the crunchy mama blog

I have not been as involved in the home birth / natural birth community as I would like to be lately.  😦 It is easy for me to say it is because I have a baby myself and I’m still trying to balance home and work,- being a business owner and photographer,and now at the beginning on wedding season , I always find myself making a must do, should do, and a hope to do list…….

Today I went to the mall to try to find some new shirts (which was not fun and I was reminded of my I wanted to wait until I was done breastfeeding and my body will be at the size it is going to stay at for a while). As I was looking an employee came over asked if I needed help and said how seeing my baby made her miss her baby. I asked how old her baby was because I was thinking that I remembered seeing her in the store pregnant not to long ago.  Her baby was 2 months.  I am not one to ever start to pry or even ask questions but I could tell that she wanted to talk about her story..She began her story about how she was in labor for 3 days ( this brought a huge smile to my face and couldn’t help but say “how wonderful” – I then told her how I labored at home for 50+ hours. She wished she would have been home. She then told me how she was induced because she was past her due date and she was there at the hospital for a NST, they told her her baby’s heart tones were bad. (but they weren’t) (This is what they told me with my first child and then were oh so amazed at how healthy she was when she came out).  I had a feeling I knew where her story was going to go- and it did.. after she was induced and thrown into a hard labor she ended up having a Caesarean due to failure to progress (which in most cases is code for the hospital doesn’t want to wait around anymore for you, or you are not progressing fast enough according to what they have been taught).  To make her story worse she ended up with an infection from the c-section and she was not able to be with her baby for 2 weeks.  I can not even imagine that.  All of this happened because of being forced to be induced. Her baby wasn’t ready and her body was not ready.  Had she waited to go into labor by herself I am sure that she would have been able to have a natural delivery and she sure would not have been robbed from 2 weeks from her baby.

It makes me so sad anytime I hear something like this.  Drs and Nurses need to stop being taught to pressure women, healthy women with normal pregnancies, into having their babies early, and when I say early I mean anytime before they go into labor themselves.  So many first time moms are forced into procedures they do not want because they should be able to trust their doctors but they don’t realize that their doctors are not putting them first.

Moms- please trust your instincts, you will know if there is something wrong with your baby and if there isn’t, do not let anyone tell you there is.  Let your baby tell you when they are ready to be born. Only your baby should trigger your body to go into labor, and when you let this happen naturally it will be easier on your baby and yourself.

The woman I was talking to told me she never wanted to do that again so she can’t ever imagine having another baby.. I told her that I felt the same way after my first.  I also told her that there are so many wonderful support groups and information out there and that she could have a natural birth with her next and at least now she knows more.  It just really breaks my heart though that in so many cases it takes having a bad birth experience to really demand a good one.  I can not stress enough to first time moms to be informed, do not be afraid to ask questions, and if you are not comfortable with something say so- even walk out. You have the right to walk out of  the hospital.  I was really looking forward to having a HBAC or at least a VBAC so that I could show people that it could be done (in additional to all the wonderful benefits for myself and baby). Maybe sometimes that is why I shy away now from trying to inform people on pushing for a natural birth but then I think, what if I would have talked to the woman from today when she was pregnant still, maybe if she heard some encouragement she would have had the strength to believe in herself… So here I am now, I am going to do all that I can to make sure that woman have the births they want or at least that they get to try their hardest for it! No matter the outcome I believe a woman will be happy with her birth as long as she was able to make decisions about the procedure along the way.  No one should have regret about their birth.

To anyone who is pregnant: please……Trust and believe in your body, and your baby.