The deaths of three newborn babies is believed to be behind the closure — but yesterday about 300 women took to the street to protest against it.

Their action triggered crisis talks and last night Queensland Health backflipped, announcing the centre would re-open for the weekend and discussions on its future would resume on Monday.

The two natural birthing suites in the centre, which is separate to the hospital’s labour ward, were closed without notice at 5pm on Thursday.

Griffith University’s Bachelor of Midwifery convenor Dr Kerry Peart said one woman was in labour when an obstetrician came in and said the suite was closed and the woman and her midwife had to move.

… some specialist obstetricians had raised concerns about the safety of the birth centre …

“The birth centre is not closing and we are committed to the birth centre model … we made a decision based on clinical safety to modify that model of care while we made absolutely certain that women and babies of the Gold Coast were safe,” he said.

… following meetings with clinicians, midwives and mothers-to-be yesterday the centre would continue to operate under the agreed model of care until at least Monday evening.

Australian College of Midwives president Jenny Gamble … said there had been three birth centre-related cases in recent months when babies had died … outside the centre and while under further medical care.

A midwife at the hospital … said none of the midwives’ practices had been reviewed or investigated and they wanted an explanation as to what the safety concerns were.

What happened is this: In my 39th week, I am induced because of high blood pressure. At the hospital, I am given Pitocin, a synthetic form of the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin, and Cervidil, a vaginal insert used to dilate the cervix. Within two hours, my contractions are one minute apart. I had lasted as long as I could without an epidural because I had read that they sometimes slow dilation. That’s the last thing I need: I’m at a pathetic 2 centimeters. My doctor comes up with a solution for the pain: a syringe full of a narcotic called Stadol.

“I have a history of anxiety,” I tell the nurse who has brought in the syringe, as I always warn any medical professional who wants to give me drugs. “Is this drug OK for me?” “It sure is,” she says.

It is not. Within 10 seconds, I begin hallucinating. For five hours, I hallucinate that I’m on a swing that’s soaring too high, that houses are flying at my face. My husband has fallen asleep on the cot next to me, and I’m convinced that if awakened, he will turn into a monster — literally. I’m aware this notion is irrational, that these images are hallucinations. But they are terrifying. I buzz the nurse. “Sometimes that happens,” she says …

By noon the next day, 24 hours after I had arrived, I am only 3 centimeters dilated. The new nurse, a nice lady, tells me the induction isn’t working. “Your blood pressure isn’t even high anymore,” she says. “Tell the doctor you want to go home.”

When my OB comes in, I say, “I’d like to stop this induction, if that’s possible. I’m worn out. I hallucinated all night … I just don’t think this is working out.”

“OK,” he says. “Let me examine you. If you’re still not dilating, we’ll talk about going home.”

My previous dilation exams had been quick and painless, if not entirely pleasant. This one takes a long time. Suddenly, it hurts. “What are you doing?” I scream. “Why does it hurt?”

No answer.

“He’s not examining me,” I scream at my husband. “He’s doing something!” My husband grips my hand, frozen, unsure.

I scream to the nurse, the nice one who had suggested I go home. “What is he doing?” She doesn’t answer me, either. I writhe under the doctor’s grasp. The pain is excruciating.

The first sound I hear is the doctor’s directive to the nurse, in a low voice: “Get me the hook.”

I know the hook is for breaking my water, to speed my delivery by force. I scream, “Get off of me!” He looks up at me, as if annoyed that the specimen is talking. I imagine him thinking of the cadavers he worked on in medical school, how they didn’t scream, how they let him do whatever he wanted.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. He breaks my water and leaves. The nurse never looks me in the eye again.

Eleven more futile hours of labor later, I am exhausted and terrified when the doctor comes in and claps his hands together. “Time for a C-section,” he says. I consider not signing the consent form, ripping off these tubes and monitors, and running. But the epidural I’d finally gotten won’t allow me to stand up.

It’s nearly midnight when I hear a cry. My first emotion is surprise; I had almost forgotten I was there to have a baby.

