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“WE ARE MADE TO FEEL FAILURES”

IF YOU believe the Old Testament, you’ll believe that women have only themselves to blame for the rigours of childbirth: after Eve tempted Adam to taste from the Tree of Knowledge, her punishment, among other things, was to bring forth children in suffering. And when the Big Almighty says suffering, he isn’t joking. Childbirth is agonising, bone-crushing, degrading and occasionally life-threatening.

This week’s demands from the National Institute of Clinical Excellence that doctors should take steps to reduce the number of Caesarean sections carried out in Britain (currently one in four) is the sort of sanctimonious judgmentalism that one has come to expect from the authorities on the matter of childbirth. The prime consideration would seem to be cost. There are statistics about blood clots, bladder infections and breathing problems in babies, but, as Dr Thomas Stuttaford pointed out yesterday in The Times, these can be ambiguous. No, the real reasons are far more sinister.

In this age of complex medical procedures and sophisticated technology, the assumption persists that when it comes to giving birth, we should simply chuck the past 100 years of medical advances out of the window. There is overwhelming pressure on women to give birth “naturally”, by which I mean not just vaginally but without pain relief.

Those who don’t, or can’t, are made to feel like failures. It would seem that unless you have had your nether regions ripped asunder by your progeny you can never be a complete woman — or, for that matter, a fit mother.

That such tripe should be in any way endorsed by the Government is profoundly depressing. Already, the National Childbirth Trust is allowed to run riot with its draconian views. If the NCT had its way, we’d have our babies on bearskins by candlelight, with nothing but a few wrinkled old ladies ululating in the corner by way of pain relief. Not only is it ridiculous, it’s irresponsible. In my NCT antenatal classes, Caesarean was a dirty word. Pain relief, other than breathing exercises and perhaps a quick squirt of gas and air, was also taboo. The emphasis was on birthing positions (we were shown ethnically correct drawings of various women in labour), whether or not to bring sandwiches and getting your “birthing partner” to massage your back.

The classes did nothing to prepare me for my own experience, which was hours of labour, lots of drugs and being glued to a bed (the baby’s heart rate was being monitored), eventually culminating in a Caesarean. I could have kissed the feet of the two surgeons who finally put me out of my misery and brought my daughter safely into this world.

A woman should not be subject to government diktats, manipulated statistics or old-fashioned prejudices. The decision should be hers.

We should be glad that Caesareans are now safe operations, and that modern medicine means that women and babies no longer routinely die in childbirth.

SARAH VINE

DEBATE

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