Manda JO, you are my hero.
.
This!
And this. Coupled with, how will his wife feel if there’s an emergency and they have to go to the hospital and they don’t get the spiritual bonding? Extremely crappy, that’s how. But I think this is the third time I’ve said this in the two threads combined, so I’ll shut up now on this subject.
Man, don’t sweat it. It’s an expectant father’s duty to be uncertain. I see your uncertainty as a perfectly natural reaction to a perfectly natural situation. Just do your homework and do the best you can. Your wife should be your guide, but I’m sure she appreciates your input, as well.
…dp
If the woman’s goal is a healthy live baby at the end of it, she can have preferences but the rest of the world should feel free to criticize said preferences if they’re making it unlikely that she’ll end up with a baby…
Sure, people can criticize all they want. But (IMO) they’d be acting immorally to intervene by force, as in the violent assault of a C-section mentioned above–an act which surely would have been prosecuted as a serious crime had it not been carried out by physicians under color of authority.
These threads have become so unwieldy people miss when I respond to things like this. We have spoken at length [my wife and I] about the very thing. Of all the research on healthy home birthing that we have done the one thing that is ever present is: what if things go sideways…or worse. And right now, we are trying to go into this with no expectations, or at least an expectation that we have made the right choice and if something happens we know we have the right people around us.
If my wife gains too much weight, or the baby is too big to safely deliver at home, we have already been told [because of my wife’s age] we will have to go to the Birthing center once labor starts. Our midwife was clear on that. And it is that very situation that makes managing our expectations extremely important.
It’s the f*cked up jumping to conclusions and not reading fully what’s going on that gets me. I mean, I was just told I was a scientologist. :rolleyes:
If your wife’s age is a factor then this isn’t a low risk pregnancy. Please tell me you aren’t declining prenatal tests and monitoring in the pursuit of a spiritual birth.
And if a whole bunch of fairly likely things happen, you will have to go to the hospital and they may well have to cut the baby out of her. You keep talking about how you won’t be upset if you have to go to the birthing center, it isn’t that bad. But there is a good chance–a very good chance–that you will end up in the hospital. You may end up needing to induce (pre-eclampsia, PROM). You may end up needing a C-section. They may well need to whisk the baby away to an NICU for a few hours or days immediately after birth. Afterwards, your wife may not be able to breastfeed for any number of reasons.
Understand this: no amount of preparation, education, or good choices can take these things completely off the table. You need to face that these things might happen, and that if they do, it will make absolutely no difference in your long-term relationship with your child.
You know, even for the non-granola types, this can be an issue. I remember that when I was pregnant, a friend of mine told me that her number-one piece of advice was to pay attention to the C-section information in the birthing class, which usually rates about a 10-minute discussion if you’re lucky. She said that she’d just ignored all that stuff - as most of us do - because duh, you’re not going to need a C-section. Then afterward you’re like “wait, wasn’t there something in the birthing class video about incision care?”
I’ve run into some people online who literally grieve the day their first child was born, because they wound up with an unwanted C-section and had their birth experience stolen from them or whatever. I think this is really sad. I took Bradley classes and was very pro-natural-childbirth and anti-intervention and practiced my relaxation exercises, etc., and wound up with a transverse baby that had to be born via C-section anyway, and you know what? The moment they held him up to me so I could see his squishy little face was one of the best moments of my entire life. I would not trade it for anything.
Er, I seem to have suddenly made this all about me. My point is, know that a C-section is always a possibility. Yeah I know, you won’t need one because you’re doing everything right. But it’s still a possibility, and if you have one, meeting your kid is still going to be one of the greatest moments of your life, and don’t let birthing politics or rhetoric take that away from you.
I cannot stress enough how right this is. Seriously, the birth process is not a walk in the park, no matter how it happens. It’s difficult, it’s painful, it’s exhausting, and a lot of time it doesn’t go as planned. In the end, when you see that baby, none of that matters at all. There’s no reason to regret what you get or don’t get out of the birthing experience, it’s a blip in time compared to the rest of your life with that baby.
My wife is in her 30’s she is not considered high risk until she is 35 and of course we are going to every prenatal visit, monitoring everything with BOTH our OBGYN and the midwife. I should never have mentioned “spiritual” within sniffing distance of the SDMB.