I was desperate to find someone who could tell me what had happened to me was normal. To say, “You hallucinated? Oh, me, too.” Or “My doctor broke my water when I wasn’t looking. Isn’t that the worst?” Nothing …

Now, I’d never loved my doctor … I’d found him patronizing — “Normal!” he’d shout at me, when I asked a question — I thought his assuredness might be a good antidote to my anxiousness. It seemed to work, until it didn’t.

… I also didn’t have a birth plan … Sure, I had a plan for the birth: Have a baby using whatever breathing method I’d learned in the hospital’s birth-preparedness class, maybe get an epidural. But I didn’t have the piece of paper that so many of my friends have brought to the hospital with them … in my opinion, the very act of creating such a contract was to ignore what labor is: something unpredictable that you are in no way qualified to dictate.

… people who hear my story ask … Did I consider a home birth? A midwife instead of an obstetrician? … The answer is no. I am not holistically minded. My philosophy was simple: Everyone I know has been born. It can’t be that complicated.

The women who ask me about my preparations for my first son’s birth — who imply with these questions that I could have prevented what happened to me if I’d been more diligent — are part of an informal movement of women who are trying to “take back” their birth — take it back from the hospital, the insurers and anyone else who thinks he can call the shots.

But hospitals aren’t so interested in giving women back their birth … stipulations dealing with labor and delivery (“I want only one medical professional in the room at a time”) garner barely a glance. University OB/GYN in Provo, Utah, even has a sign that reads, “…we will not participate in: a ‘Birth Contract’, a Doulah [sic] Assisted, or a Bradley Method delivery. For those patients who are interested in such methods, please notify the nurse so we may arrange transfer of your care.”

… This question of whether I could have prevented my trauma has lingered in my mind since that day; now that I am pregnant again, it has become deafening. I have a chance to do it all over. Would I benefit from thinking more holistically? Should I bother taking back my birth?

During my pregnancies, friends gave me two books; their spines are still barely cracked. The first is called “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.” … The other book is “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein; it’s an offshoot of their 2008 documentary, “The Business of Being Born.” Their urgent message is that women who want to deliver vaginally can do so if no one intervenes. Instead, doctors and hospitals are doing all they can to “help” the laboring woman along … and failing. Inductions like mine, epidurals given early in labor, continuous fetal-heart monitoring — all of them have been associated with a higher risk for cesarean section. The result is an epidemic — 32 percent of U.S. births were C-sections at last count, the highest rate in our history. Individual surgeries may be medically necessary, but as a matter of public health, the best outcomes for mothers and babies come with a rate of no more than 15 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

Sam … was five months pregnant when watching “The Business of Being Born” convinced her that hospitals could be dangerous and a home birth would be more meaningful. She and her husband found a midwife … and spent the rest of the pregnancy preparing.

After 24 hours of labor, Sam’s contractions were two or three minutes apart, yet when her midwife examined her, she was only 3 centimeters dilated. The midwife gently told her that she was nowhere close to delivering, despite her contractions, exhaustion and pain. Sam asked to be taken to the hospital.

The change of scenery did her good. “At that point, I had been in labor for 40 hours,” she says. “I entered the relaxed zone. The epidural took the edge off … It was a sacred space.”

After her son’s delivery, Sam passed out, having lost 50 percent of her blood volume in a postpartum hemorrhage. Needless to say, she was relieved that she was in a place where blood transfusions were readily available … she believes she will want midwife care at a hospital next time.

… Bialik’s first birth didn’t go the way she wanted. After three days of labor at home, she stalled at 9 centimeters, one short of the goal. Her midwife suggested they go to the hospital, where after a natural childbirth, Bialik’s son spent four days in the neonatal intensive-care unit. “My son was born with a low temperature and low blood sugar, which isn’t unusual in light of the fact that I had gestational diabetes,” she explains. “I understand doctors need to err on the side of caution, but there was nothing wrong with my child. All of our plans for bed sharing, nursing on demand, bathing him — gone.”

The experience was scarring. “I felt a sense of failure that I had to call my parents from the hospital,” Bialik continues. “Yes, I know vaginal birth in the hospital is the next best thing to a home birth.” …

I point out that natural childbirth in the hospital — her “failure” — was my best-case scenario. But I also understand when she says, “Everyone is allowed her own sense of loss.” She realized her vision when her second son was born at home.

