Today’s news that women are less likely to suffer complications if they give birth away from doctors and hospitals comes as no surprise to me. When I went into labour with my first child, after a healthy pregnancy, my husband drove us to our local hospital.
Seven hours later, I was told she was stuck, a heavy metal monitoring belt was strapped around my contracting belly and her heartbeat dropped to 60 beats per minute, about half what it should be.
In a desperate attempt to concentrate on the amazing feat my body was trying to perform, I tore off the mind-bogglingly uncomfortable monitoring belt and threw it across the room. I was led to a bed where the midwives covered my nakedness with blankets, an act that seemed almost as bizarre as the subsequent arrival of a man in a suit. I don’t know whether he looked at my birth plan, which said I wanted a natural birth, but he recommended a Caesarean, adding that the choice was mine but that, in his opinion, I would be endangering the life of my baby if I continued without surgery. I was pumped full of general anaesthetic and my daughter was delivered via a long incision in my abdomen. I was unconscious throughout and lost so much blood I needed a transfusion. For the first weeks of her life I was in a twilight state, recovering from major surgery, staring at the curtains from my bed wondering how on earth I was going to get up and open them, let alone look after my new baby.
Four years later, seven months pregnant with my second child, I was summoned to a meeting at the hospital. A senior obstetrician told me that, because of the complications of my first birth, doctors would want to monitor me throughout the labour. I told my midwife how unhappy I was about that and, to my amazement, she asked if I’d considered a home birth. I had assumed, because of complications with my first child, that this would be deemed irresponsible, at the very least. But she was a late middle-aged woman who, I reasoned, had probably seen birthing fashions and theories come and go and I trusted her quiet confidence.
Two months later, my son was born in my bedroom, weighing a staggering 10lbs, 10oz. As she left, the midwife in attendance said: “If you can push out a 10lb 10oz baby, I don’t believe your first child was really stuck.”
She promised to “sneak a look at my notes” before she returned. What she discovered was that, although my daughter’s heartbeat had dropped, it had started to go up again, something I had not been told at the time. She needed to make another quarter of a turn to complete her corkscrew journey down the birth canal, something this midwife said that, had she been in charge, she would have had confidence in happening. But, she explained, a senior consultant just happened be on the ward at the time and “senior consultants tend to make very cautious decisions”. The next day, my GP visited and remarked: “If I had known your baby was going to be that big I would never have allowed you to have a home birth.” After he’d gone, I gazed at the sleeping bundle of peacefulness that was my newborn son and thought, well, that just goes to show how wrong he would have been.
