We were sitting in a prenatal yoga class in an unnamed facility in an unnamed Brooklyn neighborhood (one people assume they must move to the minute they conceive). For at least half of each of these classes, we talked about where we planned to give birth, with whom, and how the endeavor was going — lots of chatter about lower backs and digestive systems.
Annie, like almost every other repeat mom in the class, had endured a C-section the first time around. And, like almost every other repeat mom in the class, she harbored a sense of failure about the experience, and felt violated by the medical establishment that had allowed it.
And yet her determination to go vaginal the next time around wasn't just the result of that experience. Indeed, that pre-stretch chatter may have had something to do with it. I noticed that women choosing home births, birth centers or midwives got a bigger smile and better feedback from our teachers than those who mentioned the words doctor or epidural (unless they did so with derision). It reminded me of a tense meeting with my OB. She had expressed just as much skepticism and dismay when I brought up the possibility of delivering at a freestanding birth center with midwives as these yoga teachers did about doctors and hospitals.
I've learned over the last eight months of pregnancy of the longtime conflict between midwives and doctors, between the medical community and the natural childbirth movement. And we knocked-up ladies, sadly, are the collateral damage of their battle, forced to navigate each side's distrust of the other, getting bruised in the process. I mean, look at Annie — what she'd ultimately said was that she'd rather die than have a C-section again.
At first, I didn't think much about the preference for all things natural in yoga — yoga is, after all, endemically hippie-ish, biased toward the non-medical model. At that time I was still signed up with my OB (who wholeheartedly endorsed yoga, doulas and childbirth education classes, by the way), and seeking advice from both my sister the pediatrician and a friend I'll call Kim, a journalist covering maternity care in this country.
It didn't surprise me that Kim and my sister's views didn't mesh — my sister toes the pediatrics party line on everything from interventions to vaccinations pretty conservatively, though she is as gentle and empathetic as can be. Kim, on the other hand, has many hundreds of pages of evidence of how the medical establishment had failed women.
But I assumed that my own bouncing around between views was a private journey, and one I was well equipped for as a journalist; it's my job to gather as much information as possible and sift through it, searching for synthesis. Then my husband and I signed up for a childbirth education class. We loved it, don't get me wrong, but the bias was a little off-putting. We read an article that suggested an epidural could make your child four times as likely to become a drug addict; that you and your child would both miss out on necessary hormones if it didn't come out the vaginal route; that the hospital would snatch your baby away and do dangerous things to it if you weren't lucky enough, or maybe smart enough, to select home birth.
The teacher was educating us, of course, trying to reverse the course, and the curse, of the last fifty years that have led to a C-section rate of over thirty percent and a generation of women, like Annie, feeling stonewalled and abused by their doctors. And yet the teacher was making many of the students feel stonewalled and abused, before they'd even gone into labor.
To read the rest of the article, go to babble.
