CNN’s AJ
Willingham wrote on April 23rd about the “Awe” expressed
by so many in the fact that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, walked out of the
hospital 7 hours after giving birth to her third child. The Duchess has done this sort of thing twice
before, and it seemed so . . . magical . . . mythical . . . unmodern to so many
commentators, both women and men.
Now yes, as
Ms. Willingham points out the Duchess has a great many advantages – from
ambulances and police escorts and on-call doctors; to stylists and nannies –
that the vast majority of women lack.
Catherine has also had a great many challenges in all her pregnancies,
as she battled through bouts of “hyperemises
gravidarium during the early stages of all three of her pregnancies. The
condition causes severe nausea and vomiting, and can pose serious health risks.”
Yes, child birth can be exhausting and yes, three kids into my own marriage and
I can assure you it’s sometimes messy.
But where
Ms. Willingham gets it wrong – as do far too many people in today’s world
(including rafts of expectant mothers) - is that the challenges of birth itself
is some sort of debilitating CONDITION that must be treated or alleviated.
Instead, understood properly and prepared for with gusto, you really can arrive
at a childbirth experience that gets you out of the hospital in a red dress
looking like you just won an award.
Which you did. By giving birth.
To
understand how we got here, you have to look at how medicine is practiced in
the “Western” world – and more specifically in the US. Just a glance at the terminology that is
associated with birth in most medical settings is a serious clue – American
medicine speaks of birth as “labor” wherein you can get medication for “relief”
of “pain.” Labor is “induced” as an “intervention.” Doctors demand the “right”
to monitor women and their babies with often restrictive ultrasound harnesses –
despite a growing body of evidence that said monitoring actually increases
anxiety in mothers, slows the birth process, and increases the occurrence of
C-Sections (Which are major, painful and invasive surgeries). At one time many
woman even sought out drug cocktails called Twilight Sleep
to medically induce amnesia so as to forget the challenges of birth.
And yet . .
. many women – like my wife – choose to take control of their birth experience
just as they take control of their reproductive rights, their careers, their
finances and their relationships.
They increasingly choose – as we did – to birth with a midwife or in a birth center
away from a hospital so that birth can be the natural, empowering experience it
has always been. In that regard the
Duchess is well ahead of the game:
Though still a relative novelty in the U.S., midwife-led
maternity care is the norm in other developed countries, including most of
Europe.* In England, for example, midwives are the lead care providers at more
than half of all births. (There, midwife care is considered fit even for
royalty; last month Kate Middleton gave birth to her daughter Charlotte under
the care of two midwives.) “In England, what they say is, ‘Every mother
deserves a midwife, and some need an obstetrician, too,’” Declercq says.
In addition
many pregnant woman are taking advantage of things like Hypnobabies
(which we used twice), a national program that, through meditation-like
practices, exercises in visualization, and practice between the woman and her
partner – aim to transform both the woman’s birth experience AND her
perceptions. These approaches don’t take away any of the physical stress in the
pregnant woman’s body. They do, however,
better prepare a woman to thrive in the birth experience and emerge just as the
Duchess did.
So go ahead,
be in awe. But know that as a woman – or
the birth or life partner of a woman – you too can achieve a similar outcome
when you birth. And that means you can
emerge from the hospital 7 hours later in a red dress (thankfully without the
cameras) to go do the important work of raising good humans.
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