They Call It <i> Labor </i> for a Reason

Your recent article on the “failure” of childbirth education hit two nails on their respective heads. Couples, looking to science to fulfill its promise, expect a healthy baby and a great experience. Medical science, looking to fulfill its promise, tries to guarantee the healthy baby while sabotaging the great experience with the whole array of medical technology it possesses.

In earlier days, technology was developed to deal with the small percentage of true emergencies that presented themselves in labor, but through training and practice doctors and hospitals have come to view each innovation as necessary to every birth, problematic or not.

At the same time, nurses and doctors have ignored the time-tested (and research-validated) methods of encouraging natural birth. They know how to give injections, but not how to massage. They can decipher the monitor printouts, but not the mother’s need for support. They can reach for forceps or scalpel for difficult births, but can’t help the mother into a less painful and more efficient position to push her baby out.

As a community-based childbirth educator, I have commiserated time and again with couples about the hard realities of hospital birth, and though they may have been prepared for their experience, they still felt powerless to control or change it. I have therefore come to the conclusion that we are teaching the wrong people: Obstetricians, nurses, pediatricians, and hospital administrators should fill our classes and practice our techniques.

DANA MCCOY

San Marcos