Commercialized “beauty” is fake, brittle, cold, and dead.  Real beauty is found in a father’s strong arms, a mother’s fertile belly, and all the other ways our bodies look when we live in them.  The great delusion we have allowed to be foisted on us through unrealistic ideals of appearance is that body changes from motherhood and maturity are a sacrifice.

Having the body of a mother is not a sacrifice, or a punishment, or an embarrassment. Having the body of a mother is a blessing.

If I did not have the body of a mother, my babies could not have grown to full term inside my big, stretchy belly.  My babies were born beautifully round and healthy because I grew beautifully and healthily round.

If I did not have the body of a mother, I could not have nursed my own babies for as long as they needed, and provided extra milk for others besides.

Those of us who long for children and have been unable to conceive, or who dearly wanted to nurse their babies and could not breastfeed or did not get the support they needed, would give anything for those stretch marks or those unpredictably-sized breasts.

We put on wedding rings because we feel the need to signify physically that we have committed our lives to loving and nurturing another.  When we become mothers, we make that same commitment to our children, and we are blessed with the beautiful changes that signify our motherhood.

For pictures of the many badges of motherhood, check out The Shape of a Mother.

One of the most frequent comments I hear from women about their pregnancies is some version of “My baby was X days overdue so my doctor induced” or even “I just don’t go into labor.”  A first-time mom was talking to me yesterday about her low(ish) birthweight baby, and I asked if the baby had been early.  She said, “No, she was actually two days past the date they gave me,” as if that were some anomaly.  And while lot of women do know intellectually that 38-42 weeks is a normal gestation, somehow anything past 40 weeks is still “overdue,” with all its attendant emotional distress, because it’s past their “due date.”

I have many issues with the concept of the “due date.”  Since anywhere from 38-42 weeks is average, and anywhere from 37-44 (or more!) weeks can be normal and healthy, at the very least we should call it a “due month.”  When you’re due in “late September or early October,” there’s no magic “due” date to make you feel like you’ve missed a deadline (more about that in a minute).  And all of this assumes that your provider is counting from your exact date of conception, which simply is not the case unless you chart your cycle using basal body temperature.  The typical margin of error for ultrasound dating is 8% (measured in days), so even a “highly accurate” 8-week ultrasound has a margin of error of five days, and the inaccuracy just increases from there.

Furthermore, the average length of an uncomplicated first pregnancy is over 41 weeks.  But typical care providers don’t add a week to a first-time mother’s due date; they just let her, or even encourage her, to think that she is broken if she goes past that magic date.

While I would love to see the “due month” become the standard way of talking about when a baby will be born, I know change like that takes time.  So what can mothers and those who love them do in the meantime?

Well, the current paradigm of the due date is that it is a deadline, and if you go overdue, you’ve failed.  All we really need, culturally speaking, is a tiny shift in how we think about that date, and we don’t even have to take it out of the lexicon of the workplace:  Some women can get all their work done in a 38-hour week, a large number do so in a 40- or 41-hour week, and others take 42, 44, or even 46 hours.  Some women work the same number of hours each week; others have a variable workload and are all over the map.  Women who are experienced at their job can usually get it done in a little less time than at first.

Going past your guess date is like working some extra hours to get the job done right.  There is no more “failure” involved in gestating a 42-week pregnancy than there is in working a 42-hour week.  You’re not broken, you’re working hard and finishing your project completely.  Your baby IS going to be born, you WILL go into labor, and everything before that is like staying late on Friday to complete a project before the weekend: you may not particularly enjoy it, but it’s rewarding and it’s important.  The baby’s healthy arrival is your goal, not a particular date on the calendar.

So if you go into labor at 39 weeks, you get to leave work a little earlier than expected.  (Of course, moms know the work is just beginning!)  If this is your first baby and you go into labor at 41 weeks, you’ve worked a normal first-time pregnancy.  And if you go into labor at 42 or 43 weeks, you’re working overtime and you deserve some extra support (which includes reasonable monitoring of your health and the baby’s), not harassment or fear-mongering.

