The truth about natural childbirth
The Corriere della Sera’s online edition reported yesterday (the report was updated today) some shocking statistics on natural childbirth.
Every year, 350,000 women die in childbirth, 95% of them in Africa and Asia (in 2002, the United Nations gave a higher figure of 500,000 a year).
“Le morti delle madri avvengono quasi sempre tra sofferenze atroci: la maggior parte perde la vita a casa, senza assistenza medica, altre mentre cercano di raggiungere un ospedale, quasi sempre a piedi o con mezzi di fortuna,” the report said.
In translation: “These deaths are almost invariably preceded by the most atrocious suffering. Most of these women die at home, without medical help. Others die while trying to get to a hospital, usually on foot or by trusting to luck to get them there.”
God bless hospitals, doctors, medical equipment, science, unnatural childbirth and those who worked hard to make all of them possible.
That we in Europe have become detached from the fact that childbirth is a savage killer and that nature doesn’t care whether we live or die is all down to these things and those people.
If that shameful couple who made the news a couple of weeks ago did not have access to the hospital and doctors they maligned, she would have become part of that statistic. There was no way on earth she was going to be able to push that baby out. Its position was wrong – because nature just doesn’t give a damn.
Most of those women die because they can’t push the baby out, generally because it is badly positioned and there is no one to perform a Caesarean section. Others die of infection where there are no antibiotics, or thrombosis where there is no warfarin and no drips.
Every woman who has ever been through the horrid agony of the final stages of labour can understand what it means to have that torture prolonged indefinitely, ending only when your body packs up under the strain and you die. That is the reality for hundreds of thousands of women who don’t have the good luck to give birth in hospital.
With babies, the numbers are more frightening still. FOUR MILLION BABIES die at birth or in the first 28 days of life (yes, breastfed ones).
People in their right mind should campaign for more hospitals, more medical treatment and more unnatural childbirth. Campaigning for natural childbirth is clearly for nuts.
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“God bless hospitals, doctors, medical equipment, science, unnatural childbirth”
Ma va!
Childbirth is a natural process, and God bless hospitals, doctors, medical equipment and science which are there when something goes amiss.
[Daphne – It is precisely because childbirth is a natural process that it is dangerous, John. Nature does not have inbuilt safeguards against death but precisely the opposite. The human body is designed for pregnancy but not for birth (the heads of human babies are disproportionately large, an evolutionary flaw) which is why women, unlike other mammals which have a shorter labour, go through many hours of agonising torture as the baby tries to fight its way out.]
Most of the deaths occur due to lack of basic medical care and knowledge of basic hygiene.
[Daphne – No. They occur because the baby cannot get out and there is nobody on hand to get it out by cutting through to the womb. If a woman is left in labour with, say, a breech baby, then both die because the baby can’t get out. It’s the same with older mothers (which means, incidentally, anyone from 30 up) whose pelvic muscles can’t spit a baby out like a 20-year-old can. More than 30 per cent of births in Malta are now by Caesarean section. Did you know that? Some of these must be unnecessary, but even if we take only half of them as being strictly and absolutely necessary, that’s a hell of a lot of women and babies who would die in childbirth without a surgeon to hand. Yes, a lot of those women die because of puerperal fever, but it’s not the presence of poor hygiene that’s the problem so much as the absence of antibiotics.]
My family experienced natural childbirth at home, assisted by professional people who leave nature do its work. I also thank God for the hospital which was there 15 minutes away from home but was never used during or after three births.
[Daphne – Yes, John, I know and it was your choice. Some people like bungee-jumping, others sky-diving – it’s a free country and nobody’s going to criticise your choice, however pointless (and expensive) it might seem. ]
In the States doctors take no risks and prefer to perform a Caesarean instead of facing some law suit, not to mention that they get more money from health insurance.
I don’t want to alarm people, but the wife of a friend of mine had a Caesarean section performed on her and she had an epidural applied in the spine. They had healthy twins but the mother is still paralyzed in the legs. We don’t need to go from one extreme to another; there is a middle way somewhere.
