A quick aside before I jump into my rant. The Pixie woke yesterday with a cough. By the middle of the night the poor thing was wheezing and having retractions. The Prince took her to an appointment first thing where her O2 sats were in the low 80s. She got hooked up with some nebulized albuterol and prednisone right there in the office. Sats back up to 98. Serious illness, but the Pixie is just as bouncy and chipper as ever. Now, the rant....(I've given you fair warning).
So, my little cohort runs on the crunchy side. I wouldn't say we're judgmental, but we're definitely opinionated. At any rate, The Business of Being Born documentary keeps getting mentioned, so I decided to download it from trusty Netflix. I went in knowing Ricki Lake created the film because she was dissatisfied with her first hospital birth and sought a water birth with her second child. No doubt, there was going to be a bias. But I found it so sensationalizing and judgmental (ironic, no?).
The result is to perpetually divide women. Breast or bottle, co-sleep or crib, working mom or SAHM, medicated or unmedicated. I'm not sure why we allow ourselves to continually be divided by these topics. Even the terminology used in the film was judgmental (natural birth for the unmedicated non-hospital births vs. ? ...robot births ? And to suggest that women are passive followers of their health care providers, are you serious! I think it's time to stop pointing fingers and accept that each of us has our own approach to motherhood and are capable of deciding which interventions we would like to pursue.
I am all for promoting low intervention births and reserving OBs for the really complicated pregnancies and labors. But, I also know that all of the interventions performed are not all doctor driven. I think a lot is patient driven; the patient's desire for an induction or a c-section or to not feel like their bottom is going to explode.
At the end of the day, I felt empowered to experience labor (pain and all), but that doesn't mean my decision is the right one for all women. At the end of the day, we are all mother's, regardless of how much we felt. Who are we to judge and impose our views onto others. I feel providing everyone with an unbiased education to help each new mother make their own decisions would benefit us all.
2 comments:
GO ON GIRLFRIEND. I TOTALLY agree. The whole mommy war thing sickens me. Really it all boils down to people looking for validation of their own decisions by putting others' decisions down. You hit the nail on the head with this one, Kerri.
Well said! It's funny, because I think that natural childbirth, on principal, and using a midwife and all that is fantastic. Just.. you know.. not for me.
But I'm always amazed by how welcome total strangers feel to critique our most intimate choices. With my 10 pound babies, I am resigned that I may never have the opportunity to see what it's like to go into labor without an induction. Bummer? Sure -- but at the end of the day, all I care about is that my babies get here healthy! Birth is a brief moment in their existence, albeit an important one, but I try to save most of my stress for .. you know.. the choices I'll be making the 18 years AFTER their birth.
SO thanks for saying this -- the reasonable point of view seems to too often get lost in the ether and noise of all the "mommy wars".
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