Is this proof a caesarean makes it harder to bond with your baby?
Jill longed to be a mum, but when her twins arrived she felt empty – and she’s not alone
EDGING nearer to the Perspex incubator, I peered at the tiny, wrinkled creature inside. I was intrigued and bewildered. On a white towel, her arms by her head and skinny legs splayed out to the sides, she looked like a small pink frog relaxing on a sun-lounger.
A few feet away in a separate incubator, an identical little creature was lying helpless, her little chest pulsating rapidly under a tangle of wires.
These were my precious twin daughters Martha and Charlotte, born two months prematurely due to a life-threatening complication with my pregnancy.
Apart from a few brief seconds where I’d seen them hoisted — bloody and bleating — from my caesarean incision, this was the first time I’d set eyes on them since their birth 24 hours earlier.
Because they were premature, they’d been whisked to the special care baby unit at King’s College Hospital, london, and would spend the next 17 days there.
While my husband Robin had been able to sit with them and take pictures, I’d had no chance to meet them properly as I’d been taken to recovery with dangerously low blood pressure. I was later transferred, without my babies, to the maternity ward.
Meeting your little one for the first time is supposed to be a magical moment. Certainly as I was taken to the unit in a wheelchair, I felt my heart quicken — but it was with panic.
As I looked at the babies, I waited in vain for the rush of love that was supposed to be infusing my body. What kind of terrible mother was I if, at this once-in-a-lifetime moment, I could observe them only with the same detached curiosity I might have for an exhibit in a museum?
It was deeply unsettling, not least because I didn’t feel enough emotion to be upset by my reaction.
Yet it transpires that this is not unusual. Experiencing an emotional vacuum straight after giving birth is something plenty of mothers who have had caesareans go through — we just don’t like to talk about it because we fear it makes us look like bad mothers. But last month, BBC Radio 5 live breakfast presenter Rachel Burden broke the taboo.
The 42-year-old mother of four revealed how she felt completely detached from her youngest son Henry when he was born nine weeks early last year.
She had been rushed to hospital suffering from pre-eclampsia (a potentially fatal rise in blood pressure thought to be linked to problems with the placenta) and had an emergency caesarean.
Talking about the aftermath, she said: ‘I felt protective towards Henry, but completely detached from him. I remember seeing this tiny purple scrap of a creature, shown to me very briefly and then thrust into a plastic container, and all the doctors swarming over him, and thinking: “My God, that’s my baby.”
‘I didn’t really feel love for this scrawny creature. I only felt relief that he was breathing and anxiety that he was out there on his own far earlier than he should have been.’
Explaining that she found it harder to bond with Henry than she had with her other three children, who were all delivered naturally, she added: ‘ There’s this idea that a caesarean is the easy option, but it’s not remotely the easy option.’
I can relate to every word. Even now, nearly five years on, I feel terribly guilty about my initial feelings towards my daughters.
In fact, as many as a third of mothers experience difficulty bonding with their babies, no matter how they have given birth, according to research by the National Childbirth Trust.
What’s more, one in ten of us is too embarrassed to talk to a health professional about it.
With the rate of caesarean births in the UK around 26 per cent, one in four pregnant women can expect to have a baby operatively. And there may be some evidence that new mothers who have caesareans have bonding issues.
In one small study, researchers gave mothers MRI scans around three weeks after giving birth and monitored brain activity as they listened to three recordings: the sound of their own baby crying, a different baby crying and simulated crying noises.
When listening to their own baby crying, the mothers who had given birth by caesarean showed lower levels of activity than those who had given birth naturally.
The comparative lack of response was put down to missing out on the hormonal priming of oxytocin, which prompts a mum to want to cuddle, kiss and feed her baby, all of which help her to bond.
The study was hardly extensive, but the initial findings do make sense. If you have a caesarean, you’re also more likely to miss out on skin-to-skin contact with your baby straight after birth (also thought to trigger oxytocin), which may contribute to feelings of detachment. WHILE NICE guidelines say
all women should be encouraged to have skin-to-skin contact with their baby after birth, this is not always possible after a caesarean.
After all, it is major abdominal surgery and mothers are advised to avoid lifting even a kettle during the first few days, let alone their baby.
Studies have also shown this long recovery time makes caesarean mums a third more likely to suffer from postnatal depression.
Midwife Rachel FitzDesorgher, author of Your Baby Skin To Skin: learn To Trust Yo u r Baby’s Instincts In The First Year, says it’s little wonder that many mums find caesareans can have some negative outcomes in terms bonding with their babies.
‘ Having close, skin-to-skin time with a newborn baby has been shown to be so important for helping women succeed with breastfeeding, settling the newborn baby’s heart rate and breathing, reducing a baby’s crying and for improving bonding,’ she says.
‘Happily, most units in the UK have responded to the NICE guidance and encourage skin-toskin contact immediately after birth wherever possible.’
Tori Gabriel, 34, was shocked by her lack of emotion for her daughter lexie after she gave birth by planned caesarean in February 2015.
She’d been advised to avoid a natural birth as her three-yearold daughter had been a big baby and a difficult birth.
