birth & doctors & medical interventions

Have you ever wondered why there is so much intervention when it comes to birth… and why we depend on it so much? I think of all the animals that instinctively know how to give birth. They go to a quiet place and have their babies all by themselves. Women used to give birth that way or they had other women surrounding her to guide her through birth. You didn’t go to a bright, empty feeling room where people come in and out every few hours to look at a screen and a beeping machine. I know that medical interventions are important and they save lives, but they also do the opposite. The birthing world needs to be better about serving women with optimal care. What is optimal care? It is the least amount of intervention that has the best outcome for the patients. The American College of Midwives came up with the term and I think that it is a really great way for providers to care for you during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum.

So why don’t care providers do this? There are a lot of factors, one of them being how they are taught. OBGYNs are surgeons. That is what they specialize in. When you go to an OBGYN you are seeing someone that is trained to look for problems, so that’s what they see. They see pregnancy and labor as a sickness and a problem to be solved. But that isn’t what pregnancy is. Having a baby is a very natural thing that happens, complications sometimes come up but it isn’t an illness and something to “cure”.

I was listening to the Birthworker Podcast with Kyliegh Banks and Dr. Nathan Riley and he shared something that was really really interesting to me, it kind of peeks into an OBGYN’s brain. He talked about how doctors become doctors. They start in high school, you have to get the best grades to go to a good college, so you answer all the questions and ace all the tests. Then you get into a college and have to be the best there too plus extra volunteering points. Then you take the MCAT to get into medical school and you still have to be the best there to get into residency. After all of that, there are licensing exams to actually become a doctor. The whole journey of becoming a doctor is about being the best and showing what you know… which leads to just following policies instead of looking and caring for an individual.

Which leads me to, why people don’t like the medical system and the interventions that are seemingly forced upon us. With my own life and example, I can tell you a story about my birth. My water broke when I arrived at the hospital. Before my water breaking, my contractions (waves) were very strong and close together. They came on super fast and it was intense. It was surprising to me how fast they came, but after my water broke they went away. So, after your water breaks your baby has no barrier between them and the outside world, so it is important that they come out so they don’t get an infection. If the baby doesn’t come in 24 hours their risk for infection doubles. That all sounds scary, right and that the baby needs to come out now. So they started me on Pitocin and I wasn’t really asked, they just did it. After 24 hours they encouraged me to get an epidural, so I got that and 12 hours later my baby was born. But the missing information that I wasn’t informed of was that my baby had a 0.05% chance of getting an infection in the first 24 hours of my water breaking, and doubled to 1% percent after 24 hours. So I kinda feel lied to and I would’ve made a different decision if I knew then what I know now. I don’t know if the care team that I had knew those statistics and they had my health and well being as their priority, but I do know that I wasn’t given a chance to be informed on the “decisions” I was making.

I think that there is a lot to be said about people who want to make those decisions, know the risks and benefits and maybe wait before they jump to intervention, which starts a snowball effect.

As a doula, I want to help my clients make the decisions that they want to make. I think a lot of bad births or trauma births are from a mom feeling like the decisions being made are out of her control. I want to help them understand that it is okay to ask questions and maybe challenge their doctor or midwife. I want my clients to know that they can share if they have experienced trauma that may or may not affect their birth experience so that we can prepare for that. I don’t need to know the details, just how to work through it. Being a trauma informed doula means that I need to remember that every birth is a new experience for that mom. Each mom has a past that is unique to her and it will affect the decisions that she makes in birth. There is nothing that we can really control in labor, the only thing we know is that a baby is going to come out of mom. We can help mom make decisions throughout a mom’s birth that is best for her and her baby, so that at the end of her birth she can know that she did what was best for her and her baby. That she made those decisions based on information not on someone telling her this is what we are going to do next.

What is something that you wish you would've known during your birth? Let me and other mamas know down in the comments!