I think the basis of the previous birth, having all that support has made
going into this one, not be something I'm afraid of. When I chose to go with a
midwife over an obstetrician, it almost felt like I was maybe doing something
quite different or alternative. They keep you informed and they keep you supported
and they always yeah, acting in your best interest I suppose,
that was probably a big part of it.
Terrifying.
Yeah that's probably the best word when I think back to it. Oh I was nervous but
I'm one of five so I figured if my mum could do five I could definitely do one.
We were quite naive going into it and didn't think that anything could
actually go wrong.
I think that it's a huge, huge issue. Most women experience some sort of challenge
in their birth when they're having their first baby. Now whether that turns into a
traumatic experience or not is dependent upon who's caring for them and where
they're being cared for. Birth trauma might be different things to different
people. For some people it may be that they've had a fourth-degree tear right
into their rectum but for other people they can feel quite traumatised if their
delivery didn't go the way they planned even though there were no external
appearances of what people traditionally call trauma it can be psychological
trauma as well. There is very much a disrespectful culture in birth that
women are coerced, they're bullied, we hear of women being yelled at, forced
into procedures they don't really want, there is lack of informed consent. This
is what should be considered like sacred time and these women are being treated
really disrespectfully.
So I had a really long labour, I think it was like 36 hours all up and she was
also back on back, so my back pain was just like unbelievably bad. And so it was
after I'd had her I was bleeding behind my placenta so it didn't seem that bad
like once I had her up until the couple of minutes it takes for the placenta to
be delivered and then there was the rush and the panic. When you know that doctors
and nurses know what they're doing and you sort of see them panic I think
that's the scary part of it. My uterus had, just it was exhausted, it had just
given up and it wasn't contracting back down by itself so they did have to
manually do that. When she got rushed away,
I like had a split second decision to stay with Harper or go with Jess. Bub was
healthy, everything was fine, it was going with Jess was the hard part.
Once the theater room's door shut yeah, that was pretty well it, yeah.
I remember when a midwife was pushing on my stomach to contract my uterus back
down, I had said it hurt and she was hurting me and she'd told me that I'd
die if she didn't do it. So things like that are yeah things that
just will probably stick with me forever.
I think Australia can stand proud in the international community and say things
like our maternal mortality rates are amongst the world's best, we can say that
our perinatal mortality rates for babies are amongst the world's best, we do great
work with very, very small babies with premature babies with early babies and
we're quite proud of those statistics. But I think there's always room for
improvement because a birth, someone's delivery is one of the most important
days in their lives and it's certainly a huge day in the life of mothers and
fathers everywhere in the world.
I think the thing is that women now are actually realising that their experience
matters that it's not just the women that have experienced something that has
been highly horrific, it's actually their own feelings in their birth, that if they
identify it personally as being traumatic then it's traumatic.
It's really hard to put into words some of the stuff that I have read from women.
From not being able to bond with their baby to marriage breakdowns, women having
to give up their jobs because it is so debilitating, when they've got PTSD or
PND from a combination of things but birth trauma is a contributing factor. We
need to consider not just the emotional and physical impacts on mum but the
economic impacts for us as a society. I think it is a huge contributing factor
in things like depression and mental health problems after birth. Women often
feel upset that they don't feel the same attachment to their baby as they expect
that they should, they feel very guilty about their feelings around their birth
and that leads them to have extreme difficulty in mothering their babies.
And look that is, I think our biggest problem because really the early
mothering period is the period where we lay down everything for the mother's
well-being and for the babies well-being.
I guess the love of your kids will make you go back. Dan really wanted a second
one. He said to me we're such good parents that we should have more.
And even though it was a terrifying decision to make it was the best decision, so yeah.
I think we did it well as a team. We discussed it, it wasn't a
split-second decision to go back again.
My anxiety was a lot higher the second
time around which is why I was suggested, to you know see someone and have more
support around.
We know that more and more women are seeking out continuity
midwifery carer, we know that has higher satisfactions. If we were to make
this about women, that's what women want, like having that known midwife. It
floors me so much that we can see 20 different care providers and still think
that that's an OK way to treat women. We would never see it in other areas.
Making sure that a woman sees the same midwife throughout the whole of her labour is
expensive. For people in the public system where they may see a different
person at each visit to try to allocate so that they only see the same person
becomes very expensive and the question is how do we as a community decide we
are going to afford that. Unfortunately you know I get that government sort of
see that they've only got a finite bucket of money. So we need funding
reform quite desperately to look at the whole episode of care really and to see
women through from beginning of pregnancy right through to that six-week
period after birth.
The difference between both births, there was a lot more communication in the
second birth to the first, so I was a lot less panicked.
As much as it's all about the birth and the delivery, I think how you are cared for
leading up to it and then after is really important as well
because it gets even more challenging after you have the baby.
you