Here’s to the day baby registries only ask for a due month, and women feel confident and proud of growing their babies to natural term.

1. “A lot of women can’t dilate all the way.”
2. “Placentas don’t come out on their own.”
3. “You can’t have a baby without pain medication.”
4. “We have to break your water.”
5. “The cord was around the neck, so we had to cut it right away.”
6. “She needed a cesarean because she wasn’t making enough progress.”
7. “Lots of women can’t breastfeed.”
8. “We have to induce or your baby is going to be too big to birth vaginally.”
9. “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.”
10. “My body just doesn’t go into labor.”

The ultimate source of this anti-birth, anti-evidence bull hockey is a topic for another post (or book, such as Ronnie Davis-Floyd’s insightful anthropology-based Birth as an American Rite of Passage).  But I do want to point out the self-reinforcing nature of these obstetrical ideas that have no basis in scientific evidence, nor even common sense.

Take, for example, the OB quoted on My OB Said What?!?: “It’s SO weird that you’re in labor! I haven’t had a mom go into spontaneous labor in over a year!”  In other words, this physician schedules inductions so routinely–and so early–that he or she almost never lets a baby grow to full term.  (Iatrogenic prematurity is also a topic for another post, but let’s at least remember here that gestational age estimates can be off by two weeks or more, and that late preterm infants are at risk for severe complications at birth and in the long term.)  Since this OB almost never sees women going into spontaneous labor, his practice of routine induction is self-reinforcing.  After a while it becomes easy to forget that women and babies are designed to go into labor on their own; and with almost no normal experiences for comparison, it also becomes easy to ignore the risks to which routine induction exposes these clients.  This may be an extreme case, but with more than one in five labors in the U.S. being induced as of 2006, induction is clearly a norm for many care providers.

If you re-phrase the list of quotes above, it turns out that we hear this kind of circular self-reinforcing thought process all the time:

1. “I expect cervixes to dilate on a specific schedule, and if they don’t, they must not be able to dilate.”
2. “I don’t wait for the placenta to come out on its own; I’ve never seen a placenta come out on its own.”
3. “I don’t supported unmedicated births; I’ve never seen an unmedicated birth.”
4. “I almost never see a mother’s water break on its own; I always perform artificial rupture of membranes at 4 centimeters.”
5. “I always cut the cord on the perineum; I’ve never seen a baby with a nuchal cord deliver normally.”
6. “The average labor (under a care model that labels a long labor as dysfunctional and intervenes accordingly) is 12 hours; since she wasn’t pushing by 12 hours, she needed a cesarean.”
7. “I don’t see much point in taking the time to support breastfeeding; I don’t see many women breastfeed successfully.”
8. “I’ve never seen a baby over nine pounds born vaginally; I always induce if I think a baby is getting big; I require my patients to birth on their backs.”
9. “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.”
10. “Your baby is not going to come on her own; I don’t wait past 40 weeks.”

These self-reinforcing habits of thought and practice not only help many physicans avoid learning about evidence-based medicine (and I’m not trying to be snarky here; learning is hard work, and doctors are just as prone to intellectual stagnation as the rest of us), but they also affect the beliefs of birthing women.  It doesn’t help that when a quarter of our countrywomen have inductions and a third have cesareans, major medical interventions in birth seem normal.

Which leads us to the biggie, the overarching self-reinforcing assumption of the disease model/interventive medical model of birth: “You need to be in the hospital/have continuous electronic monitoring/[insert intervention here] because labors fail and babies go into distress all the time.”  The prevailing culture and media constantly barrage us with the message that birth is is a disaster waiting to happen, and that birth emergencies are sudden and common.  And that message is reinforced every time the normal process of labor is hijacked by medical intervention, because it’s not the intervention that gets questioned when the assumption is already in place that birth and the female body are the faulty parts of the situation.

So what’s a thinking pregnant mama to do?  First, find a care provider who practices evidence-based care, respects your decision-making autonomy, and will offer you the support that is so important for success in goals like natural birth and exclusive breastfeeding. (CIMS’ Ten Questions is a good way to start your interviews.)  Consider hiring a doula for continuous labor support and initial breastfeeding support.  And find a network of people who will support you as you create your own messages:

1. “I’m a normal, healthy woman and my cervix will dilate in its own time.”
2. “The birth process works best and is healthiest when every stage proceeds on its own time frame.”
3. “I cannot give myself stronger contractions than I can handle.”
4. “Intact membranes make a good cushion for baby and help protect us both from infection.  It even used to be good luck for a baby to be born ‘in the caul.’”
5. “About a quarter of babies carry their cord safely with them around the neck.”
6. “My labor will progress in the timeframe that’s needed by my body and my baby.”
7. “Breastfeeding is natural and normal.  Most women’s bodies are able to make enough milk to support one or more babies.”
8. “My body will not grow a baby too big to birth.  By growing my baby to natural term, I’m protecting him until his body is ready to breathe, nurse, and keep itself warm.”
9. “VBAC is a safe, healthy option and not only gives this baby the benefits of labor, but also prevents compounded complications from multiple cesareans.”
10. “My body knew how to perform the miracle of making this baby from almost nothing; of course it knows how to go into labor when my baby is ready to be born.”

Inspired (as much as limericks are ever “inspired”) by the information about brain development in the last few weeks of pregnancy found in this excellent Mother’s Advocate post about labor induction, as well as research indicating that the surfactant produced in baby’s lungs to prepare for breathing may be a primary trigger for labor.

Please feel free to share, post, or print.  Credit appreciated, but not required (just don’t pretend you wrote it, or the plagiarism goblins will come and steal your firstborn).

This will be baby number two and, barring any evidence-based reasons otherwise, home birth number two.

I’ve been adding many drafts that I look forward to polishing and posting soon.  Thanks for hanging in there with me!

When a baby is born, he is still a primitive being.  He doesn’t have the ability to make rational choices about where he centers his love.  Meanwhile, his neurochemistry is making connections and setting baselines that can have lifelong effects, and the way he is treated at and following birth has direct effects on that neurochemistry.  In fact, we know that babies (and not just newborns, but older babies as well) who receive minimal touch from their mothers often fail to thrive.  We could speculate about why that is, but really, it’s irrelevant.  The point is that we cannot explain to a baby why she is alone in a mechanical warmer with goop in her eyes, with skin pricked painfully, instead of snuggling that skin against the only sense of security she has ever known.  So if we cannot calm her with reason, then the only way to give her the neurological support that she needs is never to remove her from the arms of her mother to begin with.  And just in case we ever doubted that in her mother’s arms is her rightful place, a baby in skin-to-skin contact after birth breathes better, has better temperature and heart rate regulation, and will usually find the breast on her own.

On the other side of this new relationship, the grown woman tends not to be so primitive; indeed, many of us think that our primitive side is something shameful.  But the primitive is a valuable part of the whole of being human, and when we suppress it instead of integrating it, we also suppress valuable resources and abilities.

Certainly the ability to override the physical is an amazing skill that allows a woman to overcome a traumatic birth to bond with her baby, or even to bond with an adopted baby.  But when we take it for granted that a mother will use her powers of reason to bond with her baby no matter how much we abuse their relationship, we ignore the way the emotional, physical, and spiritual sides of ourselves participate in the birth and bonding process.  Pregnancy and labor involve neurochemical and physical changes that make it easier for us to be mothers, and that emotional and hormonal dance does not end with labor.  This is why the sixth Lamaze Healthy Birth Care Practice is “Keep Mother and Baby Together–It’s Best for Mother, Baby, and Breastfeeding.”  If we are willing to let it do its part, the same primitive source of knowledge involved in conceiving and growing a baby provides valuable instincts and hormonal reactions for not only bonding with that baby, but also caring for him.

