We Are Made To Give Birth

Recently I have been re-reading "Ina May's Guide To Childbirth" by Ina May Gaskin so that I can write a book critique on it. While reading I have come to realize that she has such great success with her midwifery career because she has discovered some basic, but unfortunately forgotten, principles of birth. However sometimes she attributes these things to the right source, God, and sometimes to the wrong source, evolution. At one place in the book she says that, " Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic." I agree whole heartedly with that statement.  A little later though she refers to "old" and "new" parts of the brain, and how we have "evolved" to not know how to give birth, and that if we let our primitive "old" brain work we would be much better off. Her conclusion that letting the brain stem work uninhibited to produce the hormones needed for a successful labor and delivery is correct, as is her conclusion that stimulating the neocortex inhibits labor. However I know that when God created us we had all of our brain.

Further on in the book she recalls the history of how we got to the modern idea of birth, and says that if we forget all of those ideas and just "let our monkey do it" we will be better off. I agree that we need to come to birth with the assumption that birth is a normal process, but we aren't descended from monkeys, so I would say that you just need to trust that God made your body just fine, and you need to let your body work the way it was created to work.  Another thing she says is that "imagining yourself as a powerful mammal can help you feel empowered". I think it is helpful to look at animals and see that they give birth just fine, usually without any help at all, and say to yourself  "if God designed animals to have babies just fine, then I know I can have a baby without unnecessary intervention." But to imagine that you, who are created in the image of God, is just an animal is, in my opinion, wrong.

I would recommend that instead of trying to let your monkey do it, or imagining you are an animal, you should memorize Isaiah 66:9 "Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD: Shall I cause to bring forth and shut the womb? saith thy God." I found that verse completely by accident one day, but I wrote it down because it is a great promise to remember when you are pregnant, or in labor. I remembered it earlier as I was trying to critically read through and find what I disagreed with, and why.

I realized then, that while she was right in stating that we need to get our thinking brain out of the way of our acting brain, attributing natural birth to a primitive evolutionary instinct that we need to tap into is wrong. What we need to tap into is the fact that God designed us to give birth and that we need to not try and "play god" with our unnecessary medical interventions.

This post is not to say that all medical advancements are bad. I've never said that, and I never will. It was simply an intriguing thought to me that you could have the correct knowledge and attribute it to the wrong source.

The Game of Hurry up and Wait...

This is about two weeks late, I apologize for my tardiness in posting.

If you ask anyone in the military they will tell you that it's all just a game of hurry up and wait, and I have found that midwifery is exactly the same. Now I'm not comparing being a midwife to being a soldier, I just liked that they both start with the letter M, which also happens to be my first initial and my favorite letter. :) Now on to the story...

 On Thursday November 21st  I got off work, checked my phone, and found 6 missed calls, a new voice mail, and several text messages, all from Mom and Dad. Whoops! I called Mom back to find out what was going on, turns out that she was on her way to pick up some extra equipment from the cottage in Mississippi when she had a blowout!! Thankfully Dad was able to go rescue her because shortly after he got to where she was the call came in that our Mother To Be (Hence forth MTB) was having contractions three hours away. At this point I'm still in Alabama so I pulled up the GPS on my phone to find the routes that we could take that would meetup somewhere so that we didn't have to take two cars all the way to the birth. After confirming the routes with Mom I got on the road, and an hour and a half  later we met up and left her car in a parking lot.

Now comes the hurry part! On my way to the rendezvous I was only driving 80mph, but after I picked up Mom, and her bag of instruments that would legitimize our speeding if we were pulled over, I bumped it up to around 85-90mph. Well when we were 50 miles from our destination the MTB calls to tell us that her water has just broken!! After that I floored it!! At one point I was doing 105mph!! And I'm not gonna lie, it was FUN! :) Thankfully I didn't get pulled over, and we made that last 50 miles in about 30 minutes.

Then the wait... When we finally got to the house around 5:30 the MTB was doing well and was progressing, but was only about half way dilated. So after Mom checked the baby's heart tones we sat in the living room and waited, Mom had a magazine and I scrolled Pinterest.

At about 7:30 the dad informed us that he had just been asked to not leave the bed room where the MTB was laboring. Progress!! 

At about 7:40 mom checked the  baby's heart tones and the mom's dialation and and found that she was only at 8 centimeters, but she wanted to push. Mother told her not push, but two minutes later she could tell that the mom was going to push regardless and checked again and found full dialation!!!!

Two pushes later we had a head, and when mom swept the neck with her finger, to make sure that the umbilical cord wasn't wrapped around it, she bumped the tiny hand the had been born with the head and the baby grasped her finger!!!!!! (the hand was up under the chin and therefore didn't cause any problems with the delivery) That was the most AMAZING thing I have ever seen!!! After just one more push we had all 8lbs 10oz 20 1/2 inches of her at 7:51pm. 

After we weighed and measured her I got to dress and hold her. :) Mom and I stayed at the house for about three hours after the birth, cleaned up, changed the sheets (the not so exciting part of this job), checked the mom and baby again, and just generally made sure everything was hunky dory before we headed home. 

We finally got home at 2:15am, and I was back at work by 8:05 later that morning. :) 

She posed perfectly for me!! :)

Guest Post from the Senior Midwife a.k.a. My Momma :)

The Predicted Rise In Maternal Mortality Rates Is Sadly Here

 

The Maternal Mortality rate was quietly rising back in 2007.  The widely published book Pushed said solid numbers were soon to come1.  I hate to tell you, but they're here.  In 2010 California reported the number of women dying from birth had tripled.   Florida and New York have since followed suit.2  

 

The context, the cover-up and the uncanny about these statistics:  

 

Context

 

Maternal mortality reported rates are 21 deaths per 10,000 births nation-wide. 3   This is double digit losses amid thousands of births.  The increase over a generation is single digit.  Likely, you will never personally experience the mountain of grief behind these cold facts.  

 

Heart-numbing context aside, two things should be keeping Americans up at night:

1. Any preventable death is unconscionable. 

2. The number of dying mothers should be going down!

Cover Up

 

New York, California and Florida are likely the only regions conveying the truth.  The serious situation in other areas is lost to inconsistent data collection. Maternal mortality reporting in the US is so poor that  Amnesty International called it a human rights violation in 2010.

 

Uncanny

 

This very same scenario has unfolded before.  In 1918 a strange piece of news surfaced.  Counties were seeing scattered increases in maternal mortality rates.4 This trend spread over the next two years.  It was not until 1932 that a national level hearing was convened to determine the cause!! 5

 

Sadly, we have repeated our mistakes.  Digging back, we find the earliest rumblings of mounting risks to modern birthing woman.  They were heard back in 19946.  The rescue is way overdue!

 

Notes:

1. Pushed by Jennifer Block, 2007 Da Capo Press. Page 119

2. Birth Matters by Ina May Gaskin, 2011 Seven Stories Press. Page 126

3. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT retrieved 10/18/13

4. Lying-in: A History of Childbirth in America by Richard W. Wertz, 1989 Yale University Press Page 155

5. Lying-in “  Page 161

6. Birth Matters by Ina May Gaskin, 2011 Seven Stories Press. Page 126

 

 

Next posts in the series:

Your Safe Haven In The Midst Of the Storm

Could a Maternity Solution Birth a Cure for Our Nation’s Healthcare?

Random Chance? Star Dust? God?

Maybe I'm just dense, but the first time I studied biology I somehow missed how excruciatingly detailed DNA and the genetic code are. Sure I learned about the double helix, and how no DNA is exactly the same (except in identical twins), and that our whole genetic makeup is derived from our DNA. What I didn't realize is that that double helix repeats, and repeats, and repeats, to form a super coil, and the super coils form chromosomes, and chromosomes are in the nucleus of EVERY SINGLE CELL IN OUR BODY!!!      When I was reviewing it the other day it hit me like brick wall, and I reread the page 3 times just to wrap my tiny brain around how awesome, and epic, and marvelously choreographed the whole process is!!

After I had that astounding revelation, my next thought was, how can people think that this all happens by random chance? I mean come on people! We are the most complex life forms on this planet and we didn't even know about DNA until about the 1960s! How on earth do we think that all of this came together by happenstance? The odds of just one protein chain forming on its own are incredible, and for us to think that every living thing, from amoebas to humans, just happened to come together from star dust, or an oozing slime pit, or a big explosion, is just mind blowing! I don't under stand how anyone with a brain in their head can look out on this amazing planet, at our complex solar system, at ourselves, and not see in it the handy work of a master Creator.

While I am studying I am reading over, and over, and over the whole process of gestation, and it never ceases to amaze me. To think that every person started as a single cell with 46 chromosomes, and over the relatively short period of nine months becomes a living, breathing human being is astounding! Looking at the process, and seeing how complex it is, and how easily it could go wrong, yet rarely does, I can't comprehend how someone could think it's just a coincidence.

When you see a baby born so perfectly human, yet oh soo tiny, and you know the journey it has made in the previous nine months, how can you say that there is no God? No master Creator?


-Megan








 

Life? Choice? Baby? Pregnancy?

