Why is it about birth?

I have a confession to make: I read other people's mail.

We bought our house from a doctor and his family. As it turns out, they had also purchased the house from a doctor. Through some mail mix-up, we have been receiving the first owner's copies of The Lancet. I throw most of them away, but that's after first going through the list of articles to see if any interest me. I read this article, in the news recently because of its take on the safety of homebirth, and today I found an extensive article on pre-eclampsia, a subject in which I have a personal interest.

Reading The Lancet makes me feel like something of a voyeur, like I'm witnessing something I'm not supposed to be privy to because I'm not a doctor and can't understand much of what is written due to the technical terms. This article, though, was fascinating to me. I've learned the terms over the years through my own research and perusal of my personal medical records, and it was interesting to compare my own experience with HELLP Syndrome with what statistics indicate happen to other women with it.

I wanted to write a post that kind of explained what this is for me---why birth matters to me at all---and it was coincidental that I read this article on the same day I planned on doing that. I view having had HELLP Syndrome as the central issue that has affected my views on birth. I didn't view birth as much of an experience before I had a baby. I fell firmly into the "healthy mom + healthy baby = successful birth experience" camp. I knew there were things I didn't want: a caesarean, an episiotomy, and things I did: an epidural. I read with some interest the books on natural childbirth a friend lent me, but knew it wasn't for me. I trusted science and medicine and my doctor and never anticipated that things could go differently than he promised they would ("do I need to worry about not taking a childbirth education class?" "Nah, we'll just get you an epidural and you'll be fine").

So, of course, things came up as things tend to do, and there was no epidural for me and man, those classes could have come in handy (had I not been on bedrest and able to take them). And afterwards I was left so damn confused and worried. I felt like my body had failed me (which, actually, it hadn't; I went into labor as the HELLP was getting serious, and this is ideally what would happen in a full-term mother), and was worried it could happen again or that it was brought on by an undiagnosed condition. I spent months obsessing over what had happened.

And then I watched The Business of Being Born after a LLL meeting one afternoon. And I suspect I'm just the sort of impressionable woman it appeals to. Birth looked so natural and perfect in that documentary. It's edited perfectly---the doctors come across as assholes (remember the scene where the OB asks if a HB midwife would have fetal monitoring capabilities?) and the births go right and it makes everyone want to give birth in their bathtub. It left a lasting impact on me, but really, its influence was secondary to the book Pushed. If anything, it was that book that convinced me I wanted a midwife and a natural birth when I got pregnant with Number Two. It made me remember everything my old OB said that had bothered me, and it made me want to resist letting my child's birth become medicalized simply because I wasn't sure how much I still trusted medicine.

Number Two's entrance into the world was everything I'd wanted it to be, and was quite healing, actually. With Number One I'd felt fear and ignorance; with Number Two I felt empowered and strong. And it was lovely to revel in a physiological birth, knowing it was kind of a "screw you" to the old OB who'd recommended against it before.

So, in general, why does birth matter? Why is it that pregnant women are inundated with birth stories from the beginning? Why does what happens or what can happen affect some women and not others? Certainly part of it is that birth is a monumental experience simply because it's the process by which your child is brought into the world. And we like our experiences to be meaningful and special.

Are women selfish for wanting birth experiences, even if they're contrary to what their doctors or the medical community in general thinks is best for them? If policy is built on liability and preventing actionable events, is it even clear what is best for women and babies versus what is best for the hospitals? Jennifer Block quotes a doctor in Pushed who asserts that the c-section rate won't go down because people sue over dead babies, not dead mothers. If an intervention is going to mitigate the risk to a baby, even if the intervention is a problem for the mother, most likely the intervention will be pushed for. It's not perhaps a problem with the doctors or the midwives per se, but rather the systems in which they function.

In the end, what matters to me is that if the birth experience matters to a woman, she deserves to get the experience she wants. And I'll be totally upfront here: I don't see many impediments to women who want interventions in the way of epidurals or elective c-sections. And that's fine; how they give birth is their choice. I do, however, see and hear all the time about impediments to women who desire a true physiological birth. So my point here is not so much to figure out why a woman wants she wants, but rather how she gets there. And this is a favorite subject, so I like talking about it. Stay tuned!