Surgical baby arrival awareness month!

My first son's welcome to the world.

Yeah yeah yeah. Some women NEED caesareans. But MOST women DON'T need them. So how come more than 30% of pregnant women end their pregnancy with surgery? How come all those women are meeting their babies for the first time, drugged to the eyeballs?

Don't tell me it's because women are requesting elective surgery. If it was really because women were electing surgery then surely doctors wouldn't be conducting major surgery on healthy women and babies, they would counsel women on the risks of unnecessary major abdominal surgery and support them in planning the best possible vaginal birth.

Don't tell me it's because birthing women are older now than they were when we had a far lower caesarean rate. Because women are also living longer, and their bodies are far healthier owing to good nutrition and hygiene.

Don't tell me it's because women are too fat to have babies coming out of their vaginas. Left alone the vast majority of women labour beautifully. MOST complications during birth are the result of obstetric over management.

Don't tell me that it's because of the risks of giving birth AFTER you're already had a surgical baby removal, because the risks of repeating the baby amputation are greater than the risks of letting the baby choose it's own exit route - but doctors conveniently forget to mention that.

So what can YOU do to lower the surgical baby birthday rate?

Why not blog about it during caesarean awareness month!

You can tell women the truth about their birthing day. They DIDN'T GIVE BIRTH if the doctor cut the baby out. Even if the baby needed to be cut out, they still didn't give birth! The baby was BORN, the woman did not give birth.

You can write to your local hospital, politician, doctor, mother's group, health insurance company or anyone else involved with the beginning of life in any remote capacity.

What can you do to save yourself from having unnecessary surgery?

You must be the expert on health care during pregnancy and birth. You must NOT entrust your care to an "expert" no matter what happens. Google everything three times, read many many sources, read books, ask more than one type of birth professional how they will handle your pregnancy and what their protocol for birth is.

If you're hiring a doctor make sure you ask the difficult questions. If you're afraid to ask the doctor the right questions, WALK OUT THE DOOR, YOU HAVE THE WRONG DOCTOR. When asking questions if the conversation goes like this -->

YOU: How often do you do repeat surgery?

DR: Only when we 'really need' to

then your next question has to be

YOU: For what reasons will you suggest that I 'really need' surgery?

and if the answer that follows isn't a good one (post dates, stalled or slow labour, breech etc etc), then you must walk out the door and hire a new birth professional.

Hire a midwife - not to be confused with a MEDwife - and give birth AT HOME.

If you can't do that ask yourself why not. Is your partner against it? Tell him to go jump in a lake. Your body, your choice where and with whom you give birth. Period. I know of at least three women whose husbands overrode their desire to homebirth, the women had surgery and promptly divorced their husbands. Marriage can not survive birth trauma that is caused during unwanted hospital birth. Is money a problem? Get a loan. Save up. Pay the midwife in installments. Safe birth is priceless, unnecessary surgical birth is costly in ways you probably can't imagine.

If you still can't do it hire a doula. Know your interventions! Don't set foot in a medical birth management facility without knowing when and why the staff will try and push you into "consenting" to each medical intervention. Less than 5% of women leave a hospital after an intervention free birth. So maybe 3 or 4 in every hundred women will have an unhindered birth.

Here are some thing you should look into before going to hospital, or even hiring a care provider.

