Natural Childbirth

In the recent years, most of the (urban) childbirths I have heard of have been Caesarean. I see a disturbing trend where this will soon become the accepted norm, as in  Telangana where it is already 75% in private hospitals. How could something like childbirth, that is so primal to the existence of life on the planet, need so much medical intervention? Has life not propagated itself before the advent of this technology? Surgical intervention in true medical emergencies is a boon to mankind. I am afraid it is not medical emergencies that dictate the terms anymore. 

Having being frustrated about this for long, I decided to at least share my natural childbirth experiences. This may sound cheesy, as if it is a TV commercial -- natural, vaginal childbirth is a beautiful, empowering, transforming experience that offers enormous benefits to both the mom and the baby. It is absolutely true! You can find research papers online that link asthma, allergies and many other problems in young children to Caesarean births. 

So, here we go:

Albeit being 15 years old, the childbirth memories are still crystal clear in my mind.

In 2003 when I first got pregnant, we were living in California. My OB/GYN doctor’s spontaneous reaction after seeing me was that I need to be examined and assisted frequently all through the process. She obviously had never encountered anyone as petite as me, in her entire career. So I could understand why she panicked. At the same time, there was another line of thought firming up in me. It was to do with the natural process of childbirth that both my grandmothers in India had been through (with 12 and 6 babies each), in spite of being just as small as I was. They gave birth at their homes, all naturally, with older women helping them. Also, I had just then finished reading “Darwin’s dangerous idea” and had begun looking at the world through the news lens of evolution. Slowly, my trust in the human body’s intelligence grew and I shared my views with my doctor. I convinced her that I could attempt a vaginal birth, without any medication.

Around this time, we got introduced to the idea of La Maze and started attending childbirth classes with a midwife called Kris Avery. She was passionate about childbirth, and was just the one I needed to learn from. The seeds that she sowed in us took deep roots. “Pregnancy is not a disease, but it is being looked at as one and hence the slew of problems associated with that”, she said. She offered a new perspective to look at the labor pain. I remember her statement: “Pain with a purpose”, in the context of how the labor pain guides both the mom and the baby. Over a period of two months, she helped us understand the various stages of a childbirth. She gave us the tools – breathing techniques, age old wisdom from other countries, birthing positions, pain management, research findings – that we appreciated very much when the time came. Kris also recommended a doula who could be with us on the day of delivery.

On August 5^th, it was 4 a.m. when I first felt the jolt of labor pain. Thanks to Kris, I stayed calm and started making notes in my journal. Kris had asked us to jot down the time and duration of each contraction. After two hours I woke up Dev and my mom (who had come to help us out).  The morning drive to our hospital in Santa Rosa was quite nice with the Sun brightly shining. When we reached the hospital around 8 a.m., I was almost fully dilated. We had requested a private room and it was taking some time to get one. We needed the extra space to accommodate an inflatable swimming pool. After we got into the room, Dev and our doula got to work right away. They had to inflate the tub and fill it with warm water. This task seemed to take for ever. As the pain intensified, I couldn’t bear the wait any longer.

In the meanwhile, my mom arrived with a friend. I could hear her pleading the nurse or doctor to perform a C-section on me. She apparently couldn’t bear seeing me in pain! I got rudely awakened by this and forced my mom to go back home. I couldn’t care less then. Once the pool was ready, I got in and felt the pain level drop significantly.  It was wonderful to be in water. It was as if the warm water gracefully received the pain and the weight that I was carrying.

The doctor came in to check on me and said that I needed to be out of water since I was ready to push. She insisted that I start pushing. Being out of water didn’t seem right nor did the doctor’s orders. I said to the doctor, as politely as I could, that I didn’t feel any urge to push and that I couldn’t comprehend pushing at that moment. Also, I requested her to step out of the room. I didn’t know if she felt offended. Again, I couldn’t care less. I went back to the water, much against the wishes of the nurses who wanted to keep it simple. Sure enough, a while later I did feel the need to push and I called for the doctor. When she came back she said that I should be lying on my back, in the bed. She wouldn’t let me experiment with any other position that I had learned from Kris.

In bed, I felt like fish out of water. With Dev and the Doula assisting me with breathing and pain management, I pushed and pushed for about an hour, but in vain. I remember biting once in to the chubby shoulder of our doula while crying in intense pain. When there was a moment’s break from the pain, the bright Sun that we saw in the morning came to my mind. Some hazy thoughts and images about the Sun gave me the energy to persevere.  The doctor said that I needed an episiotomy since the baby had difficulty coming out. After the cut, around 1:30 p.m. the baby’s head was out with a gush of amniotic fluid. An Irish nurse said that that was considered lucky in their country! The baby had folded an arm and placed that hand cozily next to his ear, rendering pushing impossible. 

Overwhelmed and relieved, we were hugging each other and crying. It took us several minutes to regain our senses back. By then, the baby’s chord was cut, he was bathed and wrapped in a towel like a freshly baked loaf of bread, with a cute little hat on his head. We had actually requested the hospital (in a written form, called “birth wish”) to not bathe the baby and to not cut the chord without checking with us. But the nurses were on autopilot. I was too exhausted to worry about any of these then. Dev and the doula had to empty the pool and get the room ready for others (that was the arrangement; the hospital wasn’t going to let us use a pool otherwise).

Empowered by the experience of natural birth, I was in a state of bliss with baby Abhi next to me. Having seen the worst of pain and having emerged out of it without any medicine gave me tremendous confidence in my abilities and made me shed baseless fears that I used to harbor. I was transformed for life. 

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Natural childbirth is a powerful, life changing experience that every pregnant woman is entitled to. I feel that it is a terrible loss to deprive oneself of it for reasons other than true medical emergencies. Looking back at this episode, I am wondering if this was my first step into trusting natural ways of living and learning, that we as a family so dearly enjoy now.  

I will share Aparna’s birth experience in my next post.