This happened in Malta? In 10 years I’ve never seen it happen and yes, childbirth is natural but that doesn’t mean complications can’t arise and with mothers giving birth at an older age this is more prone to happen.
There is nothing wrong with giving birth in hospital. It’s safer. Maybe we still have to find a balance, but it is safer. A woman’s risk of dying in childbirth in a developing country is 1 in 25-40, compared with 1 in 3,000 in developed countries.
I agree with your point that modern medicine is an aid to us and we should utilise it when the need arises.
I oppose home birth with a doula.
What worries me is that Malta has one of the highest rates of Caesarean sections in Europe. Some of these are made for fickle reasons. Others are obviously life-saving.
On what statistics have you based this sweeping statement, may I ask? If a moderate risk equates to fickle, that’s your opinion. Who wouldn’t opt for a C-section if it carries a lower risk. In my case, we’d both have died if it weren’t for a timely intervention. So, hurrah to medical science!
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘nature doesn’t give a damn’ (when considering the big picture), since procreation is, biologically, the most important function. Any species without sufficiently successful procreation mechanisms took the road to extinction. That means a high enough survival rate of both offspring and mothers, on whom the offspring depend for survival.
Successful does not mean flawless, however. So in a way, nature does indeed not care too much about individuals who ‘take one for the team’ and die trying, as long as there are enough who do survive to make it. Like many things in nature, it is a numbers game. Prey and predator, life and death – a constant delicate balance. The world has always been a brutal place.
To be fair, the great risks in giving birth in poor countries are probably compounded by malnutrition, bad sanitation, infectious diseases, etc, not just the fact that the ‘natural’ way is terribly flawed. If that was the case, humans would have become extinct long ago. One has to look at the whole situation.
Still, their birth rates far outstrip those of western countries nowadays. They just conceive a lot more frequently to win the numbers game. And only a few generations ago, this was the norm in Europe as well. It was common for our grandmothers and great-grandmothers to say something like “I had twelve children in all, four dead, eight still living”. Infant mortality was far more common and an accepted fact of life, as indeed were mothers who died from giving birth.
Today we are blessed with all the scientific knowledge and equipment at our disposal, and the loss of even one newborn or mother is considered a tragedy – something that went awfully wrong and shouldn’t have happened. That shows how far we have come, fortunately. To not avail yourself of this great safety net when needed, and risk the life of a baby and/or mother, is madness.
So yes, god bless our modern medical knowledge, technology, hygiene standards, and everything that helps keep us safer. I wouldn’t call it ‘unnatural’ birth, however. I see it as the natural process, but with external backups in place should the excrement hit the cooling device!
Many births still happen completely naturally even in hospitals, apart from routine painkillers to help the mother as required. If there are no particular problems, natural delivery happens naturally and it is not interfered with. I do sympathize with the idea of not being overly paranoid and wishing for as ‘natural’ a birth as possible. But *if* they are needed, it’s certainly great to have all the other safety measures in place.
By the way, we may think it ‘modern’, but birth by what we now term caesarean section is a very old invention indeed.
“Bindusara (Born c. 320 BC, ruled: 298 – c.272 BC) , the second Mauryan emperor of India after Chandragupta Maurya the Great, is said to be first child born by surgery”.
The concept of trying to salvage the possible has long been in place, though it didn’t become a safe procedure until quite recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarean_section
And while four million dead newborns sounds horrific, I wonder how many millions otherwise perfectly viable lives have been / are aborted every year. The world is not only a brutal place, but a very strange one too.
“Nature doesn’t give a damn”. It cannot afford to.
Nature limits the viable births. Natural selection. This happens across the board from plants to spiders, ants, mosquitoes, elephants, humans, lampuki etc.
Loads are produced. Loads do not make it. Some survive.
Equilibrium is maintained.
We, humans, have interfered with all this. The first mistake was discovering the science, or the art, of medicine. The establishment of medical doctors sounded the death knell. Then came drug renedies, natural and not so natural. Surgery, vaccines, nurses, hospitals, antibiotics and finally medical politics.
