argument I often get when talk¬†turns to ¬†childbirth is around midwives and home births. Personally, I am foursquare against them. My eldest daughter would have died had we not had medical intervention, and it was not an intervention that we could have seen coming. Yes, the world over there are countless midwives delivering millions of babies, but the mortality rate for those babies is much higher than I would feel comfortable with for my own children. Call it Western arrogance, but I’m glad my children had access to effective health care systems that provide so much more safety to the process.

My friend Tammy recently mentioned to me a great example of compromise on this topic. In Montreal, she says, they went all out with their birthing suites, making them far less clinical and far more in line with what many modern mothers want for their birth experience. These birthing suites are immediately attached to the hospitals and offer the same state of the art medical benefits, and as such do not needlessly risk the child’s life.

I’m all for giving women the birth experience they want. In my ex-wife’s case, I think her best experience was the last one, where she used drugs for pain management but had both myself and a Douala present to assist her. The Douala brought a wealth of information on how to make her experience as good as possible, and was truly a benefit to us both. But there stood the doctor, prepared to do whatever was necessary to ensure the baby was born healthy and safe.

That’s a bit of a ramble, mostly my own opinion and nothing more, and definitely not about the article that triggered the thought. Sorry, sometimes I do that.

Jim