Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Business of Being Born

As I have been moving forward with my pre-conception diet (which I love by the way), I have come across a lot of information about home births and midwifery.  I have always leaned towards having a home birth, but after watching The Business of Being Born my baby's fate is sealed as being born under my roof with the help of a midwife.  

This documentary was created by Ricki Lake (talk show host), after she had a disappointing birth in the hospital.  Ricki Lake found that after being given pitocin (a drug to increase labor intensity), she was in intense pain and needed an epidural.  In the U.S, more than 50% of people are given epidurals while giving birth.  

Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the potential risks of an epidural.  Here are a list of some of the effects that epidurals have on labor and delivery:

  They lengthen labor.
  They triple the risk of severe perineal tear.
  They may increase the risk of cesarean section by 2.5 times.
  They triple the occurrence of induction with synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin).
  They quadruple the chances a baby will be persistently posterior (POP, face up) in the final stages of labor, which in turn decreases the chances of spontaneous vaginal birth (see below).
  They decrease the chances of spontaneous vaginal delivery. In 6 of 9 studies reviewed in one analysis, less than half of women who received an epidural had a spontaneous vaginal delivery.
  They increase the chances of complications from instrumental delivery. When women with an epidural had a forceps delivery, the amount of force used by the clinician was almost double that used when an epidural was not in place. This is significant because instrumental deliveries can increase the short-term risks of bruising, facial injuries, displacement of skull bones and blood clots in the scalp for babies, and of episiotomy and tears to the vagina and perineum in mothers.
  They increase the risk of pelvic floor problems (urinary, anal and sexual disorders) in mothers after birth, which rarely resolve spontaneously (taken from CHRIS KRESSER "Let's Take Your Health Back Now").

One of the most concerning facts of the side effects of an epidural would be that your risk of needing a cesarean section increases by 2.5 times.  How is this possible?  It seems that one intervention leads to the next intervention and all of a sudden, a woman who desired a vaginal, "natural birth," is all of a sudden needing an "emergency" cesarean section.  

This is a highly problematic situation for the health of the baby because vaginal birth is critical to the baby receiving the gut flora necessary to build a healthy immune system and to develop a healthy digestive track.  While a baby travels down the birth canal, she or he receives gut flora from the mother's vagina in order to start building immunity to protect itself from the environment outside the womb.  Unfortunately, in a cesarean section birth, the baby does not receive gut flora from the mother's birth cannel; rather, the baby receives gut flora from skin contact or the breath.  This can cause major imbalances of gut flora and later on can develop into digestive, neurological, and immune system dysfunction for a child.   

In 2005, 1 in 3 births ended in cesarean section.  This is unbelievable.  Cesarean sections are treated so casually today because so many people are having them during labor and delivery.  A C-section is considered major surgery and the recovery is gruesome.  Further, the mother is put in the high risk category after having a C-section and most likely will have to have C-sections with the remaining pregnancies.  

C-sections take about 20-minutes to perform, but take so much away from the experience that a mother could potentially have in delivery a baby.  For example, in a natural, home birth, a women peaks during vaginal birth by having a release of oxytocin hormones that causes her to have almost an orgasm release while the baby is being born (specifically during the distension of the cervix and uterus during labor).  Oxytocin has been shown to be pivotal in the bonding of a mother and a baby and has become known as "the bonding hormone (Wikipedia)."

Epidurals have been found to inhibit oxytocin production and to keep it from rising during birth.  This brings forth huge questions that I am not sure that we fully understand at this stage.  The research that has been done on monkey's show that monkey's who deliver babies through cesarean section do not care for that baby at all because the hormones are not released properly (oxytocin as the bonding hormone is not released during a C-section).  

What is even more concerning to me about hospital births is that America has the worst maternal mortality rates during pregnancy among industrialized nations.  In Europe and Japan, midwives deliver over 70% of the births.  In America, midwives are involved in less than 8% and some say the statistic is actually 0.5%.  In Norway, home births constitute 1 in 3 births; however, Norway statistically loses less women and less babies to child birth than in America.   

These are just a few of my concerns.  There are many more.  My concern primarily is that women do not know of their options.  There is simply the assumption that a woman who is pregnant will have a hospital birth.  In the 1900's, 95% of births were done in the home.  It became foreign territory to have babies born in the hospitals.  In fact, the doctors who began to deliver babies after receiving their education had never even witnessed a baby being born.  

Doctors began to systematically speak again midwives and to paint pictures of them as ignorant, uneducated people who did not possess the expertise to deliver a baby.  Throughout this process, the doctors began experimenting with different drugs to give a mother during labor and delivery, many babies were born without arms or legs because of the experimentation of drugs without full comprehension and knowledge of the dangers of these drugs.  


As women, I firmly believe, our bodies have been designed to give birth naturally.  We have all that we need from God and from nature to naturally conceive and birth a health, beautiful baby.  We have the hormones needed that are released during labor and delivery to ensure an other-worldly experience and an ability to bond with our baby in a way that we would not otherwise have without the release of these hormones.  Modern medicine interferes with this process to a large degree and takes away from women a potentially magical and pivotal moment of her life.  For me, I am excited to deliver a baby at home and to allow my body to do exactly what it was created to do:  give life.