The second time around
I don’t consider myself a candidate for a home birth. The risk of uterine rupture from an attempt at vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) makes it unthinkable … I’m also not really interested in a home birth … But I’m also not interested in another C-section …

So I’d like to attempt a VBAC, but I know that it doesn’t always succeed. I have a new doctor — the 10th I interviewed following my son’s birth — at a new hospital, and he has agreed to help me try. But my primary goal is more modest: not to be retraumatized. Even now, my heart pounds at the sight of hospital receiving blankets, the antiseptic smell of the maternity ward.

The common thread in Bialik’s and Sam’s stories that impressed me was how supported and safe they felt with their midwife …

In an e-mail Bialik sends after our meeting, she goes back to my idea that some women weren’t meant to have babies the holistic way. “There are those among us who believe that if the baby can’t survive a home labor, it is OK for it to pass peacefully,” she writes. “I do not subscribe to this, but I know that some feel that … if a baby cannot make it through birth, it is not favored evolutionarily.”

I think about my appendectomy, back in 2003. Had I not made it to the hospital in time, I would be dead. What would it be like to refuse medical intervention? I’d call my family, say my good-byes. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. “But I’m not evolutionarily favored. It’s time for me to go.”

This attitude, that everything was better back when there were no doctors, seems strange to me. C-sections, although certainly done too often, can save lives. Orthodox Jews still say the same prayer after childbirth that those who have been in near-death experiences say — and with good reason. A birth that leaves mother and child healthy may be commonplace, but it’s also a miracle every time.

As the weeks pass and my belly grows, I can’t stop thinking about Sam. Her pregnancy was a sacred time, and she had truly looked forward to labor. Is that what I should try for — a meaningful birth, as well as an untraumatic one? At what point had people like Sam and me learned to feel entitled to a meaningful birth?

“I think that birth should be a beautiful experience,” says obstetrician Kimberly D. Gregory, M.D. She’s the vice chair of women’s health care quality and performance improvement at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. “It should be exactly the way you want it, and doctors should intervene only to preserve the health or life of you or your baby.”

Naturally, one would assume that Dr. Gregory advocates birth plans. When I ask her this, she laughs. “We always say, ‘If you show up with a birth plan, just get the C-section room ready,’” she says. “You get everything on that list that you don’t want. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dr. Gregory led an unpublished study that compared women who took traditional hospital birth classes with those who employed Bradley-like training and a birth plan. The birth-plan group trended toward a higher C-section rate and more interventions. “There’s a certain personality type that tends to be more anxious. Maybe the anxiety hormones themselves put them at risk,” Dr. Gregory theorizes. “It seems that being open and honest and choosing the right doctor is probably a better option than writing everything down. Walking in with this list appears to set up an antagonistic relationship.” …

… In the past three weeks, I’ve had the same dream. I’m in a field (I believe at Ina May Gaskin’s Farm), and women in braids are dancing around me as my baby is born, painlessly, joyously. As I reach down, I notice my C-section scar is gone.

I wake up upset. Am I truly under the impression, subconscious though it may be, that taking back this birth will undo the damage of the last one?

“I don’t understand this phrase ‘take back your birth,’” nurse-midwife Pam England, creator of “Birthing From Within,” … tells me. “Who took it? What would a woman tell herself it meant about her if she failed to meet the criteria she made up for ‘taking back’ her birth? I am concerned that this phrase, meant to generate action and a feeling of empowerment, may actually be generated by or feeding the victim part of her.”

England is right: Having a childbirth that I deem successful this time will not change what I haven’t overcome from the first. I try to find a way to make what my doctor and nurses did to me OK, but my mind rebels. I feel loss — no, theft — of an opportunity for me to have a baby the way so many other women do: a carefree pregnancy, a labor that could still go any way.

Maybe I’m not so different from the women I spoke with, after all. Bialik had a successful natural childbirth but felt like a failure because it was in the hospital. Women who had a C-section also used words like failure. Perhaps part of the problem is that our generation of women is so ambitious, so driven, that we don’t know how to do anything without quantifying it as a success or failure.

