Fifty

At supper we were talking about the whole awful debacle that was the time leading up to Luna's birth and beyond, including the entire hospital experience.  We were so excited for this baby's birth, our first grandchild/niece/ in our family.  Emma had planned on a water birth, and Jess and I came to stay so that Emma would have help for at least three weeks.   Well, the aunt-to-be had to go home without even seeing the new little being, as Luna took her time, just like her aunt had done so many years before, and eventually, with the baby two weeks overdue, Emma was informed that she should go into hospital for an induction on Monday 18th February.

The three of us feverishly packed everything we would need, as Stuart and I were to be her birthing partners.  At the hospital reception a very gruff administrator stopped us short and told us that only one person could be the birthing partner because of the NORO virus having been a problem in hospitals.  Emma, in her inimitable way, immediately decided that she would go to another hospital where I would be welcome, but the grumpy administrator informed her that it was the same in all hospitals, and she told us to hurry up and choose the birth partner while she waited impatiently to process Emma as a patient.  No one had previously informed Emma that I would not be allowed in, and not even after the birth would I be able to visit, meaning that we would only see each other again when she arrived home a few days later.  Things went from bad to worse very fast, and I am sure that the fact that Emma was so upset and that the staff were so unpleasant and uncaring impeded any good progression of events coming out of the entire fiasco of an experience.  Luna was eventually born by emergency C-section on the 20th, when the foetus had already gone into distress, and the mother was suffering from a high fever due to an infection which was a direct result of bad practice in the hospital itself.   And things continued to go very badly in terms of care until they were finally allowed to come home on the Friday afternoon.

If you talk to any mother just about everyone has her own horrific birth-story to tell.  Of all the women I have ever spoken to about birth, only a handful have good things to say about it.   Why, in the 21st century, is this still the case?  Why must women suffer so?

Six months after the debacle that was Luna's birth, Jess had her little Ella by C-section, as the baby was breech, and it was such a different enterprise. The staff were amazing throughout, everything went cleanly and according to plan, and even though only the baby's dad was supposed to stay behind after regular visiting hours, I was allowed, as the mum's mother, to stay the entire afternoon and late into the first night with my daughter and newest granddaughter.  And Jess was totally present and aware for the entire positive experience, and recovered so quickly thereafter as well. 

Something that is totally natural, giving birth, has become man-made, for several centuries now, no doubt with good intentions, but with sometimes disastrous consequences, like so many women dying in childbirth from infection caused by doctors' dirty hands and instruments.  I am not advocating that the developed world make a return to plopping the baby out in a field, as many women in the world still must do, but surely, with all our technology, all our insight, all our knowledge of the human body, we can find a better way.  Perhaps C-section is the new way to go.

In England women are encouraged to have a "natural" childbirth, and the protocol is to let the vagina tear if it must, instead of doing an episiotomy.  There are recognised degrees of tearing, just like there are recognised categories of things that have to happen before you can term what is happening in a country a genocide.  Some things that human beings choose to categorise are very strange indeed.

Thinking about all these things, doing a little research into tearing vaginas versus episiotomies, remembering my own traumatic first experience of childbirthbirth, and then thinking too of all the awful things I know about the truly horrific things girls and women have to go through in some countries, like FGM and its myriad awful consequences, makes me feel so fragile that I find empathic tears running down my cheeks.  I think that 90% of women probably suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after giving birth, just as soldiers do, after having been forced to do and witness terrible things in a war.

We went for a long walk along the Thames today, under a cloudy sky, brisk and cold, Luna in her pram, and Emma and I talking companionably, my firstborn daughter and my firstborn granddaughter.  We saw these beautiful sculptures, which epitomise how we feel as mothers, even after going through all that pain, because there it is, the reason for our lives, the biological imperative, only much much more than that.