Childbirth could be defined as the peak moment of a pregnancy, as the moment that is reached after nine months of waiting and the moment in which the baby that has been formed and existed as part of a woman must leave to start a life for itself.
So much meaning and so much accumulated waiting time make childbirth seen as a potentially dangerous moment that has caused professionals to have a probably exaggerated need to control all the processes of labor.
This, which might seem like something beneficial (“how good they treat me, they are doing a lot of tests to see that everything is fine”) is a double-edged sword, since The more you intervene and control, the less power is given to the mother and, the less protagonist the mother feels, the more risks there are of something going wrong.
On this subject, he published a few days ago one of the blogs that I follow the most, that of “Childbirth is ours”, in which Jesús Sanz, a midwife from Tenerife, who has been attending home births for 16 years, explains how his evolution has evolved attention from the beginning until these days, confessing that the more he wanted to control and cover, the worse his assistance.
The woman about to give birth is a healthy person
The woman's body is so wise and takes so many thousands of years of evolution that it is hard to believe that we can see that it is normal to be able to gestate a creature growing practically from nowhere and we distrust its ability to give birth to said baby
It is true that the risks exist and that a seemingly simple birth can be complicated, however it is also true that the more you want to reduce the risks, if this is done from interventions and control, the chances of failure tend to increase.
I remember a phrase that a patient told the surgeon when he entered the operating room to be operated on life or death just before being anesthetized: "Doctor, do not operate on me as if I were already dead, opéreme as if I were alive, because I want to continue living".
Professionals who care for parturients should do the same, Think of them as healthy women, capable of giving birth on their own, without anyone helping them.
By this I do not mean that we must abandon them, much less, but be vigilant and vigilant in case something fails and their intervention is necessary, but from the shadow, invisible, mute, acting almost like spies who would not be discovered.
How Jesus tells it
Here is a summary of the entry of Jesús Sanz that I consider very interesting because it is always enriching to see what the professionals who attend them think about and how they deliver:
For more than 16 years I have accompanied and attended home births, and throughout these years I have undergone many changes, and I have realized that I have not always done a good job as a midwife, that many signs have escaped me They talked about something going wrong and, on the contrary, that everything was fine when I was worried and annoying the woman in excess. ... Apparently, it seemed that my assistance was impeccable, I went with all the necessary equipment, had all the necessary knowledge and was accompanied by the right person. So what were the women complaining about? Until I found the answer: my lack of listening. I didn't listen to the woman's needs, I didn't listen to the birth, what messages each delivery sent me to understand that everything was right or wrong. The women really complained that it bothered them. When you realize this, your attendance changes a lot, it is all an unlearning of annoying childbirth, of everything you do, that you should stop doing because it really is useless, just to annoy you. ... When we change our point of view everything is possible. We can change the way we attend, we can "not do", we can learn to be present in deliveries without disturbing, intervening when it is really necessary, we can create the necessary environments for assistance in hospitals, maternity hospitals, clinics, delivery homes ... be the most similar to those at home. We will learn to know when we have left over, when the presence of other people can hinder or endanger the birth process, we will learn to listen to the needs of the birth, its warmth, its gloom, its intimacy, its silence, its love.
If you are interested, you can read it completely in "The Birth is Ours".
