“A good birth needs a midwife, and time”
By Danell Swim
February 26, 2008
What is it about birth that makes our society want to intervene? Perhaps it is human nature to want to help and to take away the pain of the transition from woman to mother. But is it the help that women need?
In our desire to help and make birth safer for mother and baby, society has produced a paradoxical situation where the conditions and increasing medical intervention in labour make it harder for them to cope and harder for a birth to take its normal physiological and safe course.
When a healthy woman’s pregnancy is normal there is strong evidence to show that a vaginal birth is the safer option for both the mother and the baby.
On some occasions obstetric complications can mean a caesarean section may improve the outcome or even save the life of the mother or the baby but this is only true for a minority of women and babies.
For others a caesarean adds risk for both mother and baby not just for the current pregnancy but for the next pregnancy too.
While the number of caesareans is rising, so too is the number of births assisted by forceps and ventouse.
Figures for 2005 show that in England around 48 per cent of women having their baby in hospital had a “normal birth” compared to 60 per cent in 1990.
This is not just an issue of safety, in terms of life and death. In intervening where there is no medical need, we create more risk and may damage the mother and sometimes the baby in the process.
We also risk damaging the very nature of the transition.
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