• pregnancy due date estimating
• scanning and other tests they will want you to undertake "because it's routine"
• induction
• monitoring during labour
• the effects of pain relieving drugs. ALL of them have side effects. ALL OF THEM.
• natural pain relieving techniques that the institution support and to what degree they support them (for example some hospitals will "let" you labour in water but insist you lie on your back with your legs in stirrups to push the baby out)
• how long they will "let" you labour for before they push chemical augmentation and/or surgery
• KNOW ABOUT THE CASCADE OF INTERVENTIONS.
• Know that when you set foot in a hospital you will be just one more woman in another bed and nothing more. The staff will forget your face in a week, you will remember their faces for the rest of your life. Hospital staff are the same as supermarket staff, they just want the customers to be in and out without "making their jobs difficult"
• Make sure your partner and/or any other support people you take will not tell you to "listen to the nice doctor". Make sure they know as much as you know about hospital "birth". Make sure they know that staff will use intimidation and emotional blackmail to get birthing women to cooperate.
• BE PREPARED TO SAY NO until you are blue in the face, to as many scary people in white coats as they can send in to scare you with their non evidence based practices.
• Be prepared for them to laugh at your birth plan and completely override it
• Know that you might just be that one in three who has their baby cut out
• Know that your chance of a completely natural birth in hospital are about 3-4 in 100

I am a mama who has had two caesareans. One hospital vba2c and one hba2c. The ONLY reason I got my hospital vba2c was because I had a very stubborn support team who really knew their way around obstetric birth managment, and because I turned up at the hospital at 10cm, ready to push (but they still tried to section me, telling me my contractions were ineffective). The ONLY reason I was in hospital is because I was in premature labour. Had labour begun on its' own and all been well I would have stayed WELL AWAY from the Knife Happy place.

The time has come! Women need to stop waiting for governments, hospitals and obstetric surgeons to reduce the caesarean epidemic. Women must take charge of their own pregnancy care, demand support and respect from their partners, husbands and families. Demand the care they want, the BEST and SAFEST care from their pregnancy health care professionals. Demand evidence based care, demand to SEE proof of the evidence! Source your own material, never rely on one source.

Vote with your money, take your business elsewhere if you aren't getting the service you want. Would you hire a plumber who said he would only install a toilet in your lounge room because that was what he believed was safer? No! You would hire a different plumber and insist that the toilet be installed in the bathroom. Never hire any professional unless they can guarantee you the service you seek.

Obviously some births will always end in caesarean, but those surgical births must be undertaken with the greatest of care and kindness towards the woman and babies undergoing this major surgery, and they must never be undertaken unless they are absolutely necessary.

My youngest son's welcome to the world

What's happening in Antarctica

The front of the house is ready to paint, it's been sanded and had a white undercoat and puttied and sanded some more, so now we just need a few fine days in a row so we can dash out there with some paint and some brushes.

We've started killing off the grass out the side in preparation for starting our garden bed out there, we're using a salt thing that washes away after a good rain. We're also getting lots of lovely plump, dark green zucchinis and broad beans and gorgeous tomatoes out of the hot house.

There is a definite chill in the air, I can feel winter is on the way. We've been glad of the fire in the evenings. We took out thermometre outside and read it the other night, it was 9 just before the kids dropped it and it smashed, but I think it would have gone lower. Every time I'm in the yard at night I'm struck by how many stars there are and how much I love the night sky. In Sydney you couldn't see the stars, but here you can see lots of them and they're so beautiful *happy sigh*. I'm looking forward to winter in a way, I love it when it's misty, it makes me feel like I'm in a celtic fantasy. Looking out the window and watching the weather changing on the hill is my new favourite hobby!

Passing time in the valley

So we've been here since October and we're really settled in now. I keep waiting to start pining for the city, and I do sometimes have moments of longing but at the end of the day we moved here so we could have this lifestyle, and it does seem to be that it was exactly what we wanted!

Every couple of days we get a massive number of beautiful plump broad beans off the bushes in the hothouse and a whole bowl of juicy ripe tomatoes of all different colours and types. I've planted some new basil and coriander seeds and brussel sprouts too, but the chooks got in and scratched the garden bed up like mad so I'm not sure if any will come up.

The chooks have gone back to laying lots of eggs and we're planning on getting a couple more in the next week or so just to keep us on top of demand. Spikee has finally decided that he will eat what we call an "egg cup" or a microwaved scrambled egg (I should hang my head in shame) and we are all rejoicing because it is ONE source of protein in his diet.