Have you ever read a pregnancy book? I'm currently working my way through 21 of them as part of my midwifery course. And as I've read I've been amazed at the dichotomy and duplicity of every author's vocabulary when it comes to the baby. On one page they will tell you that it is so wonderful to do a sonogram and see the heartbeat, or to see how the baby is definitely a tiny human, and then turn right around and say that if such and such is wrong (downs syndrome, or other defects) the "pregnancy" can be terminated! It is mind blowing to think that in our country right now you can have an abortion up to 24 weeks of gestation! Most people have already felt the baby move by that time, and yet it's legal to "terminate" the "pregnancy" if you so chose? They can't even say that it's just tissue then, they cant even use that argument for a 12 abortion! Babies look distinctly human by the 12th week and if you do an ultra sound you will see a heartbeat and get to see the baby moving around even though you can't feel it yet.

And the thought of killing a baby just because there is "something wrong" sickens me. How would it be if went around killing all of the born people that we thought had something wrong with them? Oh that right that already happened in Germany under Hitler and the whole world thought it was WRONG!! But it's just fine to kill that unborn, though no less alive, baby because it has and extra chromosome or isn't formed just the way you want it? And woman's choice? That woman made a choice to sleep with that guy and now you can face the consequences like a woman! In the case of rape you didn't make that choice but it's not that baby's fault either and you shouldn't kill it just because it's daddy is a worthless piece of slime sucking scum. Even if you can't raise the baby there are hundreds of couples who can't have children and would LOVE to adopt that little baby. It is a new life. Not a "choice"

Building on that, I think our society's definition of life is way off. I believe that life starts at conception, others believe that it starts at birth, however let's define life with death. Clinical death occurs when the heart stops beating and the person is then pronounced dead. By law of opposites life should be defined by when there is a heartbeat. That happens at 6 weeks! So you can argue that life doesn't start at conception, but it sure as heck starts long before birth, and it is legal to take that life until the 24th week.

 It saddens me to see people kidding themselves and others by referring to that life, that baby, as just a "pregnancy" when you want to "terminate", a.k.a. kill, it.

Thus ends my rant for the day.

Baby's First Picture

                                                            Supplies all ready to go

                                                               Baby's very first picture

                                                     Examination to make sure he is perfect

One Down Many More to Come

A week ago today I witnessed the miracle of birth for the very first time! It was AMAZING, and happened so fast that I was only on the other side of the bedroom and almost MISSED it! We, my mother (the senior midwife) and I, had been with the mom-to-be since about 3:00am that Friday morning while she labored in the Jacuzzi. Her labor was progressing but her water had not broken, and she was getting tired. (she had been in mild labor since sometime Thursday) At about 5:10am Mom asked me to sterilize and extra little clamp that could be used to snip the amniotic sac if the baby was born without it having broken. At this point we thought that we were still a ways away from having a baby and the Father was actually watching sports in the living room. :)

All of a sudden there was a shout from the bedroom so he and I dashed in to see what was going on! The next few minutes are a little blurred but I'm going to try and piece them together for y'all. ;) Let me set the stage for you first; picture a cozy little cottage room with two twin beds, the one on the left is all prepped for a birth, the bed on the right (and closest to the bathroom with the Jacuzzi) is not set up for a birth. Naturally, as is always the case with Murphy's law, the Mom had only made it to the right bed when that monster contraction hit and brought her husband and I running in. When we got into the room the Mother-to-be was still on the edge of the right bed and my Mom was kneeling by her in the narrow (like only 2 1/2 feet) space between the bed and the wall. Mom then gave directions for the Dad to get behind the Mother and support her from behind, and for me to get her the box of gloves which she thought she had left in the bathroom. I squeezed past her (literally squeezed) into the bathroom, only to discover that she had moved them to the night stand of the left bed in preparation of the birth. Just then the Mother's water broke! All over the bed, the floor, and my Mom! I then squeezed back past my Mom, through the puddle of amniotic fluid on the floor, and quickly made my way over to the other side of the bed to get the gloves.

 Then, just as I was about to hand Mom the gloves, with one final contraction and NO PUSHING the baby practically flew out!!! I kid you not! He (it was a boy) pretty much just fell out after the membrane that had been holding him back had broken. Mom caught him in mid air, I grabbed the towel, that we had laid out to wrap him in, and wrapped him up all in the space of about thirty seconds!!  Then while I held the baby Mom clamped and cut the cord so that we could easily move the Mother over to the prepared bed. We were all astonished at how fast he was born, excited that he was here, and happy to see him!! After that we weighed and measured the baby, checked him to make sure that there were 10 fingers and 10 toes and everything else was where it was supposed to be.

After the placenta was delivered the Mother had lost a fair amount of blood and couldn't get up without being dizzy so we gave her a sponge bath, remade the right bed and made her comfortable on it so she could rest.


All in all it was quite the extraordinary event and I was thrilled to have been there!!

Until next time...

~Megan