Birth Truths.

It's all about physiological birth.

You know, this is is important important is not even a good enough word to describe it it's crucial it's part of our humanness um it's part of us as women and people just as an aside just want you to know i am inclusive um and if that's not for you that's fine you can tune out now um But what's happening right now is what happened with Breach over several years, many years, especially with the trial that happened.

I think the Hanna trial came out in, it was around about the time I was a student, 99 or 2000. which basically said having a breech baby was much safer by cesarean than it was vaginally.

And if you look at any of those episodes of Call the Midwife or you've worked with anybody or met anybody or listened to stories of people who were working in that era of Call the Midwife, such as that beloved woman, Mary Cronk, breach birth skills were part of midwifery and I remember as a young midwife throughout my career I've met more senior midwives or older midwives who said yeah yeah we always used to you know breach births you know we would attend and there would be people that had the skills and the patience and trust in it they had the knowledge to be able to do that Well, after the Hanna trial came out, I don't have the link.

I'll have to put it in the notes below.

It was just almost like there was a blanket ban on breech births.

And the United States, I don't know what state they were in beforehand.

But right now, I think it's really difficult.

The same way it's difficult to have a breech birth in hospital without the surgeons wanting to just cut that baby out quickly as possible.

And same goes for birth after cesarean.

I think in the States, sometimes it is just impossible.

And it's unbelievable that you could be in that state of not having bodily autonomy to use your body to birth your baby out of your vagina.

And that somebody somewhere, and often we're talking white men in coats, are denying us the choice and the right to birth our baby as we want.

So where are we now? Come into 2024 and we're now literally erasing the knowledge and skills around spontaneous catholic, which is head down babies, their births too.

Let's just throw it all under the bus, you know, that actually with the... epidemic of induction and increasing incredibly increasing fear and medicalization of pregnancy and birth there are very very few women and birthing people who are now able to experience what it feels like to go into labor spontaneously and going into labor spontaneously is an important part of the whole process.

It prepares the baby.

There is a communication between the baby and the body through hormones that says that this baby is ready and the lungs are ready for birth.

but what we're doing is saying we don't want to wait for that and we don't trust that that works so we've brought that um the gestation of which has been 42 weeks for as long as I can remember, we're bringing that back to 41 now.

And that was the moment when I thought we are seriously going to lose any understanding, knowledge or respect of birth longer than 41 weeks.

In 10 or 20 years time, women will be saying to each other, really, you went to 42 weeks.

Oh, my God, how dangerous.

And of course, it's not dangerous because people are going to 42 weeks all the time.