Today we took Vinnie for a nice long walk and picked what is starting to look like the last of the blackberries for the season. We have a tin of them that we're gong to have with chocolate cake. I'm also going to get around to using my frozen banana supply in a low gi self saucing banana pudding.

The front of the house is nearly fully scraped and within a day or two it will be painted, that'll leave the side and half of the back only. Waiting for a few days without rain has been the challenge, but this week si supposed to be fine most days.

The weather has been gorgeous! Not too cold at all, just pleasant. The thermometre said it was 17 today but it can't have been because I was wearing short sleeves. I think cold is different down here to in Sydney. But once the dead of winter hits I'm sure it'll have quite a bite, so I'm buying lots of second hand cardigans.

A House of a Different Colour!

THE PAINTING HAS BEGUN! After a month of more of scraping back the worst outdoor area of the house (the ugly room and kitchen) we painted it with undercoat two days ago, and then today A put two coats of our chosen mustardy yellow on. It looks amazing! it took all day to do just that area, although he did do two coats which rather effectively doubled the time it took.

I spent the day trying to maintain some semblance of order indoors, which is complex when you have a teething baby and you haven't slept well for 6 nights. Nonetheless I managed to wash and fold lots of clothes and completely reorganise the system in the boy's wardrobe.

The chooks are slowing their laying now that the weather is cooling down, but today we got an extremely long egg, and a small one. I think the phantoms are living on borrowed time now, they both look rather elderly and haven't laid a single egg (today withstanding) for a month or more. The emus are laying less, too. We have plenty of insulation on their shed but apparently they're quite hardy in cold weather and it's hot weather that they dislike.

Summer is in death throes at the moment. Yesterday and today were so lovely and warm, but you can feel the change in season is coming. Soon we'll have the doors on the hothouse closed tightly!

A climbed up on the roof to clean the chimney because we weren't sure if the fire was working very well. Turns out ... we were right. He stuck a rope to both ends of a chimney cleaning brush and he and Dad pulled it up and down, but in the process A dislodged the flue. It was a very dicey procedure to get it back in, it involved unscrewing the top plate on the inside of the fire and wriggling it around lots until it wouldn't wriggle anymore. Finally it went back in though, and A decided that it might not have been in there properly to begin with, which would explain why the fire wasn't burning well. We suspect the last people who lived here tried to clean it, dislodged the flue and didn't know, or couldn't work out how to get it back in place. Now it's burning beautifully! We have plenty of firewood to last winter, and that's largely due to the fact that A bought a raffle ticket and we won second prize which was 3T of wood.

I keep meaning to update on Vinnie! He is finally settled in and for the most part behaving himself very well. He's toilet trained, and is still learning to walk on a lead but doing better.

A day at the markets.

A month more in the life of a humble vegetable

The zucchinis and broad beans

Tomatoes - out of control!

The hot house is really going mad! Everything it growing really well, even the transplanted herbs are happy and growing like mad. It's an absolute joy to see it all starting to flower and fruit. We got our first zucchini, a plump green chili, two ripe yellow cherry tomatoes (ate them before I thought to take a picture!). We also had a spice mix day where I used masses of our parsley and oregano to make pasta sauce.

Spice mix day was on Friday and a few women came over and we all mixed up a large quantity of spice mixes (I made pasta sauce) and then shared it out between ourselves. I got a cajun spice, a middle eastern spice rub, a marsala mix and the pasta sauce I made. I put the sauce in jars that I got from the tip shop. The sauce had caramelised onions, a whole jar of marinated garlic cloves, semi dried tomatoes, green and black olives, half a bottle of wine, and masses and masses of fresh herbs stirred through at the end. It tasted wonderful!

We spent the day at Salamanca markets on Saturday, we had a whale of a time walking around and looking at all the amazing Tasmanian made stuff. We came home with a bunch of herbs and cassia bark from the Spice World stall, a hand made hat for Angus, and Spikee got a hand made jigsaw puzzle, made in Tassie, that just so happens to be Ben 10 *sigh*.

