A study found more health problems among children born via planned cesarean births than among babies delivered by emergency C-section or vaginal birth.
Source: C-Sections Are Best With a Little Labor, a Study Says – The New York Times
Author: Robin Jones-Tropiano
Breast-Feeding Is Good for Mothers, Not Just Babies, Studies Suggest – The New York Times
Breast milk may provide the ideal nourishment for an infant, but two recent studies are putting a different spin on the bottle-versus-breast debate. Please click on the link below to read:
Source: Breast-Feeding Is Good for Mothers, Not Just Babies, Studies Suggest – The New York Times
Delicious Lactation Cookie Recipe
This recipe is great for mamas who are breastfeeding. It can help keep your milk supply up or increase your milk supply. Use more brewers yeast and oatmeal if you want to increase your milk supply. This recipe makes about 4 dozen.
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons water
- 2 tablespoons flax seed meal
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3 cups oats
- 1 cup chocolate chips
- 2 -4 tablespoons brewer’s yeast
Directions
There Is No Right Way to Have a Baby
Written by: Jessica Grose and courtesy of NYMag.com
What the new book Labor Day gets wrong.
I love a good birthing yarn. Sure, most happy labor narratives have the same general shape (they begin with contractions; they end with a baby), but the emotional and physical details are so particular. I want to know how you felt in the third hour of pushing. I want to hear what your partner said to you. I want to find out if you pooped.
So I was excited to crack open my copy of the new anthology Labor Day: Birth Stories for the Twenty-First Century — and disappointed by the overwhelming sameness of the stories within. Whether or not the women involved had natural childbirth (and the majority did), with one or two exceptions they are all still marinating in the same birth culture. It’s a culture that reveres midwife Ina May Gaskin, is populated by doulas with nose rings, and frames the decision to have a natural childbirth as a moral choice. And it’s a didactic, judgmental culture. If the vision of childbirth presented by editors Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon is to be believed, the movement that began as a pushback to ‘50s and ‘60s medical paternalism has become tyrannical in its own way.
Edan Lepucki, a writer who wanted a home birth but ended up needing a C-section, is a good example of the childbirth moralists in Labor Day. She writes that she doesn’t like to talk about her labor because:
I feel the need to explain my whole long story; otherwise, you might think I’m a clueless everywoman who let the doctors do what they did because I didn’t have faith in my own body. Because I was weak, because I’m not in touch with my physical powers.”
Over and over again, the choice to have an epidural is framed as “weak” and “fragile,” even by the women who end up asking for them (the exceptions are Nuar Alsadir and Cristina Henríquez). Here’s how Joanna Smith Rakoff describes it: “I was complying, admitting defeat, succumbing to my body’s inferiority to the miracle of modern medicine.” Cheryl Strayed admonishes women, “Don’t believe you can’t withstand enormous amounts of pain,” and “Don’t believe a pregnant woman is psychologically fragile and should be protected from the realities of labor and birth.”
Amy Herzog goes even further, writing, “In my personal pregnancy mythology, an epidural would be a disgrace, a C-section a tragedy of Greek proportions.” Herzog is being self-deprecating here, especially because the epidural turns out to be a minor issue when her daughter is born with a congenital muscle disease and must spend weeks in the NICU. But her initial feelings about the epidural show how pervasive the natural childbirth pressure is on a certain kind of pregnant woman.
The “strength” of a natural childbirth is equated with agency: You’re telling the medical establishment to piss off every time you reject their dulling drugs! But it’s inadvertently condescending to women who do choose to have pain relief. It’s telling them they’re “clueless everywomen” who just aren’t properly educated about what their bodies can do, when in fact they may just not want to go through the pain if they don’t have to, or they may be facing complications beyond their control (à la Herzog). As a columnist for the New Statesman put it earlier this year, “That which at first seems empowering — it’s all in your hands! — turns out to be a burden.”
The message to such women is that they didn’t experience “real” childbirth if they took pain medication. Here’s Edan Lepucki again, on women who had epidurals near her while she was in labor: “I felt both envious of their comfort, and also sad. If that sounds self-righteous, so be it. Feeling my body work to give birth to my child was unlike everything I’d ever experienced, and in the moment I couldn’t understand why a mother wouldn’t want that.” First off, modern epidurals are not like the twilight sleep of the ’50s: I can say from experience that you still feel a whole lot going on. And more important — while this seems like it should be obvious — not every mother wants the same things.