To put it another way, the fact that people can overcome losing a leg doesn’t justify removing legs for less than life-saving reasons.  Just because a mother can find ways to bond that are not the original primitive bonding that occurs in the first hours after birth, doesn’t mean that it is ethical to deprive her of that important and very physical part of being a mother, nor to deprive her of the advantages of having a baby who has been able to bond normally.  Whenever it is possible to preserve someone’s own leg, it is most humane to do so.  Whenever it is possible to keep mother and baby together–and this can actually have even more advantages with preemies and after a cesarean–that is the most humane course of action.  We no longer expect a woman to overcome a lack of physical attraction and hormonal chemistry to marry as her parents see fit, so why do we expect mothers to forgo a deeply physical attachment to their babies?  Those “primitive” bonds function at the deepest levels of our minds.  Let’s take full advantage of the opportunity to access those unconscious abilities!

We expect married people to have children; but not to do the things that create a family, like including children in their lives and making the adjustments that allow that inclusion to happen.  Instead, we expect them to bundle their children off to daycare, school, after-school care, and summer camp–and then we wonder how families get dysfunctional.

We expect women to walk on eggshells about pharmaceuticals, other harmful substances, food, stress, posture, and medical procedures throughout pregnancy; but we snark at them as “granola,” “foolishly optimistic,” or “spending too much time on the internet” if they question the use of narcotics, stimulants, the preservatives in those drugs, denial of food, hostile surroundings, lying on their backs, and unnecessary surgery for labor and birth.

We expect women to breastfeed; but not to do the things that go along with it, like nursing when the baby needs to eat even if that’s at a restaurant or on the bus or in the park, pumping at work, or taking an extended absence from work.

We expect women to be good mothers; but if they believe the best way to do that is to put their careers on hold, we say “Oh, so you’re just staying at home now?” as if motherhood isn’t really valuable work.

We expect women to have careers and be mothers at the same time; but when they go back to work, we expect them to be as temporally, mentally, and emotionally available to their work as they were before being responsible for the health and well-being of a brand new person.

The theme here is that parents are expected to tuck their parenthood away like some shameful or inconvenient condition.  I suspect this results from the instant-gratification-culture idea that we can make major life choices without making any correlated life adjustments.  Of course, that doesn’t work for parenthood any more than it does for marriage.  We can either treat parenthood as an inconvenience and spend our lives trying to escape from our choices, or we can treat it as an honor and live our lives learning to be our best at one of the most sacred trusts in the world.

We live in an amazing time, when we can quite reliably choose whether and when to have children.  I have a lot of respect for people who decide that children are not for them–that takes a lot of soul-searching, because it’s not the “expected” way of doing things.  I also have a lot of respect for people who consciously choose not only to have children, but to be parents.  That also is a soul-searching decision.  Adjustments have to be made, and those adjustments, sadly, aren’t the expected way of doing things either.

What can we do to fix these conflicted expectations?  Sweep our own doorsteps.  No culture exists as its own entity; each is made up of the individuals within it.  Each of us must take the time to make informed, careful decisions not based on anyone else’s expectations, take full responsibility for those decisions by following through with all the effort and personal growth needed, and be thereby secure enough in our own choices to respect the decisions and resulting life paths of others.  We will always have different points of view among us, and thank goodness for that.  But a little personal responsibility on all fronts goes a long way toward replacing conflict with perspective and respect.

So take a deep breath.  Your decisions are your own.  Anyone else’s expectations are their own burden of insecurity, not yours.

Courtroom Mama asked how we would reply to both Oakley and Dell’Antonia, and my reply got a little long (shocking, I know), so I’m posting on my own blog.

To Oakley: You rock.  Your body rocks.  Don’t let anyone–not even me –tell you any differently.

Like you, I chose natural birth for my first baby.  I was then told by my two closest friends, who had just had their first babies, that I couldn’t do it.  They put me in the strangling position of choosing between re-explaining my reasons and thereby indirectly belittling their very recent experiences, or sucking it up and just saying “that’s still what I’m doing.”  I chose the latter; before their births I was quite enthusiastic about our local BirthNetwork and the information it helped me get about birth choices, so I had already talked about more of my reasons than they were willing to hear.  After my son was born (completely according to plan), and after I had listened to their birth stories over and over, they refused to listen to mine, interrupting with statements like “Well I’m getting an induction even sooner next time.”  (You know who you are. If you took the time to click through to this post, thank you so much for listening.  All I ever wanted was for you to listen, respect my perspective, and support my choices.)

