Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way by Susan Mccutcheon

[lightreads]

Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way by Susan McCutcheon-Rosegg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I usually don't fuss much about ratings. I do it by feel, generally as an afterthought, throwing in both my emotional reaction to something and a more analytical assessment of quality. This time I had to think hard about it, and I ended up averaging my 1 star and 5 star impulses.

The five stars is for being one of the first books I found to talk directly and candidly about unmedicated childbirth and how to think about it. I had an instinctive negative reaction to all the hypnobirthing stuff that got thrown at me early on – it's popular right now – and this book squarely confirmed my feeling that no, what I wanted was to engage squarely with labor, to use my brain every step of the way. This book talks about how to do that, and the discussion of particular emotional signposts was incredibly useful to me. I didn't even know what information I was craving – that no other source was talking about – until it was presented to me in this book. My labor didn't go sideways to crazytown until I hit 7 cm – until then I labored unmedicated, and it was this book I thought about while I swayed and breathed and thought my way through each contraction. (Well, it's worth adding that by unmedicated I mean no analgesia – I did have increasing amounts of Pitocin. And let me just say, doing augmented labor unmedicated is a different animal than this book contemplates). After 7 cm – well, that's a TLDR story for another time, but let me just say: 10 hours in transition. Enough said. At that point, this book became rather irrelevant.

Anyway. Enough about me. The one star stuff is everything else. The scare tactics about interventions, the manipulative and downright deceptive use of study results, the moralism and smugness, the sexism. This book hits every checkbox for what is fucked up about the natural childbirth movement. I am really glad I stuck with this book to get to the parts about actual labor, because like I said, they were absolutely invaluable. But man oh man, the opening and closing chapters are dire, guys.




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Comments

[sashajwolf]

I hear you on the augmented unmedicated labour - BTDT, for the best part of 32 hours, and frankly it's all a merciful haze now but it's safe to say nothing prepared me for it. But ten hours in transition? Wow, I don't think I could have done that and come out of the other end anything approaching sane. You have my deepest admiration.

[lightreads]

To be clear, I was drugged to the eyeballs for most of the last part (though not as effectively as I was hoping by then) and, mercifully, was so far in my head and locked into getting it done that I didn't articulate "hey this is transition....hey, this is taking too long....oh shit." In retrospect, though, one of the first things I said in recovery was "wait, holy balls, what was that?"

Props to you for 32 hours. I got to 6-7 with just Pitocin pretty fast (if things had gone normally after that, I'd probably have been done with everything in under 12 hours) and even that was amazingly exhausting.

[cahn]

(10 hours in transition: my whole body tensed up at that. Eek, is about the mildest thing I have to say about that.)

The scare tactics about interventions, the manipulative and downright deceptive use of study results, the moralism and smugness, the sexism. This book hits every checkbox for what is fucked up about the natural childbirth movement.

THANK YOU FOR THIS. It boggles my mind the judgmental smugness that is brought to every decision a woman makes about childbirth. (And breastfeeding, was another big one for me.) I thought we were in favor of people having freedom to make choices, here. Bleah.

The labor parts do sound interesting, though...

[castiron]

When I was in the stage of preparing for first delivery, the "evil! horrible! interventions!" was a problem I had with most of the books I read on childbirth-without-painkillers. I understand that they're reacting to a medical culture that's quick to do interventions that may be unnecessary, but still, there *are* times when interventions are needed. I'm also bothered, to say the least, by the implication that a woman who decides that enough is enough and chooses pain-relieving medication is a horrible person willfully harming her baby. Fortunately my midwives were much more reasonable than the books.

And yeah, ten hours of transition? Ow.

[lightreads]

Yes. I ended up with an epidural, which I (a) know for a fact did not cause the problems I had, and (b) which I have no doubt was the right decision considering the extraordinary degree of pain I was in from 8 to 10 cm (posterior baby with a head in the 90th percentile for circumference) and I'm saying that as a person with a very, very high pain tolerance. But even with both those things? I still feel shitty about getting it, and that just makes me mad. The thing is, as much as everyone talks about the evils of drugs, and as much as there are reasons and circumstances where medicating is not a good idea, I can't help but think that part of it is the notion that we're just supposed to suffer. That there is virtue in being in pain. And I just don't buy it. But apparently they got to me anyway, somehow.

[castiron]

That whole "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children" BS, indeed.