The childbirth moralists seem motivated by a desire to be good girls, to do everything perfectly. And in their culture, “good” equals “no drugs, soothing music, birthing tub glugging in the background.” Sarah Jefferis writes that when her cervix doesn’t open properly, “I thought I was doing labor wrong. And I wanted to do it right. Not just right. Perfectly.” Jane Roper writes as if she is going to be graded on her birth plan. “Overachiever that I am, I wanted to get through the birth without drugs if I could.” Again, there is a glimmer of self-deprecating humor here, but it doesn’t discount the fact that Roper is laboring under the same set of expectations as the other writers included.
I want to make clear here that I am not blaming the individual essayists for sharing their personal experiences of childbirth, and I’m not dismissing their reactions to their own births. I’m blaming the editors for not trying harder to find a more diverse set of views and experiences among the essayists. Eighty-three percent of women delivering in America use some kind of pain relief, so it probably would not have been that difficult to find more women writers who not only used medical interventions, but didn’t judge themselves or other mothers for doing so.
There is no way to do labor “right” or “wrong,” and it’s damaging to perpetuate a one-size-fits-all approach to having babies. Taking pain meds doesn’t make you a weak or fearful person. It doesn’t make you a bad mother. Taking pain meds just makes you a person who would like to experience somewhat less pain. That’s all.
Science Fails to See Benefits of Eating Placenta – NYTimes.com
Ashley Williams’s Blog: Why I Decided to Have a Home Birth – Moms & Babies – Celebrity Babies and Kids People.com
The Gentle Cesarean: More Like A Birth Than An Operation (from National Public Radio)
Please click on the link below for the story, broadcast March 9, 2015:
The Gentle Cesarean: More Like A Birth Than An Operation : Shots – Health News : NPR.
“Trust your body, you are designed to give birth!”
Tuesday, Feb 24 2015
Milli Hill hears how directing a new BBC documentary completely changed one woman’s perception of childbirth
© Landmark Films
Childbirth on TV – it’s most often a drama, right? We know why they do it – a sense of panic, a terrified woman on her back, midwives running down corridors looking worried, and…cut to the ad break – we’re hooked.
But whilst this sort of telly might be entertaining, it unfortunately gives a false impression of birth, and this has the very real and damaging effect of rendering most women completely terrified.
One such woman was Rebecca Arnold, the Producer and Director of Childbirth: All or Nothing, a new documentary to be aired on BBC 1 this week.
“I’m 34 and yet to have children”, she told me. “I wondered if making this documentary actually might end up putting me off for life! Like lots of other people, I imagined birth was painful, messy, and probably pretty grim, just from what I’d heard and read about. I can imagine if I was pregnant then it would have scared me and I would have gone into the whole nine months not looking forward to the end result.”
Childbirth: All or Nothing, follows four women, three of whom give birth at home and one who chooses elective caesarean. Rebecca was inspired to make the film because she was curious about the way women often report feeling a failure if their birth does not go according to plan, and was keen to explore how women’s choices in birth are so often the subject of judgment and opinion:
“I hope this film will mean people become a bit more accepting of the choices women make. Live and let live. Birth should be a totally personal choice and what suits one woman will not necessarily suit another. People might not agree with all the decisions the women in the film make but that’s fine, it’s not their birth!”
When Rebecca began work on the film, she says she would personally have chosen a hospital birth because, “I’d never considered there to be any other way.” But her experiences have changed all that. The words of a midwife she met during filming have stayed with her: “The safest place to give birth is the place where you feel the safest. So, if that’s in a hospital with all the medical staff around you then that will probably suit you best, if you think being at home will keep you calmer, then that’s more for you.”
Like many women, Rebecca was unaware that how birth unfolds is not simply in the hands of fate: it can be influenced, for the better or for the worse, by a number of important factors, including how you feel, and where you are:
“I think I’ve learnt that being scared and being worried that birth is going to be a huge, horrible challenge won’t help your body relax when the time comes for the baby to arrive, however you decide you want to give birth. I hadn’t really considered how the environment you give birth in can have such a huge impact on how you birth.”