‘I knew what that rush of love feeling was like because I’d experienced it with Jessica and was looking forward to having it again with lexie,’ says Tori, a bookshop supervisor from Ramsgate, Kent.
But because she was hooked up to so many wires, Tori was unable to hold her new baby immediately after birth, so doctors passed lexie — whose full name is Alexandra — to Tori’s husband, Steve, 42, first.
‘Steve put her by my face so I could see her,’ says Tori. ‘But at that point I couldn’t touch her.
‘I remember saying “It’s my little Alexandra” and I smiled and said “I love you”, but actually I felt nothing and that scared me. It was about three hours later that I got to hold her and I wonder if that had something to do with the feelings that followed.
‘I put my initial emotion down to the drugs, but later that night, as I was trying to get her to breastfeed, she kept crying every five minutes. I began to wonder if she couldn’t latch on because I didn’t love her as much as my other daughter.
‘I felt horrid and was crying and it really worried me. I even said to one of the nurses: “She’s a really cute baby, but it’s like she’s nothing to do with me.” ‘Thankfully, the nurse told me that bonding can take a while. She said not to listen to the TV or soaps where women love their babies straight away. She was right. ‘It was probably two or three weeks later that I began to feel something for her. I remember singing to her and feeding her and thinking: “Yes, this is more like it.” ’
In the UK, planned caesarean rates are around 11 per cent, while 15 per cent of mums have emergency operations.
Some doctors suggest the circumstances around the birth — the trauma and fear of a sudden dash to the operating theatre and a baby whisked to a special care unit — all contribute to problems later on.
Certainly, for mothers like me
and Rachel Burden, who go for many hours — sometimes days — without touching their babies after the birth, the effects can be devastating.
Tracey Needham, a 33-year-old weight- loss consultant from Plymouth, was so underwhelmed by her feelings for her son Ethan after he was delivered by emergency caesarean in September 2011 that she needed counselling six months after his birth.
‘It was worrying because I began to think the love would never arrive,’ says Tracey, who is married to Peter, 38.
‘Ethan was a much-wanted baby and I’d loved being pregnant and I’d even loved being in labour. But when things started to go wrong, I was whisked off to theatre and given a general anaesthetic.
‘One minute I was in labour, the next I was waking up and Peter was holding our son all dressed and ready to go home. That rush of love you read about all the time on mummy groups on Facebook and in magazines just didn’t happen. I looked at Ethan and thought: “Hmmmm, it’s a baby.” But he could have been anyone’s.
‘We took him home and for the first six months, I fed, bathed and clothed him, but it was the bare minimum. I did all the stuff new mums are supposed to do, but I’d put him down and look at him and think: “If he wasn’t here, would I even be bothered?”
‘Emotionally I felt empty, and I feel terrible saying that now, but it’s true.
‘I didn’t breathe a word about it to the health visitor. I’d been warned by friends to say that everything was fine because no mother wants anyone to think she isn’t coping.’
Six months after giving birth, a friend suggested to Tracey that she should seek counselling.
‘It was great simply to be able to express my thoughts and hear the counsellor tell me it was perfectly normal,’ says Tracey.
‘ Society tells mothers they should feel a certain way after giving birth, and the fact I didn’t made me I feel like such a failure.
‘I remember crying in bed one night after reading something on the internet about bonding and thinking: “Why don’t I feel like this?” AROUND ten months after Ethan’s birth, Tracey began to feel the enduring love for him she feels today.
‘Ethan and I couldn’t be closer now. Even if he’s gone away for a day with my parents, I miss him like mad and love him to bits.
‘But mothers need to be more honest with each other about how sometimes you don’t fall in love with your baby straight away.’
dr Ellie Cannon, author of Keep Calm — The New Mum’s Manual: Trust Yourself And Enjoy Your Baby, says that mums shouldn’t panic if they don’t feel a bond immediately.
‘We need to move away from the idea that bonding just happens instantly when a woman has a baby,’ she says.
‘Social media — whether it’s an Instagram picture of Miranda Kerr breastfeeding her baby or friends posting their pictures on Facebook — is only perpetuating a filtered myth of what motherhood should look like. It’s not the reality.
‘The idea of bonding is quite new in psychological terms, and there isn’t great evidence that there’s any negative impact on the relationship if a mother doesn’t bond with her baby the moment the infant leaves the womb.
‘Bonding is like falling in love with a partner, it’s a slow build-up. But if a new mother has hormones rushing through her, as well as the physical changes after pregnancy and perhaps the baby blues, they are all are going to contribute to her worry and guilt.’
Happily, today my daughters and I couldn’t be closer. Over the 17 days that we spent in the special care baby unit, I had many hours to get used to them.
The nurses would lift their tiny bodies out of the incubator and tuck them down my vest top so I could experience that precious ‘skin-to-skin’ care.
I learned how to breastfeed and slowly, the love I felt for them began to seep into every fibre.
I remember visiting the unit around four days later and Martha seemed unwell and weak. The love I had for her at that moment — the desire to protect her and keep her safe — made me realise I did have feelings for my girls after all.
Now I couldn’t love my gorgeous little girls more and we’ve more than made up for those first few hours and days in masses of kisses and cuddles.
It didn’t happen instantly. But now I know that’s OK. We just needed a little extra time.