If anything, we are probably considered quite granola, meaning we shop at whole foods, or from a CSA, and try to avoid chemicals and processed foods and don’t have a TV. Good God we’re not homesteading scientologists or anything like that. We both have advanced degrees and are functioning just fine in our little community of Boulder, CO.
p.s. we are in a Bradley class right now.
Might I suggest a name for the baby? OK, I will.
Woo.
Happy birthing.
Bull-fucking-shit. It didn’t happen to you - that doesn’t mean it never happens. I had a baby in 2004 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, widely acknowledged to be one of the best places in the world to have a baby. She went to the nursery the first night, because the nurses suggested that we would be unable to care for her since I was exhausted after a very long labor ending in a C-section. I had made it clear that I was planning to breastfeed and I didn’t want her given bottles. I still remember the student nurse bouncing in the following morning to check my IV and announce, “I just finished feeding your daughter!”
Feels like a Leith or Layla to me.
This is extremely on-point for me, as we actually had the C-section discussion last night in our class. And you could almost physically see some of the couples checking out mentally, and a few others (to their credit) getting more focused, preparing for these worst-case scenarios.
I personally wouldn’t consider having our baby somewhere other than a hospital, but then again hospitals are very comfortable places for my wife and myself. As long as all the information is on the table, and you have your plans (and, more importantly, information about interventions and backup plans), it’s all good. But preparing only for “the perfect birth” without being aware and informed of the possibilities is a recipe for disaster or heartache.
Those people have missed the point of this entire “parenting” thing.
And before anyone asks why this matters–birthing a baby does not signal your body to start producing milk. NURSING a baby is what begins that hormonal cascade. It can be much harder to get the supply of breast milk established if the baby has no interest in nursing because someone just fed it. It’s a real concern, not just a hippy-love obsession.
:eek: Isn’t this one of the signs of the Apocolypse?
I will just say that if my wife and I had done a home birth there is a strong chance my daughter would not have survived. She had the cord wrapped twice around her neck and could not phyically move down the birth canal. Every contraction my wife had tightned the cord and trapped her more. We even had to go into the emergency C-section with the OR not fully preped as the birth team determined that they would not be able to wait the 20 mins it would have taken. When things went wrong, they went wrong fast.
Just something to consider, Phlosphr.
(FYI, mom and baby ended up just fine. Daughter is a healthy, happy seven-year old at the top range of every growth chart.)
I just came in to say that I could not agree with this more.
In my situation, I was hell-bent on natural childbirth, to the point where I really fucked myself over in a number of ways. I jeopardized my own health and my son’s, and I wish to God that I had accepted pain management far earlier in the process. In my case, I actually needed more interventions than I allowed and pretty much “educated” myself into brainwashed oblivion. The only factor in my favor was that I was not at home. Had I been there, both I and my son would probably be dead.
It sounds like Phlosphr is more open minded than what I was; however, I cannot stress enough that you must, must, must always keep in the back of your mind that, regardless of how “joyful” childbirth is, it’s potentially dangerous.
When I was pregnant with my first, I sounded almost exactly like Phlosphr did in the other thread. I really wish I had been more middle-of-the-road. I didn’t even like my son until he was 6 weeks old, due almost entirely to my birthing experience (read: own stupidity) and the resultant complications.
I also took a Bradley class and the complications of childbirth were completely glossed over (“Oh, it’s completely unlikely you’ll have any!”). I should’ve prepared more for complications, but I was just insistent that they couldn’t happen to me.
Yes, I had jackass nursing staff. But I was more of a problem than they were. I’m NOT saying you should nod your head to every suggestion your doctor or nursing staff have. Have a birthing plan going in. But, definitely listen to their suggestions and don’t immediately toss them out the window because they’re part of the “medical establishment” and “it’s not natural.”
That’s part of what is scary about Phlosphr, he insists over and over that he’s prepared to go to the birthing center instead of having a home birth, yet if the home birth goes badly they’ll end up with an ambulance trip to the hospital OR or birthing ward, not the birthing center. And the midwife will be out of the picture. Even if there are some unnecessary c-sections, many are necessary (WHO estimates around 15% of births require a c-section), so being pro natural childbirth to the point of blocking even the possibility of a c-section is being unprepared and your birth experience will be a disaster rather than something you can manage.