According to Dr. Gregory, women are now requesting a C-section for their first birth, even without indication. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the unknown,” she says. Plenty of people are wary of C-sections by choice, from holistic moms to obstetricians. But isn’t this, too, taking back your birth? Refusing to be out of control seems to me the epitome of taking it back. You don’t have to have an unattended birth in the woods to be considered a real woman.

Deciding that you can’t control the uncontrollable — and committing to that decision when you are, in fact, out of control — is also taking back your birth. It’s what your grandmothers did. It’s what their grandmothers did.

With this, I realize that I have already taken back my birth, but not as part of any movement. I have stopped judging women who take extra precautions as defensive and started to understand that everyone has to find her way.

I don’t know how this story ends. I’m still not convinced my body was made to deliver vaginally. But here’s what I do know: I will insist on kindness. I will insist on care. And I hope I will be open to being treated kindly. It’s harder than it seems.

The survey of 460 midwives, GP obstetricians and obstetricians found that over half of doctors thought they should have the final say in maternity care but only 4% of midwives agreed.

In contrast, over 90% of midwives thought they should be the final decision maker, but only 30% of doctors agreed with this, according to the survey …

“The results showed while there was a widespread [agreement] with the definition of collaboration, there were significant differences in the way this definition translated into practice,” …

Both groups indicated that they thought the current system did not support collaboration between doctors and midwives. Nearly all doctors respected midwives, but this was not reciprocal, with only 75% of midwives saying they respected doctors.

… The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists made the legislation a patient safety issue, arguing that the agreements ensure an OB-GYN will be contacted immediately if a midwife is faced with a high-risk birth. After passage of the bill in the Legislature, the organization stated that patient safety will continue to exist in midwife-attended births in hospitals but not for home births.

… the report lends support to midwifery. She cited its conclusion that choosing a midwife will likely decrease the chance of an unnecessary Caesarean since the likelihood that one will be needed is generally less with midwives than with obstetricians.

With obstetricians more inclined to perform a Caesarean, some women worry about losing control of their delivery.
Chapman, a neonatal nurse … received a Caesarean for her first birth in 2008, but she found it difficult to recover from what turned out to be a physically and emotionally wrenching process for her.

“It was very hard on my body,” she said. “When I got pregnant again, I wanted the delivery on my terms. I wanted to do it on my own and feel like a real woman.”

Her second baby was larger than average, like her first, and the obstetrician worried that a normal birth could cause a uterine rupture, particularly with the previous Caesarean.

“When I asked her about doing a vaginal birth, she looked at me as though I was crazy,” said Chapman.
She sought out a midwife anyway … and liked that her desire for a vaginal birth was treated with encouragement rather than skepticism.

So when I recently learned that my wife is pregnant … I did not anticipate that accompanying her to obstetrical appointments would change my understanding of the doctor-patient relationship in a profound way.

The pregnancy has been healthy … We have been diligent–my wife faithfully takes her prenatal vitamins, exercises and watches what she eats, and we established a relationship with an excellent obstetrician right away to monitor the pregnancy.

However, due to the fact that my wife celebrated her 35th birthday last week … we were encouraged by our well-meaning obstetrician to see a perinatologist as well.

Perinatologists are also known as maternal-fetal medicine specialists, and are sometimes more aptly referred to as “high-risk obstetricians.”

These specialists care for pregnant patients with complicated pregnancies–gestational diabetes, unborn children with congenital defects, and other chronic health problems that women may have prior to pregnancy or may develop during pregnancy.

“But wait ” I can hear the average reader’s double-take: I thought your wife and the pregnancy were healthy? Why see a high-risk doctor? It turns out that it’s all about how to evaluate risk.

FEAR FACTOR
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has long held the position that once a woman passes the magical age of 35, she should be considered of “advanced maternal age” …

Most of this arbitrary distinction comes from the risk of having a child with Down syndrome, also known as trisomy 21 … [and] other rare chromosomal and congenital defects …

Our first appointment with the perinatologist could have been renamed “Fear Factor–Pregnancy Edition.” We first met with genetic counselors. These well-meaning master’s-degree-level health professionals have the job of counseling parents about their risk of having a child with some genetic defect.

