I finished the book written by my classmate, the American midwife Peggy Vincent, yesterday. It is essentially her memoirs from the early days of her career in California from the 60’s to the 80’s. It’s quite interesting and very readable. Lots of birthing stories in the same vein as “Call The Midwife” on the telly, but set in middle class hippy San Francisco rather than poverty stricken post war East End London. She describes dipping her biscotti into her latte in the 70’s so clearly Berkeley was way more sophisticated than New Zealand at that time. I expect there was no better time or place in the world to live over those years – although now I come to think of it, the hospital she worked at in the 60’s was segregated. Black patients had separate water fountains (usually broken), toilets, and had to share big open plan birthing rooms, whereas the white women got birthing rooms all to themselves. Incredible that that was happening almost in my lifetime. She also describes a junior doctor trying to sexually assault her as a new grad nurse, and this sadly rings very true. I think we shouldn’t underestimate the positive outcomes of our current Me Too era. A lot of stuff was put up with that women really shouldn’t have to.
Anyway: birthing stories. I must say I never understood why women put so much importance on the process of their labour and delivery. Surely just get you and the baby through it safely? Yes, it’s a natural process, but it’s also natural that it comes with a high morbidity and mortality for both the baby and the mother. My mother was an awesome woman, as I believe I may have mentioned previously, but she was always aggrieved at having been bullied into having a dose of pethidine near the end of labour with her first born. The rest of her five children were born with no assistance at all, although all in hospital. We were all exclusively breast fed also. A super mum, clearly.
My two deliveries were a little less impressive. Rather than put up with desultory early labour for much longer, we went for a syntocinon drip and an epidural. I was so sensitive to the epidural that I couldn’t feel anything after that, and we ended up having our firstborn delivered by forceps. It did mean that I felt quite calm and rested, and when I finally managed to get my baby back from the nurses (they always take the cutest babies away “to give the mothers a rest” but really just so they can all have a cuddle during the long and boring night shifts), I just stared at her for hours. Cool. A couple of months later, one of our obstetricians, a scary lady whom I have never got on with, asked me how the delivery went, and when I said I had forceps, she was most congratulatory that I had managed to deliver vaginally. I felt quite proud of myself, although the timing of our conversation was a little awkward as we were both in the middle of a cesarean section at the time (with an awake patient – whom I remember looking at me somewhat forlornly, but I may have been imagining it).
The twins was another story. I was only 36 weeks and they were tiny scrawny things but unfortunately they were trying to kill me with pre eclampsia so I got induced. Again I got an epidural before I even had any proper contractions, many thanks to my lovely anaesthetist who went ahead even though my platelet count was borderline at best. I believe I may have told this story before but our obstetrician gave me a very strict deadline to avoid vaginal bypass surgery – curiously about half an hour before kick off on the All Blacks Australia game that night. Both he and my husband had tickets, which were wasted as I only finally managed to push out the offending articles around half time.
Reading the heroic birth stories in Peggy’s book, I did wonder what it might have been like to have a home birth, and experience everything naturally. But then I was reminded of another family member for whom things did not go well. Sixty years ago, she was living in the country when she went into labour. She became obstructed, and by the time she made it to a proper hospital, her baby was dead. I’m sure she would have put up with any amount of medical intervention and unnaturalness to have avoided that.