Childbirth finally leaves the Stone Age
Childbirth finally leaves the Stone Age - Telegraph
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Indulge me in a thought experiment. Imagine an experience that affects only men and involves hours of mind-altering pain, blood, gore and brutality. It leaves some of them so shaken that they slip into debilitating depression; it leaves others sitting uncomfortably, prone to haemorrhoids or incontinence – and even allergic to sex.
Now picture a procedure that does away with all that pain and horror, but comes at an extra £800 cost to the NHS. Do you think that men would pause for a nanosecond before pushing and shoving the Government into making that procedure available to all, on demand, with no ifs or buts? Sit-ins, protest marches, and the threat of strikes would bring the medical authorities to their knees, and the NHS's experts to their senses. Citing everything from their fragile mental health to their vital contribution to the economy, men would get their way.
But childbirth is a woman's matter. The government of the day has to launch consultations, specialists have to conduct studies, and the sands of time must trickle down painfully s-l-o-w-l-y before anyone sees fit to release females from the greatest suffering that most of them will ever endure. NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has finally proposed that caesarean births should be available to any woman who wants one on the NHS – but it's taken them more than 60 years to get around to it.
I don't just blame the NICE men. Natural birth fanatics, midwives, and NHS bean counters have long opposed caesarean sections, deriding those who want it as wimps and scroungers.
Step into an NHS surgery when pregnant and you'll come face to face with placenta-munching Gaia-worshipping thugs determined to make you have a baby "Nature's way". They wax lyrical about contractions that "ebb and flow like the sea" and birthing pools that simulate the womb. I still wince at the memory of being an "elderly primigravida", the flattering term for an expectant mother over 40.
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I signed up for the council's prenatal classes and obediently joined a dozen or so women in breathing exercises. We sounded like bellows and looked like Humpty Dumpty, but the worst was still to come. Our instructor (a midwife) shared her mantra: home births were for heroines, gas and air for wimps, and as for caesareans – God forbid – they were for those "too posh to push", of course. Childbirth, she explained, was a sacred ritual, and we were to re-enact the ancient rites of our ancestresses. I was reduced to a quivering wreck: my pregnancy was no longer a wondrous adventure to relish, but a Calvary to dread. I felt as bereft of medical help as if I'd been a cavewoman, squatting in the mud to push out my baby. Thankfully, when I did have my emergency caesarean, it was mercifully quick and painless.
Technology has delivered progress in everything from transport to transplants, but for our instructor it had no place in childbirth; only Mother Nature did. Yes, the same agent for destruction that floods Bangkok, shakes Turkey, and allows malaria to decimate Africa should stalk, unchecked, our neonatal units and homes. Doctors might as well hang up their stethoscopes and take off their white coats. The natural birth movement bemoans the medicalisation of birth – as if, rather than helping poor mortals cope with gruelling conditions, medicine distracted from the grandeur of Nature's processes.
If the scientist and the doctor are hate figures for this movement, the midwife is its high priestess. Ludicrously, feminists such as Naomi Wolf have sentimentalised this all-female profession as wise earth mothers, indefatigable in their support of expectant women and devotion to their unborn charges. One reason is that midwives love to use feminist lingo when they speak of "women-friendly births" and the "misogynistic" medical maternity establishment. (This, I might add, is true only of those midwives who can actually speak English: EU rules mean that the Nursing and Midwifery Council cannot test the English of the more than 3,000 nurses from EU countries registered with them.) In this way, pregnant women are left feeling confused, as well as anxious about their condition.
But beyond their calculated use of mystifying jargon, the midwives' agenda is to keep themselves in business – no matter what the risk to the women in their care. When The Lancet recently warned against home births, citing a study that showed they carried three times the risk that a baby would die, Cathy Warwick, who heads the Royal College of Midwives, dismissed the editorial as "misogynistic". As for dedication, the Care Quality Commission last week highlighted a "culture of abuse" among midwives and maternity staff at Queen's Hospital in Romford, Essex. One caring paragon of midwifery barked: "If you don't hurry up, I'll cut you." That example hit the headlines. Many don't.
Caesareans also raise hackles among NHS budget keepers. At a time of scarce resources, why prioritise an unnecessary procedure that involves expensive anaesthetics? Women have given birth naturally for millennia: why should they be pampered at the taxpayers' expense? This argument is cruel – and short-sighted, too. Once natural childbirth, like leeches and poultices, is relegated to the mists of time, midwives will be about as necessary as witches. Easing the trauma of childbirth, moreover, which leads so many new mothers to suffer baby blues, will save the NHS millions in anti-depressants and post-partum counselling. Women who want to push still can – but the rest of us thankfully will give pain a miss.
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Rare that I agree with Christina Odone...
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