But it was one birth in particular that Rebecca describes as a pivotal moment. Having been ‘on call’ for a woman called Kati, Rebecca dropped everything to travel three hours by train for her home water birth. Having never seen anyone give birth before, Rebecca was surprised to arrive and find Kati, ‘calm, smiley, chatty and totally in control.”
© Landmark Films
Kati with her baby
“As the contractions ramped up she got into the pool and was so focused I sensed she was totally in her own world. When the time came for the baby to arrive, she literally breathed it out. There was no screaming, no desperate need for any sort of drugs, just total focus. I’ll carry that memory with me forever and I feel lucky to have that very strong image in my mind because it’d be the thing I’d want to recall if I was going through it.”
Having started out, like so many women, with a very negative expectation of childbirth, Rebecca feels that, thorough filming, she has learnt that, whilst birth can be unpredictable, “…you can increase your chances of a ‘better’ birth if you prepare, keep active, learn breathing techniques, write a birth plan.”
Talking to Rebecca and knowing that her film will be shown on prime time UK television this week, I can’t help but feel excited, not just that her personal views of childbirth have experienced such a shift, but that this seems to represent a wider cultural shift that is happening.
© Landmark Films
Lisa is another of the women who features in the show
By coincidence, Childbirth: All or Nothing is aired in the same week that a new book is published: “The Roar Behind the Silence: Why kindness, compassion and respect matter in maternity care”.
This little book will make a big impact – it calls for an end to the culture of fear that is driving up rates of intervention and creating labour wards that are governed by risk management and paperwork, to the detriment of the human experience of both women and maternity workers.
Change is happening. “Women are beginning to question things a bit more”, says Rebecca. “I’d like women to feel confident enough to trust in their bodies. It’s a very natural process, we are designed to give birth. Some women do experience complications and they will need medical support, but if women could start off trusting in themselves then that can only be a good thing.”
However, there is a way to go yet – as Rebecca puts it, “I think you have a be a particularly strong woman to do what you want and have your baby how you want. There is so much advice given to a pregnant woman that I think it’s incredibly difficult to weed out what is relevant and helpful to you and what’s not. There is freedom of choice, but whether you stick to your guns and go ahead with your plans slightly depends on who’s supporting you, in terms of both friends and family, and medical professionals.”
In the meantime, having begun making Childbirth: All or Nothing, believing a hospital birth would be for her, what would Rebecca choose now?
“I would have a home water birth with an Independent Midwife”, she replies confidently. “I really don’t think there could be a happier, more relaxed and empowering way to be.”
Childbirth: All or Nothing will be aired tonight on BBC1 at 10:45pm. (BBC N.Ireland and Wales 11:10pm and BBC Scotland Wednesday 25th February 10:40pm)
The Roar Behind the Silence is published on Friday 27th February and available from Amazon.
BestDaily columnist Milli Hill is the founder of The Positive Birth Movement. Her latest book is available on Amazon.
British Regulator Urges Home Births Over Hospitals for Uncomplicated Pregnancies
LONDON — Reversing a generation of guidance on childbirth, Britain’s national health service on Wednesday advised healthy women that it was safer to have their babies at home, or in a birth center, than in a hospital.
Women with uncomplicated pregnancies — about 45 percent of the total — were better off in the hands of midwives than hospital doctors during birth, according to new guidelines by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. For these low-risk mothers-to-be, giving birth in a traditional maternity ward increased the chances of surgical intervention and therefore infection, the regulator said.
Hospital births were more likely to end in cesarean sections or involve episiotomies, a government financed 2011 study carried out by researchers at Oxford University showed. Women were more likely to be given epidurals, which numb the pain of labor but also increase the risk of a protracted birth that required forceps and damaged the perineum.
The risk of death or serious complications for babies was the same in all three settings, with one exception: In the case of first-time mothers, home birth slightly increased that risk. Nine in 1,000 cases would experience serious complications, compared with five in 1,000 for babies born in a hospital.
The findings could affect how hundreds of thousands of British women think about one of the biggest questions facing them. Nine in 10 of the roughly 700,000 babies born every year in England and Wales were delivered in a hospital.