During this session, I was wearing many hats–doctor, columnist–but most importantly, concerned husband and expecting father.

While the counselors presented chart after chart detailing the myriad genetic defects our child could (might, maybe, perhaps) have, my wife’s smile morphed into a furrowed brow filled with tension and concern. We were offered genetic testing–something I will get back to later.

Upon leaving the appointment, I found my role was to help my wife–a teacher–understand how to think about the risk that had just been communicated to us.

We have a 1-in-400 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome. Another way to communicate this risk is to say that for every 400 women who are 35 years old and who become pregnant, 399 of them will have a baby without Down syndrome. Sounds a little different, right?

Statisticians have computed that each of us in America has a 1-in-83 chance of dying in a car accident over the course of a lifetime. Yet we drive every day, and we are not in constant fear of a fatal crash (though a little fear would be nice for those who text-message while driving, no?).

Inherently, we have a great deal of difficulty in understanding risk. Emotions often trump rational analysis, leading to overestimation of risk–which directly leads to unnecessary biopsies, procedures, tests and medications.

COMMUNICATING RISK
It is the role of the physician to do his or her best to communicate risk to a patient. But studies over the years have demonstrated that doctors are not very good at communicating risk, and patients hear different take-home messages even when presented with the same words.

Out of a desire to advise patients of potential risks, physicians often scare patients instead …
Since I am an internist, I have a different set of common conditions about which to counsel patients, and I find the need to constantly improve how I communicate risk. Should my 80-year-old patient with a mildly elevated PSA get a prostate biopsy? Should a 35-year-old with chest pain have a cardiac stress test? Should a 40-year-old woman have a mammogram to screen for breast cancer?

I have a newly strengthened appreciation of the need to properly, carefully communicate risk to my patients–and to talk about that risk in the context of the patient’s individual value system. Each patient may have a different comfort level when it comes to taking on risk and uncertainty in his or her life.

UNNECESSARY DISCUSSION
In retrospect, we should never have agreed to see the perinatologist.
At the very beginning of the pregnancy, my wife and I thought deeply about our values and decided that we would never consider an elective abortion if our child were found to have any condition, including Down syndrome.

The post chronicled the buzz over the recent suspension, reinstatement and resignation of popular OB, Dr. Robert Biter, from San Diego’s Scripps Encinitas hospital last month, and the hundreds of people who showed up at local rallies in his support. Even though this piece portrays individual stories — mine with Dr. Biter and his with a contentious hospital — I’m glad to see the attention Huffington Post readers are giving it for the larger issues at play.

Dr. Biter was cleared of any wrong doing under a peer review panel and the California Medical Board declined any sanctions against him … Given the continued silence of both parties, it’s not clear what legal proceedings may still be underway. Regardless, his enormous, continued support in my community says a lot about what many women want as health care consumers today.

A central aspect of Dr. Biter’s popularity seems to be his unique ability to incorporate much of the midwife’s model of care … where birth is seen as a normal process … he puts in endless hours to stay very present in a labor, however lengthy, and tailors the care to maximize a woman’s innate ability to birth her baby without interventions …

… Over the years I’ve met more than one patient in Dr. Biter’s crowded waiting room who has driven hours just to see him. They make one thing clear, Dr. Biter does things differently than most. In addition to being more sincere and caring than some of our past doctors, he has extremely low rates for interventions like labor induction/acceleration drugs or c-sections. He also encourages women to move around during labor, as desired, to help the baby move down and out of her pelvis.

… Perhaps you are asking if Dr. Biter’s way is less safe than the norm … Even though we birth with OBs over 90 percent of the time in the U.S. … we still have the second worst newborn mortality rate of any developing nation and our maternal mortality rate has doubled in the last 25 years.

Of course, there are plenty of women who aren’t interested in a more natural birthing experience and options are abundant for them. But a real number of others are clearly starved for an OB who allows her to take her time in labor and resists the urge to intervene unless there is a genuine complication.

