This is a quick reflection on how birth is about “the unexpected” and about how important it is that women be in control of decision-making in birth precisely BECAUSE so much in birth is unexpected.
I think there is nothing worse than expecting one thing, having something entirely different happen, and feeling like the decisions were not in my control. Yet, this is what happens in birth across America every day.
We all have some vision in our mind of how our “perfect birth” will go. And I have yet to meet the woman who achieved her vision 100%, although I’ve definitely met a lot of women who are happy with their experiences. I’m always amazed at how even women with seemingly perfect births can obsess about the things that did not go right! (That’s a post for another day, because, come on! Let’s start talking about what went RIGHT at our births!) But this post is not about those seemingly “perfect” births.
It’s about the births in which we’ve planned really well, we’ve hired just the right support team, we’ve done everything we can to ensure that our vision has the best chance to succeed…
and then the baby decides to turn her head sideways or come out foot-first
or there is a flood/tornado/hurricane/outbreak of SARS (that last one happened to friends of mine who gave birth in Toronto!)
or our midwife is sick
or our blood pressure gets dangerously high during labor
or whatever….
And we have to improvise. We have to make decisions that we wish we didn’t have to make. We accept interventions because we know they are the right thing to do in the moment, but we also know that we researched and planned for HOURS and WEEKS and MONTHS to try to avoid them.
It’s just so important that women have as much decision-making control (and support) in birth because when these scenarios arise we will feel so differently about them when WE said, “Yes, it’s time for that intervention” than when we felt like it “happened to us.” Our healing for the days, weeks, and months after the birth will hinge in many ways on whether we feel like we had no choice or whether we chose.
We may be sad and angry that we did not have the perfect birth we envisioned, but we will not feel tricked, disempowered, or trampled upon. We can be sad and angry and also, simultaneously, grateful and empowered. These do not have to be mutually exclusive.
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