Yesterday was Baton Rouge’s second annual Rally To Improve Birth. The rally is put on by a worldwide organization called Improve Birth with the goal to inform women of their options surrounding their birthing experience and to advocate evidence-based maternity care.
This type of maternity care is based on the idea that the care a mother receives is most beneficial for her, her baby and is specific to the individual and the situation. For those people who don’t know about modern hospital birth practices, it seems to fit the bill.
It doesn’t.
In a world that’s constantly growing, people strive to achieve productive change. With the hospital birth process becoming increasingly medicalized and interventions being a common occurrence, these attempts at progress are digressing.
With Louisiana having the highest cesarean section rate in the country, falling around 40 percent, it was refreshing to see women standing on the side of the busy road holding brightly colored signs stating “Improve Birth,” “Know Your Options,” and “Honk if birth matters!” There were even children holding signs saying “I came when I was ready!”
The current state of the nursing and medical education system focuses on all the things that can go wrong during a delivery rather than how to simply treat a normal, low-risk vaginal birth.
The missing link is that birth should be seen as an empowering and spiritual experience for women.
The only way movies and TV portray birth is as a horrific, excruciating and completely unenjoyable experience. With this awful representation, few women seek out information about the process and spend their whole lives dreading the day their first child is born.
This is where Improve Birth comes in. They strongly believe women need to be educated about their own bodies in order to make the best possible decisions regarding their delivery. They also aim to hold physicians accountable for the choices they make during the delivery process to ensure they’re really in the best interest of the mother and baby.
On its website is a chart illustrating what common hospital labor and delivery practices have relevant evidence to back up their usage. Amongst these are artificial acceleration of birth with Pitocin, artificial breaking of the water, the mother not being allowed to eat or drink, not allowed out of bed and not allowed to give birth in any position other than laying down.
Of all of these, none of them hold evidence that shows they benefit the mother or the baby. Which begs the question — why are doctors doing this? And why is it the mainstream?
The answer is simple — time, control and money.
Physicians need to start giving low-risk women alternative options that aren’t limited to a hospital. Midwives, doulas, home birth and birthing centers are all safe options that have great, if a better, results than hospital births.
Women have the power to reclaim the delivery room and to transform the taboo ideas surrounding birth. It’s possible to have an enjoyable hospital birth — one needs only educate themself about their choices and ask questions.
With knowledge comes power. In this case, women are able to transform a special day of your life from something painful to something beautiful.
Mariel Gates is a journalism sophomore from Baton Rouge.