Pillows, playlists and a gentle nudge… My birth plan was a joke

Oh God, I mean, I’m laughing about it now. Which is funny in itself, the idea that ten years later I would laugh about the day, the dawn, when, white-faced in a room with blood on the walls, I would hand over our new raw blinking baby to my friend. to frantically search in my Notes app to find the document I had called grand Birth Plan. I now wonder what I hoped to find there. It’s funny, it is funny, how I sorted through it – “I want a mobile epidural”, “I want gentle guidance instead of being forced to push” – this plan, written like I’m checking off boxes on a dim sum menu, written in the voice of the person I was before. At that moment it seemed crucial to see if perhaps I had given them the wrong piece of paper. Was it an administrator error? The tweezers, the lack of medicine, the breast milk that didn’t come in, the blood, was it my fault? I remember reading it over and over again, of course I hadn’t slept for a while and the baby was crying, but I felt, I think, that even though I had tried to do everything right, something terrible had happened. wrong.

It turned out that, despite my shock, despite the horrors and the ripples that haunted me for years, my birth experience was almost comical in nature. It reminded me of when I got my ears pierced, I must have been about twelve, when I was going home on the bus, looking at other women’s earrings and thinking, “Okay, you have that same pain.” felt” – now I was strolling around London with the baby strapped to me, looking at other mothers, thinking: “and yet you walk, smile, put on red lipstick in the reflection of a phone?” Over the years I’ve talked to other people about their births with a kind of hunger – these are stories of babies almost dying and mothers almost dying, and worse of course – so when last week’s report on birth trauma was published , none of me was surprised by the findings. I can’t imagine many parents were like that.

It is estimated that 30,000 women a year in Britain have had negative experiences during childbirth, with one in twenty developing PTSD, at least partly as a result of the government’s austerity measures. The report makes a total of twelve recommendations, including: recruit, train and retain more midwives, obstetricians and anesthetists to ensure safe staffing levels; respect mothers’ choices around childbirth and access to pain relief; commit to addressing inequalities in maternity care for ethnic minorities; and universal access to specialized maternal mental health services. It probably says something grim about me, or perhaps points to my own PTSD, that I read the recommendations with the memory of my well-intentioned but crappy birth plan in my gut.

I often wondered in those hot, white months after my daughter’s birth whether, in addition to my birth plan, it would have helped me cope with the shock if we had also been encouraged to have a plan B, and C, and maybe D to consider. compiled long lists of “essential” items to take to the hospital – straws, protein bars, aromatherapy. We dragged an Ikea bag with pillows and small T-shirts into a taxi, then across the parking lot and into the elevator, and it sat in the corner of the maternity ward all week. The report calls for a system “where poor care is the exception rather than the rule,” which, to be honest, upset me a bit, because absolutely eliminating poor care should be the overriding theme, the starting point from which we should start. I would add some gentler, very achievable additions to the recommendations. Starting with prenatal classes. In addition to the lessons in breathing for pain relief and meeting other new parents, there is certainly room for a measured conversation about the possibility that your birth will not go as planned and how to deal with the trauma if it occurs. With this should also come recognition and support for people who want elective C-sections (several of my friends chose, or fought for, C-sections after a difficult first birth) and those who cannot or do not want to breastfeed. , especially after trauma.

There is, I think, still a code of silence around difficult births, the feeling that you can summon spirits and bring bad luck into the room. I get it: pregnancy lends itself to a kind of magical thinking, this invisible being that grows inside you, that has come there, you say, from sex? But this often clouds the reality. The prospect of pain is being discussed in crazy new ways – a hypno-birthing session I did as my due date approached reassured me that labor wouldn’t hurt if done correctly. Now I may understand that lesson as a way to rethink the language of pain, or to try to reduce our fear, but at the time it threw me into pits of confusion and guilt. It was, I now think, a small example of the many linguistic talk thrown into conversations with expectant parents, to reduce anxiety or to encourage smooth handling of the situation. More clarity and fairness (as well as, of course, properly funding the NHS and profoundly improving the quality of care for women) could help prevent so many negative birth experiences, and help us walk into parenthood with confidence, rather than on our knees to crawl. knees.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman