I recently wrote about the way births without pain relief or medical intervention are sometimes celebrated as though they are somehow a greater achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The conversations afterwards made me realise there was more I wanted to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the problem isn’t simply intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interventions can be unnecessary. They can be poorly explained. Women can feel that decisions are being made around them rather than with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That absolutely matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But intervention itself does not make a birth less valid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My emergency C-section quite possibly saved both my baby’s and my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am incredibly grateful for the people who looked after us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The anaesthetist came to do her final check before I could be discharged and I burst into tears thanking her. I had been so exhausted and in so much pain during the epidural that I could barely hold myself in the position she needed. According to James, they ended up tilting the bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She still managed to do it safely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ll never forget how calm and kind the surgeon was either, or all the staff playing their part while tolerating my slightly quirky birth playlist. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never wanted to hear George Michael again…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can feel enormously grateful to them and still find the birth traumatic. Those things aren’t contradictory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, the neurodivergent part of the experience matters too. I’m AuDHD. I mentally rehearse things. I like knowing what is going to happen. I want information, options and enough time to process them. Birth gave me very little of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was induced because of late-stage hypertension. I don’t think I even knew that induction could lead to further interventions, or at least what that would look like in practice. The more painful contractions. The monitoring. The possibility that I could end up with the emergency C-section I desperately wanted to avoid. Had I understood all of that properly, I think I might have chosen a planned C-section instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then add the sensory environment, pain, exhaustion, people talking to you, decisions needing to be made quickly and a birth that suddenly looks nothing like the one you’ve spent months mentally rehearsing. That’s a lot for any brain to process. For an autistic ADHD brain that relies heavily on predictability and a sense of control, it can be enormous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And afterwards, my brain wants answers. I was told that I was already 1cm dilated before the induction, so of course part of me still wonders: What if we’d waited another day?<\/em> We couldn’t. My blood pressure meant waiting wasn’t really an option. Knowing that doesn’t stop my brain going back over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why I don’t think the answer is to replace one hierarchy of birth with another. A vaginal birth isn’t more \u201cnatural\u201d than a C-section. Giving birth without pain relief isn’t more impressive than having an epidural. Using medical intervention isn’t cheating. And enduring more pain doesn’t make someone better at giving birth. There are no medals for suffering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One person commented on my post that several of her friends had felt they had failed because they couldn’t follow their birth plans or breastfeed, even where the interventions had been lifesaving. I understand that feeling. I’ve felt it about my birth. I’ve felt it about combination feeding my son. And that’s why language about being proud to have \u201cavoided\u201d intervention, done things \u201cnaturally\u201d or, worst of all, given birth \u201cproperly\u201d bothers me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be proud of your birth. Celebrate it. But we don’t need to rank women’s births according to how little help they needed. We need better information about intervention, better communication, real choice where choice exists and better support when things don’t go to plan. And, particularly for neurodivergent women, far more understanding of what losing predictability, control and the birth we had mentally prepared for can actually do to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However your baby arrived, you gave birth. There really isn’t a more \u201cproper\u201d way to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently wrote about the way births without pain relief or medical intervention are sometimes celebrated as though they are somehow a greater achievement. The conversations afterwards made me realise\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[33,31,35,30,32,23,20,34],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-divergently-parenting","tag-audhd-mum","tag-birth-intervention","tag-birth-trauma","tag-informed-choice","tag-maternal-mental-health","tag-motherhood","tag-neurodivergent-motherhood","tag-neurodiversity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}