Like me, these women may want the option of having an epidural, or other medical tools available at their birth. But many of them don’t feel their freedom of choice is respected once they walk through a hospital’s doors.

FOR most women, the memory of their baby’s birth remains a vivid mental replay that awakens sensations at times as sharp and clear as the moment itself.

For Fiona Thomas, such memories are hazy, trammelled by darker ones that involved her fight for survival. All she remembers is the baby, her third, being lifted from deep within her; and then feeling faint and unwell.

As the baby lay in her arms, she was elated to discover she had a daughter (she already had two boys.) But there was tension in the room and the obstetrician seemed preoccupied. As the feeling of faintness dragged her deeper into a place she did not want to go, she signalled to the nurse to take the baby.

She remembers the anaesthetist telling her there were ”some complications” with bleeding and the obstetrician saying tersely, ”get her husband back here now” (he had gone with the baby to the nursery).

And then she was lying unconscious, monitored by the rhythmic beep of machines on a 24-hour guard. Meanwhile, the baby slept in the nursery, her life stretched out vast as an open sky.

Unbeknown to her, Fiona was suffering from placenta accreta, a potentially fatal condition in which the baby’s food supply, the placenta, attaches itself to the walls of the uterus so deeply that there’s a risk of haemorrhage if it is removed. It occurs in one in 2500 pregnancies but is difficult to detect beforehand.

In the delivery suite, the obstetrician worked rapidly to stitch up the ends of the blood vessels but the placenta was an open network, pumping blood at a rate of knots. ”My husband had a fright when he came back into the room and saw the obstetrician covered in blood,” Fiona recalls. ”I actually think it was harder for him than for me.”

… Fiona underwent an emergency hysterectomy and woke up in intensive care attached to drips and tubes that leeched donors’ blood back into her depleted body. Pinned to the foot of her bed was a photo of her daughter …

AUSTRALIA is the fourth-safest country in the world in terms of maternal mortality …

The chance of dying in Australia as a result of childbirth is remote – about one in 10,000 …

But globally, women die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate of one a minute, with 99 per cent of deaths happening in developing countries. Clearly, giving birth is a risky business. Good hygiene and better standards of living and prenatal care have gone a long way towards making it safer in this country, but that doesn’t mean it won’t go wrong.

Ironically, despite Australia’s great record, experts say many women are feeling more, rather than less, anxious about the birth process. Some blame this on our risk-averse society, saying the screens and tests and the increasing level of intervention in birth and pregnancy is geared towards making women fearful. As one expert puts it, antenatal care has become ”antenatal scare”.

Louise Kornman, associate professor of obstetrics at the Royal Women’s Hospital, says: ”Birth rarely leads to death, but it can lead to damage. The majority of pregnancies work out fine, but the reality is it doesn’t always go that way. There is a belief that technology can save you if things go wrong, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact there are inherent risks.”

… ”Of course, women might feel that sometimes the medical profession intervenes too much in what is a natural process, but the reality is that if left to mother nature then the outcome is not very good, often, and there needs to be a sensible balance struck between not interfering in a natural process but judiciously intervening when things start to go wrong – or preferably before things start to go wrong, given that prevention is better than cure. It can be a difficult compromise to reach.”

It is worth remembering that obstetricians are at the coalface of difficult deliveries. Does this make their view distorted? Unlike midwives, who oversee successful, normal births every day, doctors bear witness to the worst-case scenarios. Inevitably this difference in experience manifests itself in an ongoing debate on how best to manage childbirth. Midwifery groups push for normal deliveries and natural births while obstetricians err on the side of caution … Caught in the middle are the mothers.

Rather than becoming too complacent, Melissa Maimann, a private midwife and childbirth educator in Sydney, is seeing more anxiety among her patients, created, she believes, by our risk-averse culture.

”The safest place to have a baby is at home, if everything is going well,” she says firmly. ”The vast majority of people who go through the hospital system are unhappy with their experience.”

Have women been made to feel over-anxious? ”Possibly,” admits Bernadette White, clinical director of obstetrics at the Mercy Hospital For Women. ”It is easy to focus on the things that go wrong, and for some people that’s a source of stress.

