Month: March 2014

Dear Mom,

This day is hard every year, but this year there’s an new element to my sadness. Jeff and I having a baby, and you won’t be there to meet it.

I wonder about all of the little experiences and conversations I’m missing because you’re not around. What were your pregnancies like? How did you feel when I first fluttered about inside of you? What was it like to see me for the first time? All of these experiences of becoming and then being a mother that every mother experiences, but which would have a special poignancy when coming from you to me.

I think about how much you would have loved baby, about how excited you would have been. Baby will get lots of love, but it will never get to know you, and you’ll never get to know it. We’ll make sure baby knows about you, but that can never be the same as knowing a living, loving human being.

I miss you, and I love you.

Erika

It’s from a couple years ago now, but this is an interesting article about how we’ve conflated science and technology in determining what makes a safe birth experience. The author isn’t saying that women shouldn’t have interventions, but the author is saying that for a normal, low risk birth interventions that can be life saving in critical situations can actually lead to worse outcomes than not intervening. Thus, if the reason a woman is getting an intervention is fetal or maternal safety — and there are other reasons to get interventions — but, as I said, if the main motivation is safety, then the intervention may not, in fact, be the best choice.

Epidurals are a good example. If a woman is experiencing her labor pain as suffering, then she should certainly get an epidural if that’s what she wants. But under normal conditions, epidurals should not be considered a way to make the birth safer.

We tend to think — at least in the US —that more technology is better, but that’s not necessarily true. Technology is awesome, but it’s also very limited, especially when applied to the human body which is always more complicated than our current understanding necessarily gives it credit for.