As others have stated, the eyerolling and downright nasty comments are largely a matter of insecurity.  When a woman believes in her choices enough–and knows that she was informed enough when she made those choices–she can be supportive, offer information, and let other women make their own choices unhindered.  But when someone is bullied into her choices or didn’t even realize she HAD a choice, it can be very hard for her to step outside that schema and respect other women’s choices, because they are a reminder that she has more to learn (sad to say, since continuous learning is just part of being human).  It may help you maintain your own kind and supportive stance if you can feel sorry for rather than angry with those women who are afraid to open their minds to what you are choosing for yourself.

To Dell’Antonia (what an awesome name, BTW):  I was that “naive” first-pregnancy natural birth optimist and enthusiast.  In fact, I chose home birth.  It was harder and more painful than I could imagine!  But I was educated about normal birth, secure in my choices, and as prepared as possible–which is to say that I expected to feel unprepared.  And I would not give birth any other way without medical reason.  The fact is that birth works for a majority of women who are not hijacked in the name of medical “assistance,” because if it didn’t there would not be several billion people on the planet already.

So please, think twice before you snort at a mother, first-time or otherwise, who believes in herself.  She just might be right.  And you know what? If things don’t turn out as planned, she’s still right to believe in herself.  The point of planning a birth is not that everything goes exactly “perfectly” and that a woman gets exactly what she planned.  The point is that she has taken the time to educate herself and choose a set of ideals for how her body and her baby should be treated.  We don’t snort and say “I told you it wouldn’t make any difference” to a friend who works hard to be a good driver but still gets rear-ended by a jerk on his cell phone (that’s the medicalized hijacking), or loses control because she runs over a nail and suddenly gets a flat at 70 mph (that’s the unpredictable situation beyond anyone’s control).  We hug her and say “I’m so glad you were prepared and wore your seatbelt and had your penicillin allergy card in your wallet.  Would you like to talk about it?  Can I do anything to help you?”

So say it with me, everyone:
Would you like to talk about your birth plan or your birth experience?  Can I do anything to help you?

Perhaps a nearly identical warning would be appropriate at the front desk of every OB office or L&D ward: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Scheduled Delivery May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight.”

A recent article on Fit Pregnancy talks about an insurance company that told their providers to “curb the practice” of scheduling deliveries after they “found that 48 percent of newborns admitted to the NICU were from scheduled deliveries, many of them before 39 weeks.”  Lo and behold, they “saw a 46 percent decline in NICU admissions in just three months.”

So I have an idea: let’s save those NICU beds for the babies who really need them, and let the healthy babies stay inside the healthy mamas just as long as they need to stay.  An estimated due date is just that, an estimate–not an expiration date.  Not every baby walks at 12 months exactly; some are ready sooner, and some later, and the only way we know is to see them do it. Not every adult male is exactly 170 pounds, and the only way we know how big our sons are going to grow is to watch them do it.

In other words, parenting is about patience.  Let’s remind our care providers that our parenting starts with pregnancy, and not every baby is ready to be born at 40 weeks (much less 39 or 38), or at 8 pounds (much less the 7 or 6 pounds that a third-trimester ultrasound “measurement” of 8 pounds can mean).  In fact, let’s review those two often-stated reasons for induction: “overdue” baby, and “big” baby.

“You’re OVERDUE!” Remember, no medical practitioner should consider a baby “overdue” until 42 weeks.  Recommending induction the moment you’ve gone past your “due date,” or some even earlier arbitrary “safe” delivery date, arrogantly assumes that the practitioner knows better when your baby is ready to breathe than nature or God does (depending on your own point of view).  And since induction creates additional risks for mother and baby, early induction without urgent medical reason is not only arrogant, it’s impatiently irresponsible.