”Obviously, a logical approach is to look and say, ‘Yes, that could happen, but how likely is it?’ But people don’t always have an entirely rational view when looking at things that might go wrong in their labour.

”And when you are assessing a risk, there’s a very broad spectrum of interpretation. That’s why some people will look at one set of figures and want a home birth, and someone else will look at the same figures and want an elective caesar.”
Associate professor Jenny Gamble, deputy head of nursing and midwifery at Griffith University, Queensland, has researched birth and post-traumatic stress.

Her findings show that while birth is a relatively safe physical event in Australia, it remains a hazardous psychological journey.

”If we stick with the premise that a high level of intervention has unintended negative consequences, then yes it does. We have consistently found that 30 per cent of women report that their birth was traumatic; that they feared for their life, or their baby’s life. This is a very high figure. We also know that about 6 per cent go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

”Women don’t feel safe. Birth is being geared towards making them feel fearful; strangers are telling them this and that, there is screening and testing at every step and they develop a sense that at any moment they might lose the baby or something catastrophic is going to happen. It’s called ‘antenatal scare’ in the trade.”

Gamble is concerned about the ripple effects of such trauma. Affected women may find it harder to bond with their baby, and their relationships may fall apart. They may develop a fear of hospitals and doctors and even birth itself.

”Most of our gains in maternal morbidity have been based around realistic, basic things, like feeding the mother, sending out health messages such as not smoking in pregnancy and basic care in the community. I am not suggesting that we do nothing, but the pendulum has gone too far the other way.”

ERIN Horsley had her first baby in Britain. Despite her plans for a natural birth with no intervention, she ended up having her baby induced and then delivered by forceps when labour progressed slowly.

Attached to a drip and no longer able to move around, Horsley couldn’t speak through the pain. ”If you can’t tell me what’s the matter then I can’t help you,” said the midwife, brusquely.

Horsley emerged from the experience feeling emotionally battered. ”I felt let down,” she said. ”Not listened to. It caused marital problems. When I had my second baby here in Melbourne I tried to talk the hospital staff about my experiences; they said I was being oversensitive and that birth trauma doesn’t exist.”

Shae Reynolds, 31, was also hoping for a natural delivery but a late scan showed the lake of amniotic fluid surrounding the baby was ”potentially low”. (This turned out not to be the case when the waters finally broke.) In the cascade of intervention that followed, Shae found her legs in stirrups opposite an open doorway with several strangers milling around the room, including someone emptying the bins.

A vacuum extractor was attached to her baby’s head and one her most horrific memories is watching the doctor put a foot on the bed and pulling, saying, ”We have to get this baby out”. She says part of her daughter’s scalp was damaged as a result, and she suffered a big tear.

”I struggled terribly the first six months,” she recalls. ”I couldn’t have sex for over a year. I felt like I’d failed, like I hadn’t protected her.”

Reynolds’s daughter is now five and she has had two more children, both born without complications and naturally, at home.

But every birthday awakens memories of the trauma. ”It’s hard not to feel torn, because one of the happiest days of my life was also one of the most traumatic. Those precious first moments that we had as a family were destroyed. We were cheated of so much more than just the birth. We still are.”

Medics and midwives are united in the belief that it helps if a woman can feel in control, or at least informed about what is happening. Says Maimann: ”We have an excellent public health system. The government’s job is to offer a basic and safe level of care, which it does very well. It doesn’t suit the emotional or mental needs of women having babies, but I don’t think it should.”

She argues that families should be prepared by investing in independent childbirth education, or working with a private midwife who will provide continuity of care at a cost of between $3000 and $6000.
Surely this will be out of reach to many? ”We can afford holidays,” … ”It’s about valuing what you get.”

Melissa Bruijn and midwife Debby Gould run birthtalk.org, a national birth trauma support group … ”People assume that if birth is going to be safe, there has to be lots of intervention, but reducing the amount of birth trauma is not about reducing what can go wrong, because that’s not controllable.