The cassia bark is the most amazing spice, it smells like buttery cinnamon. last night I tried it out for the first time and made rogan josh. It was the best curry I ever made! So rich and full of flavour, and with good quality beef, falling apart it was perfect! We have a fellow staying with us at them moment, he's from France, and he said my curry was the best he'd ever eaten!

Spade = Spade! The REAL BIRTH lie.

Today, three years ago, I had a vba2c. My son was born still. I sometimes think that the most important gift I could have given him, was something I could not give my other two children, a REAL birth.

I recently posted a link to the story of my latest REAL birth on facebook and someone decided to tell me that it wasn't fair of me to say REAL birth, that a c/sec is also a REAL birth. I tried to be diplomatic and not offend anyone but seriously ... it was MY BIRTH! I can say what I like about MY BIRTHS! I've also had two c/secs and guess what? THEY WEREN'T REAL BIRTHS! Saying a c/sec is a REAL birth is like saying a prosthetic leg is a real leg, or dentures are the same as real teeth. No one would be that stupid or presumptuous to someone who lost a leg in a car crash. Why must we placate women by telling them that they gave birth via c/sec? Why not simply allow them to grieve?

I think what we need to do here is sit back for a minute and see why we're so invested in telling women that a birth is a birth no matter what. The only thing you need to do to be classed as having a NVD (normal vaginal delivery) is to have a baby come out of your vagina. But guess what? It's not NATURAL if there were forceps, if there was pethidine, if there was an epidural, if the cord was cut and the baby was whisked away to be poked, prodded and given an arbitrary score out of ten.

The reason we're so invested in the REAL BIRTH LIE is because hardly anyone has a natural birth that goes to plan. Well that's true of hospital birth, but not of homebirth. A NATURAL birth is where the mother is supported by those she loves and trusts, and she is the first person to touch the baby, when she pulls the baby to her and greets the baby with whispered joy and shocked elation. When those in the room looks on in silent awe of the moment that is taking place before them and leave.

What's that I hear you saying? "That's not always possible!" Well, NO SHIT! I've watched as a team of strangers tried to revive my still son, while they pumped him full of adrenalin and tried to start his tiny heart, I've been there while time stood still and all I could do was pray*. And my prayers have gone unanswered. I've also been there when my child was taken away from me, living, but needing special care after he was cut out of me. I've also had my perfectly healthy child taken from me because "babies aren't allowed in recovery". None of these experiences were NATURAL nor were they REAL births.

"how can you say that about your children?" I hear you ask. Well that's just it. I'm NOT saying it about them. They are no more their births than you are yours. I think society has latched onto the idea that birth is joyful and tried to make it a one size fits all emotion that women MUST feel when they meet their babies. How was my mother meant to feel when she met me? She'd had a general and I was cut out while she was unconscious. I know she loved me, and I know that my birth was separate to how she felt about me. That's just as well because she was off her face on pain relief! It's the same for me and my kids. I love them but THEY ARE NOT THEIR BIRTHS. My c/sec children are not their births, my stillborn son is not his birth and my triumphantly home birthed son is not his birth either. But his was the only REAL birth. And I can say that about MY BIRTHS. I can say it because it's a fact, and I can say it because I am the only person who can articulate how I FEEL.

It's time to call a spade a spade. Stop lying to women, surgery is not birth any more than dentures are real teeth. Stop having unrealistic expectation of how women should feel about THEIR births. Stop telling women they have unrealistic expectations of birth. Tell the medical world to give birth back to whom it belongs. Stay safe, stay home, and make appropriate use of medical technology only when necessary. Birth CAN be great, birth CAN be amazing, beautiful, empowering, transformative and so many other things. But only the woman whose birth it is can describe it. The more we call c/sec birth, the more we embrace the dangerous, financially motivated, medical approach to labouring women and new babies.

I wish you were here baby boy. I thank you for all that you have given me, and pray* you know how often I think of you.

* I am not religious