If you’ve gone past 42 weeks and would still like to avoid unnecessary induction, especially if you have any doubt of your conception date or have a family history of healthy babies waiting until past 42 weeks to be born, you can do your research and then work with your practitioner on using expectant management and monitoring YOUR particular situation rather than working from statistics that may or may not apply to you and your baby.

“Your baby is getting BIG!” Isn’t “Let’s just go ahead and induce/schedule a c-section” really saying “Let’s just go ahead and deliver your baby prematurely”?  If low birth weight is a dangerous side effect of smoking, let’s stop giving credence to the idea that iatrogenic low birth weight is optimal for ease of birth or for baby’s health.  Scheduling a delivery at 38 weeks for a “big” baby is just as foolhardy as scheduling that early delivery for a baby who’s measuring 6 pounds.  We simply do not know how big that baby needs to get–and more importantly, how long her lungs and brain need to develop–until labor begins on its own.  (Research for mothers with diabetes, especially gestational diabetes, seems to be inconclusive, which to my mind means expectant management is still a wise option.)  And with mother-friendly care during labor and during birth, a 10- or 11-pound baby born vaginally is more than possible, it’s NORMAL.

For instance, I’m 5’4″, 125 pounds not pregnant, and I delivered a 9-pound 6-ounce baby at 40 weeks.  If the average growth rate is a quarter to half a pound a week during the last weeks, that means he hit that dreaded 8 pounds somewhere between 34 and 37 weeks.  Let me tell you, the “extra work” of pushing another couple of pounds of baby fat into the world was well worth having a baby who was ready to breathe on his own, nurse effectively, and maintain his own temperature as well as any newborn can.  (The question of whether bigger necessarily means harder to deliver is a topic for another post.)  I know at least three women whose babies were premature due to unavoidable circumstances and who spent weeks visiting their babies in the NICU.  I think they would agree with me that there is nothing “convenient” about a premature baby struggling to adjust to the outside world.  Don’t put yourself in their position voluntarily, and don’t let a pushy doctor put you and your baby there just for the false “convenience” of a scheduled delivery or a smaller baby.

The other night, against my better judgment, I watched the Discovery “Health” episode on freebirthing (unassisted childbirth/UC).  Every time they showed a woman freebirthing, they listed three things this woman was going without: hospital technology, professional assistance, and pain relief.  I found the last almost comical, not only because it doesn’t seem to rate the same priority as the other two (so far I haven’t heard of even the most ill-informed practitioner saying “You can’t go without pain relief or you and your baby will die”), but also because it was patently irrelevant to the woman being filmed.  It’s hard to take a narrator seriously when she sounds shocked and slightly disgusted that a woman has been in labor for TWO HOURS without pain relief–and the woman is lying in a tub of warm water, calm, happy, and reaching between her legs and cooing “Oooh, the baby’s coming, I feel a tuft of hair!”

What really bugged me, though, was the huge assumption that pharmaceuticals are the only source of pain relief.  This in a nutshell is why I ignore most mainstream media on any topic.  If I can even get past the assumptions that are based on some agenda I probably don’t share, there’s usually little information of value left over.

These women were not forgoing pain relief.  All of them were in a tub of warm water at one point or another.  All of them writhed, vocalized, and chose the position that was most comfortable.  All of them had another person there to support them unequivocally and tell them they could do it.  What these women, and every woman who decides on an unmedicated birth, are forgoing is the physical and emotional complications that are often caused by pharmaceutical methods of pain relief–the only pain relief methods, I might add, that typically detract from rather than promote the process of normal birth.

So, back to my title.  No woman should be expected to give birth without pain relief.  However, just because it doesn’t come in a needle or a pill doesn’t mean it’s not pain relief–as long as we recognize that pain relief should not mean total removal of sensation.  While comfort allows a woman to progress effectively through labor and birth, total lack of sensation often does not; hence the more forthright term “comfort measures.”  And there is an unending list, limited only by your preferences and imagination, of supportive and labor-promoting comfort measures: walking, rocking, hydrotherapy (laboring in water), hypno-birthing, continuous support, aromatherapy, massage, and upright positions for birth are just a few.  What are your favorites?