”It’s really about meeting the emotional needs of women. Even if they find themselves undergoing emergency caesareans, they can still feel empowered and part of the process if they are looked after properly. It’s a myth to say that the most important thing is a healthy baby. Traumatic birth gets carried with you – you don’t leave it at the hospital – and it can have profound consequences for both the mother and baby.”

It is almost seven years since Fiona Thomas, 45, an occupational therapist, went into hospital to give birth and ended up in intensive care. She was fortunate to have given birth in a hospital with a good supply of blood; fortunate that there was a team on hand that worked with rhythmic precision to save her. ”You don’t expect that,” she says. ”I went in thinking I was going to have a routine caesarean, just like I’d had before. All our friends were expecting a phone call 10 minutes later with good news, but there was nothing.

… 6 am we were at the hospital. I took a ton of food in with me, because I was not going to do this with no fuel. We got settled, the first nurse got us all checked in did all the paperwork and started the IV. They had a change of shift, so the next nurse, Anna, come-on and she was wonderful.

Anna spoke with us and I told her how things were going to go. To call the doctor if she needed but I was the one birthing a healthy baby, and unless the stats of baby changed, this is what I wanted …I told her we would be doing the pit slowly. I only wanted an increase every 45 min to an hour, not the every 15 the Dr. had ordered. She called the Dr and it was agreed. So off we set. We had a cervical check and I was barely dilated 2 and my cervix was very posterior.
I had no idea how the pit would work on me and baby so we just waited. Annabella was so squirmy, they couldn’t keep her on the monitors, Anna had to hold them on and move with her …

After awhile the Dr came in and wanted to look for Annabella and when she couldn’t find her well stated the baby was breach and we needed to go have a c-section. I looked at this woman and told her no, baby had not flipped I would have felt it, and I was not getting a c-section today. That if baby had turned, then we would turn off the pit, and I would go see my Chiropractor to help move her around again. I don’t think the Dr liked me. I didn’t care. So she ordered an ultrasound just to see, and I was later told she knew baby was breach and had started the paperwork to send us on.

Annabella was in fact not breech. She was head down just not really engaged. I felt so good knowing I was right. All this happened about 11am. There had been no increase in the pit for awhile … We started upping it again.

During these times since Annabella wasn’t staying on the monitor anyway, I was up. I walked and rolled on the ball. I leaned over the ball to do pelvic tilts. Pretty much anything I wanted. I really enjoyed that. I was eating and drinking … At 2pm I declined another cervical check …

I was standing and rocking my hips back and forth during the waves, and they were nice. Just these waves, they never were uncomfortable. I didn’t feel I needed to go in to off during them so I just stayed in center moving as I felt I needed to. Anna would come in and check baby with a Doppler, and the let us do our thing.

About 4 the Dr was back, she wanted to see where we were so we checked. I was 4cm, and my cervix was no longer posterior, about 70% effaced.

• The Dr. said I was not where she would like to see me by now. She wanted to break my waters and move things along.
• I told her no thanks; I felt we were doing fine. Baby was fine, so was I.
• She didn’t look surprised. She did get quite nasty though, and told me if I didn’t do things the right way this will land in a c-section and was putting myself and child at risk. That she was going off shift and there would be someone else.
• I … looked her square in the eye and told her that my child in fine.
• I am not having a c-section to please her that if she had not noticed this was MY birth. I was the one doing things, until someone can show me that my child was unsafe I would do this all night if needed. That was the RIGHT way.
• Also that it was a good thing that she was going off shift, because she was fired. I didn’t want her back in my room. I didn’t need any one in there being negative. I was sure there were other people around who could catch this child, and if not I would do it myself.
• She left the room in a quick hurry, and as I turned around again, my husband and … the nurse were all just kind of staring at me.

My husband was stunned, and asked if I could do that, firing the Dr. I told him I didn’t care if I could or not, she wasn’t coming back to my room …I don’t know how things happened from there, but another Dr. came in and introduced himself about 45 min. later and was way more respectful than that woman had been.

We continued, at 7pm the waves were more intense and almost on top of one another … I started to shake and shiver but I wasn’t cold. I vomited all over, and then with the next wave I felt pushy. soon there after my waters broke during one of the pushy waves.