Childbirth is not a walk in the park
CALL The Midwife is back on TV tomorrow night: hurrah. Serendipitously, Helen George who plays nurse Trixie in the series, has been talking about having her first baby, a little girl called Wren (lovely name, often given to men in Cornwall) four months ago.
Helen developed a complication in late pregnancy – a liver condition which could have crossed the placenta and affected the baby. So Wren was delivered a few weeks early by Caesarian section. What makes Helen heroic is that she’s not “hiding” behind her antenatal problems to explain the C-section. She bravely says she was always going to have an elective section, even if the pregnancy had gone to plan.
Why am I describing her candour as “brave”? Because any woman who admits she prefers the idea of an operation to giving birth naturally is seen as a hopeless cop-out, a wimp, by the powerful natural birth lobbies that still dominate the pregnancy debate these days.
Helen says she didn’t like the idea of a vaginal birth. Her acting experience on Call the Midwife meant she was, frankly, a bit scared. She’d been involved in several “horror stories” portrayed in the drama, and she didn’t fancy the ordeal herself. Because it IS an ordeal: one which usually and hopefully has a blessed outcome but can still be a psychological and BRAVE: Helen was open about her plan physical trauma for the mother. I was the opposite of Helen when I had my babies in the 1970s and 80s. An enthusiastic attendee of National Childbirth Trust antenatal classes, who devoured natural childbirth guru Sheila Kitzinger’s books, I was determined to be the kind of triumphant mother whose cervix, to quote Kitzinger, would “open like a flower” to deliver my offspring. It didn’t happen. All four of mine were born by Caesarean: one set of twins (the first baby breech); one enormous ovarian cyst which medics feared would hinder the progress of my next son: and the fear of rupturing my much-stitched uterus when my last baby was born barely a year after her brother. I was deeply fed up that I never had that natural birth. I felt I’d somehow failed. Now of course I count myself bloody lucky that we all survived. I get cross when people talk about being “too posh to push”. Even my son said that the other day when we were discussing his own birth (lots of babies on the way in the Madeley family right now, hence the preoccupation). “No,” I told him frostily. “I was just possibly saving your life.” (And who knows, my own.) So well done Helen George for being so honest and frank. All babies are wonderful; all natural births are not necessarily transcendental experiences. Just delight in safety and tranquillity, however yours is born.