If nature had been allowed to take its course baby Pea would not have been around to tell the tale nor would have several billion other babies. This is it. Whether you like it or not we have messed it all up. We have interfered with nature.
Now we have our blood relative Gaddafi asking
the earth to stop all the ‘extra’ millions we have helped survive from invading our life.
To quote from St Matthew and Winston Churchill, “it would have been better if he ( in this case Edward Jenner amongst others) had never been born”.
I am afraid you are looking at this with a particularly skewed view.
Humans, having the natural instinct of survival, do everything to survive – just like a thirsty animal would instinctly look for water to avoid death.
It just so happens that we are far more down the line than simply looking for water and food.
I would not call the use of technology or knowledge discovery a mistake. It is what we do by nature. Natural selection is still at work. The barriers are simply higher now because we adapted to them by improving the technology used to overcome them.
I gave birth at 21. I was healthy and strong and made sure I took all precautions. My waters broke and I wasn’t having any contactions, so I needed the drip to start them.
I was in too much pain and eventually needed an epidural, and when all the pushing was finally over I needed another epidural as the placenta had remained inside my body. So nature on that day would have got to me one way or another had no docters been around. I thank God for the lovely widwife, the anaesthetist and the surgeon who took care of me on that day.
Then my baby needed her stomach pumped also as she was in there for 12 hours after my waters broke and had swallowed some fluid along the way. Had it not been for medicine and doctors neither I nor my child might be standing here today.
But then again some people underestimate the greatness of modern technology
When there is the smallest hint of danger or complications, the mother should opt for a Caeserean section. Unfortunately there are still women who die in childbirth and not to mention the others who face a very difficult childbirth.
I still insist on the importance of the epidural which reduces pain so much, meaning that birth won’t be considered any more as a nightmare.
As always both extremes are undesirable. I do not think that those who are campaigning for more natural childbirth want us to return to what happens in Africa. Similarly I do not think that what you are suggesting is that we should stop natural birth completely and rely on c-sections. I agree that the recent case was an appalling one which clearly shows how extremism is wrong.
I think that one should put his faith in the doctors and medical staff at the hospital because if something goes wrong you risk the life of the baby or even the mother. The experience of our first born child was one in which everything was going well until suddenly my wife had to be rushed in for an emergency c-section. Our second child was also a c-section for totally different reasons. In both cases my wife and I wished for a natural birth because my wife knew well that a c-section is not an easy way out of labour, quite the contrary it is a major operation which leaves you suffering for a number of days if not weeks and months. However when push comes to shove you do what needs to be done to safeguard the mother’s and the newborn’s lives.
I agree that we should thank god for the great advances in medicine and health care which have reduced mortality for both infants and mothers. We should not on the other hand abuse of the procedures we have. If all is well then a woman should go for a natural birth. If there are complications then you should make use of anything available to have your baby safely. There are obviously those who abuse the system. A c-section is a major operation and like other major operations you should avoid it unless absolutely necessary. To have a c-section you need a whole medical team, an operating theatre etc. all this costs thousands and uses up precious resources so once again unless absolutely necessary should be avoided. The recovery from a c-section is much longer and some mothers do not realise this until they live through it.
About the high incidence of c-sections in Malta one would need to delve deeper into the subject to know exactly what is happening but unfortunately from what I hear, there is reason for someone in the health authorities to look into how c-sections are done and for what reasons. One will probably find higher than normal rates in certain periods of the year and then must question why…
On the breastfeeding issue, you say that the millions of babies who die are breastfed. It is obvious that they are breastfed. Statistics will show that these babies come from very poor households where breastfeeding is the only option. The fact that they die is not because they are breastfed but because of the conditions they live in and the health of the mother. When the mother is healthy and there are no problems for the child then the mother should breastfeed the child as much as she can as this is definitely the better option, granted not always the easiest.
One last comment. You are shocked about four million babies who die because of lack of medicine and hospitals in their first 28 days of life. I am shocked by the 40,000,000 abortions that are made every year. That’s 100 times the Maltese population every year. What a shame! (http://www.worldometers.info/abortions/)