Birth: Three Mothers, Nine Months, and Pregnancy in America by Rebecca Grant

Author:Rebecca Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

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The weekend before Thanksgiving, Alison and Steve settled into their living room, a wide-open room with a white shag rug, a gray couch, and shelves filled with sound equipment and records, to watch the Midwifery Birth Center’s birth videos. Before pressing play, they opened a bag of chips and cracked open beers (nonalcoholic for Alison, regular for Steve), ready to receive an education.

The first video covered the what-ifs of giving birth and went through various scenarios in which someone would not be able to give birth at the birth center, like if the baby came prematurely or hadn’t come by forty-two weeks, if the baby was breech, or if the mother’s blood pressure was out of the safe range. The video also reviewed potential complications and the most common reasons for transfers—usually because labor was taking a long time and the mother needed rest that only an epidural or narcotics could provide.

The second video focused on mentally preparing for the birth, to the extent possible. It emphasized that it was important to have a “choice” rather than an “avoidance” mentality in choosing to have an unmedicated birth at a birth center because when things got hard—too hard, impossibly hard—it was helpful to have a rooted sense of the “why.” It also touched on the importance of being adaptable if (or when) things didn’t go according to plan.

Alison was struck by the video’s advice. Until that moment, she had been more focused on the “what”—what she could do, what she could buy, what she could expect and prepare—than on the “how”—how she would prepare herself, mentally and emotionally, for labor, which would probably entail the most pain she’d ever felt in her life. She wasn’t someone who coped well with unknowns and therefore had focused on how she could exert control over the situation rather than coming to terms with her lack of control. Maybe the best thing she could do to prepare for childbirth, she realized, was to work on making peace with the unpredictability. Once labor started, she wouldn’t be able to stop it. She would be on that voyage, wherever and however it went. What if she let go of the idea that everything had to go according to plan for it to be “okay”? Instead of dwelling on all that could go wrong, she could make the choice to concentrate on what could go right. Instead of catastrophizing, she could remind herself that everything she was experiencing was normal. Lots of people had babies, and in the grand scheme of things, birth was routine. She could expect the best and prepare for the worst and convince herself that everything would happen the way it needed to. Easier said than done, to be sure, but it was an important shift in thinking for her and for Steve.

As they talked through it all after the videos were done, Alison recalled a nature documentary she’d seen as a kid in which a sheep gave birth and remained perfectly calm throughout.

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