And what better person to hear it from than someone you love and respect. If we didn’t have tv and movies to distort our vision of how childbirth goes, we would have no problems thinking about going through childbirth.

It really isn’t that bad.

Interesting. I just said this to my niece after we watched a very dramatic birthing scene in a movie. It was really sensationalized, but I hope my message got through to her…

i wrote a book for my daughter, it begins at conception and finishes at the end of her first year, we read it together, she’s 4. i let her know that it is hard work but amazing and so exciting. i’m really trying to normalize birth for her… funny too cuase when i’m reading birth (or health-related) books she wants me to read aloud so she can hear too.

Same here. My mom told me she did it all naturally, and somehow that ingrained in me that it was possible for me, too. No horror stories = a much more positive perspective on what birth can be like. Thanks, mom.

One of my parenting goals with my daughters is to help them grow up without a media induced fear of childbirth and breastfeeding.

I am planning to have my daughter at my next birth, for whichever parts she feels comfortable.
Also, I use this website as a catalyst for conversations about how medical birth has become and how natural it really is.

Interesting, and interesting comments. I grew up being told medical birth was ‘easy’ for my mum in spite of the trauma and gore (and there was!). Unforunately, this had the effect of making me feel like a failure when I didn’t find mine easy…

Yeah I think it’s great, but only if it’s really not that bad. It was that bad for me, and worse. Not that I regret it or would do it differently, but statements like this make me feel like a failure because it just wasn’t true for me.

My mom and grandmother both said the same thing about birth my whole life “its labor, hard work but totally doable”. Medicated birth was, at best, dismissed by them both. There was never a question that I would need or even want pain relief during birth, it just wasn’t done. I admit their viewpoint is rather ‘high horse’ for women who choose to have a medicated birth, and, had something happened where I needed an epidural I’d have felt like a failure for it, but, at the same time, the thought never entered my mind during my 24 hour 1st labor that this wasn’t ‘totally doable’. In fact, I found it a lot more ‘doable’ and less painful than I had expected. (by the way I don’t share their viewpoint that women who have epidurals are somehow failing at birth so please no angry responses I don’t understand them, but find it a perfectly reasonable choice for a parent to make if they so wish.)

Growing up, my mother told me “If I could give birth for a living- I would totally do it. As long as I didn’t have to be pregnant. Birth is only 1 hard day of work… pregnancy is SOO much worse!”

Given that every pregnant person I knew seemed to love (or at least tolerate) being pregnant, I figured it wasn’t that bad.

And you know what? She was right. My birth was so much better/easier than the pregnancy (which was problem free, btw).

The mother quoted here is mine, and her daughter is me

It’s a complex issue, isn’t it? How do we empower women ahead of time with the message that they almost certainly can do this work, without undermining those who need (or choose) medical technology to help them birth?

FWIW, the strongest women I’ve ever met were the “failures”….ones who labored longer and harder than I ever did, and particularly those who couldn’t get it done without help despite desperately wanting to.

I’ve been mulling over writing a blog post on the values my mother instilled in me when I was relatively young, telling me about the difference between my birth, under twilight, and my brother’s birth, totally natural.

I went in to both of my births with a determination that I could do this without intervention, because I came from a line of powerful mamas who have been doing this since the days of the magna carta. In fact, looking back through my family line, the mamas tended to outlive their husbands by a significant amount.

My mom was pit induced, almost hyperstimulated, episiotomy, everything short of a c/s, drug free with me and had natural births with a midwife for her other 2 kids. She always said awesome stuff like this to me. She instilled a fear of pit in me though!

That said, I really don’t know why I went with an OB for my first baby. I KNEW better. I’d heard the stories. But I went with an OB group and ended up with a decent birth (they listened to my “NO PITOCIN” rule, at least since my body did the work of labor pretty quickly for a first time mom) but plenty medicalized (purple pushing, epidural, etc). Then with the next one I used a midwife group and it was amazing and I still can’t figure out why I didn’t learn from my mom’s experiences in the first place.

Having had both an induction (leading to c-section) and a natural, unmedicated labor and birth at home, I can both agree (natural labor isn’t that bad) and disagree (inductions really ARE that bad!).
Oddly enough, my mother tried to warn me about inductions, and I blew her off, prattling the same crap I was told, that “it’s the same thing your body makes, so it won’t make labor worse”. Had to learn the hard way.
But I will be telling my daughter my own experience, that natural childbirth (Home VBAC of a very large baby, even) was much easier and gentler than the induction was, and that induction only got to 4 cm.

People still think I am crazy or deserve a medal for going through natural childbirth, and won’t believe me when I tell them that it’s the medicalized birth that is so horrendous, not natural.

my mum told me that she would happily give birth every day….she just was so sick while she was pregnant….she said it hurts but you know it has an ending, just keep reminding yourself the pain wont last forever. i had my first baby in 4.5 hours with minimal drugs.

My mom reported a fairly easy pregnancy after some years of trying, and I now know that her birth experience wasn’t exactly optimal, but she always maintained that she was so delighted to have a baby afterwards she didn’t really care that L&D sucked. It set me up to a) expect a relatively easygoing pregnancy; b) demand a better birth experience and c) relish the eventual outcome as so positive that the road getting there, however rocky, would be worth it. So far, it’s all come true!