As recently as 2007, the guidelines had advised women to be “cautious” about home birth in the absence of conclusive risk assessments.
Mark Baker, clinical practice director for the health institute, said first-time mothers with low birth risks would now be advised that a midwife-led unit would be particularly suitable for them, while mothers who already have given birth would be told that a home birth would be equally safe for the baby and safer for the mother than a hospital. But women are still free to choose the option they are most comfortable with, Dr. Baker said. “This is all about women having a choice,” he said.
Not everyone was at ease with the new guidelines. “Things can go wrong very easily and we do feel this advice could be dangerous,” Lucy Jolin of the Birth Trauma Association told the BBC.
So far doctors have not expressed any outrage over the decision. “If we had done this 20 years ago there would have been a revolution,” Dr. Baker said. “The penny has dropped. We’ve won the argument.”
With the exception of the Netherlands, where home births have long been popular and relatively widespread, few developed countries have significant numbers of women opting for nonhospital deliveries. In the United States, where a culture of litigation adds a layer of complication, only 1.36 percent of births took place outside a hospital in 2012. Two-thirds of those nonhospital births took place at home and 29 percent at free-standing birthing centers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
“We believe that hospitals and birthing centers are the safest places for birth, safer than home,” said Dr. Jeffrey L. Ecker, the chairman of the committee on obstetrics practice for American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Under Britain’s integrated health system, if there is a complication, “they have a process and protocol for appropriately and quickly getting you somewhere else,” said Dr. Ecker, who added that he did not believe the British-style guidelines would come to America anytime soon. If such a recommendation were made in the United States, doctors might worry about losing patients to midwives.
That concern is absent in Britain’s taxpayer-funded system. “There are no financial incentives in the U.K. for doctors to deliver in a particular setting because there is no personal gain,” said Dr. Baker of the health institute. Childbirth is “effectively an N.H.S. monopoly,” he said, referring to the National Health Service, Britain’s public health system.
Holly Powell Kennedy, the immediate past president of the American College of Nurse-Midwives, an organization in the United States, praised the guidelines, saying, “This is how the practice should be happening.” In a hospital, “you are less able to labor without interventions,” Dr. Kennedy said.
Reducing the number of hospital births would save the health service money, but British officials said budgets had not factored into the new guidelines. A traditional hospital birth costs the country’s health system about $2,500, with a home birth roughly $1,500 and a birth center about $2,200.
“Yes, it’s a very expensive way to deliver healthy babies to healthy women,” Dr. Baker said about hospital births. “Saving money is not a crime.”
Keep those Hips Moving during Pregnancy & Labor!
Sitting on a chair for hours on end (as many of us do while at the computer) is not good for your posture, or health. So, during your pregnancy, try sitting on a chair with a fitness ball built in instead of your regular office chair, and see how helpful it is in keeping your spine straight and body centered.
When your body and baby are laboring, you want to keep your pelvis open and moving. Slow dancing with your partner is a great way to do this. Sitting on a birth ball (aka fitness ball) is also great. Whatever kind of birth you choose, with or without medication, you can literally rock your birth (and potentially shorten your labor) with the help of a birth ball.
During labor, birth balls are simple to use, and as long as your upper body is supported so you don’t fall off, safe. Simply sit on the ball and lean on whatever feels best to you: into the arms of your partner, your doula, the edge of the bed. The forward leaning position will help align and center your baby and is usually one of the most comfortable positions during strong contractions. Since the ball is waterproof, you can also sit on it while in the shower. Mamas I’ve worked with have sometimes stayed in their hospital room shower enjoying the warmth and relaxation of the water while laboring on the ball for hours at a time!
Another kind of ball you can use in labor is the peanut ball. As you’ve no doubt been told, lying on your back in labor is the worst place you want to be — both for your baby’s positioning, and your comfort. Lying on your side, however, is a great way to rest. Placing a peanut ball between your legs helps widen your pelvis and allows the baby more room to descend and rotate.
Birth balls are widely available (Target sells them in the sports section) and many hospitals already have them available for you to use when laboring there (White Plains Hospital and Greenwich Hospital, for example). Since it is best to keep your hips open and pelvis rotating in pregnancy anyway, you may want to have one available at home to sit on. Rock on, mamas.
Birth with Confidence 