What is the partner meant to do during birth? #1

I get what the pregnant one is meant to do after being through child birth more than once. However, other than carrying bags and being sworn at, what exactly is the partner meant to do?

“Stop saying, ‘We’re pregnant’. You’re not pregnant! Do you have to squeeze a watermelon-sized person out of your lady-hole? No. Are you crying alone in your car listening to a stupid Bette Midler song? No. When you wake up and throw up, is it because you’re nurturing a human life? No. It’s because you had too many shots of tequila.” -Mila Kunis

I wrote this blog-post just after having experienced the birth of a child for the third time in my life. It is an event that is somewhere between beauty and horror for me. I could only compare it to skipping through the most beautiful field of wildflowers in pristine sun being chased by puppies, songbirds swooping around your head. The only problem is that, while skipping, you have an overriding and very palpable fear that the people you love most in the world will die at any second and that there is nothing else you can do about it. Maybe it’s like running through the field of wildflowers with the birds and puppies, but with a tank rumbling away behind you while a helicopter hovers menacingly, ready to strafe the field with gunshots. Oh, and you occasionally find poo and blood. Maybe an analogy isn’t the best thing for birth.

So how did I come to be standing in my lounge holding a hosepipe and filling a paddling pool, getting ready to watch my wife give birth?

We have had three very different births. When we had our first daughter we spent forever researching birthing methods, reading books, speaking to people and scouring the internet. I did very little of this, but I definitely had to listen to a lot of it and I did read at least one book about these things. I remember the book being quite fascinating simply because there are so many factors in play when deciding how to give birth to a child.

Simply put there is a choice between different natural births and non-natural births and every woman has to decide on a birthing plan. This is basically a list of demands, similar to rock stars who demand bowls of orange M+Ms in their changing rooms and a bottle of vintage scotch on the countertop, but when I made this analogy to my wife she slapped me so it’s probably best not to repeat it. Women write down how they would like their births to occur and the things they would like the doctor to do. In the UK these usually relate to pain relief, whether they want a natural birth or Cesarean section, whether they want skin-to-skin contact with their child after birth, etc. When we came to Thailand we found that this birth-plan was quite different; instead of the things western mothers would commonly ask for, Thai mothers would often ask for a C-section on an auspicious time and day.Whether us westerns are far too practical or whether asian women are just more in-tune with their spirituality I just don’t know.

“There’s a whole birthing plan, but what is the plan other than to get it out? I mean, there isn’t an option to kind of keep it in, is there? So I’m assuming my plan is to get it out. But apparently, there’s more to the plan than that. I don’t know what that is.” — Keira Knightley

Our birth plans have looked the same and my wife has always opted for natural birth. For us this was a default and it was surprising for us to know that this isn’t the case in all countries. However, even with natural birth there are a smorgasbord of options to choose from including hospital, hospital water birth or, what we opted for, which was essentially filling up a paddling pool in your living room and getting on with it with the help of a midwife. When I look at people who consult their horoscopes before deciding their birth plan I often consider what they would think of us splashing around on our ground floor, needless to say I don’t cast dispersions on others for their choices!

Birth is a weird one as far as medical matters go. Normally with doctors and hospitals you go there because you have very little choice, you go there because you have a problem and you want to know how to get it fixed, a hernia or a suspicious rash you’d rather your colleagues didn’t see. However, when you talk to doctors about birth you have options, you have choices and there’s not one that’s obviously better than the other. This makes the whole thing quite stressful because you’re not used to being in this situation, you’re not used to having a choice. If you were to break your arm and go to the hospital you just want them to mend your arm and perhaps give you a little something to take the pain away. If the doctor sat you down and gave you different options your only response would be ‘which is best?’ if he told you that all fixed your arm equally well, but they were all quite different you’d have no real idea how to make a decision and stress out because you’d worry about taking the wrong option. Saying this I’m almost certain that you wouldn’t choose the option where you have to buy a big paddling pool and essentially fix your own arm in your living room, maybe we would.

“My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.” — William Blake

So when you’re presented with the different birthing options you normally ask which one is most successful and you will probably find out that Caesarian section, done in a reputable hospital, is one of the highest success rates. So why didn’t we choose it? Well there is no right and wrong here, and I’m just going to go through our thoughts without judgement of anyone who chooses other options. For us we read about problems that could occur with bonding as a consequence of Cesarean section. I’m not a doctor, but it does make sense that natural ways of doing things are usually better so there must be some benefit to natural birth. Of course there’s downsides, and I’m not going to bring myself to describe the obvious physical ones, but there are clearly downsides. In our minds, the importance of doing things naturally and the risk of losing the chance to bond with the newborn outweighed the slightly higher physical risks from natural birth.

“A ship under sail and a big bellied woman are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.” ― Benjamin Franklin

For me this is a tough decision as I would generally like to be successful and I would normally take the option that gave me the best chance of reaching the safest outcome. It certainly took a lot of thinking about.The decision was made clearer after I read about some of the reasons behind why C-section can be more successful. Basically, success can mean different things when it comes to giving birth. It can mean the lowest infant and maternal death rate, the lowest rate of having major complications or it could mean the highest chance of baby and mummy bonding, feeding and generally being happy. The first is easy to quantify, the second is not. Surely hospitals want both of these things and I have no doubt that all individual doctors and midwives would want the same. However, for hospitals they are now judged by league tables and metrics. These comparisons involve things that are measurable.They cannot include less objective things like ‘happiness’ and ‘bonding’. Therefore, the bottom line for hospitals is to ensure that mum and baby don’t die and that there are no major medical complications. To do this they will naturally suggest a C-section whenever there is any difficulty because they have more control over the process. This thinking has led to a greater and greater frequency of assisted births.

So, partly in a ‘stick it to the man’ gesture, partly to give us the best chance of baby wellbeing and partly because, well, my wife decided and I didn’t really have any grounds to argue if I thought differently, we went for natural birth.We then decided on home birth more through pragmatism and happenstance than anything else. In the UK at the time, we found out that going into hospital meant you had a different practitioner every time, but a homebirth meant that you had the same person looking after you so you could build a relationship with the midwife.

Bearing in mind that we were both nervous and that the person delivering your child gets into some pretty intimate situations with you, we thought that this was important. What is more, the midwife came to you, you don’t even have to go to the hospital! So we elected home birth initially because it made practical sense. If we decided, a little further down the line, that we could always change our minds and switch to a hospital birth thereby getting the best of both worlds. However, we forgot one important aspect in this plan, the fact that we’re English, and we’re simply too polite to change our minds once we had elected for home birth. This is the reason why I refuse to eat free samples; if I eat them I have to buy it, otherwise it’s cheating, I don’t know why but it is, and this is what makes England what it is today. Anyhow, that’s the logic that led to me filling a big blue and white pool in our house while my wife huffed and puffed through her early contractions.

….I’ll continue this in a new story which I’ll post here soon. In the mean time please subscribe and read other pieces like this: