Rachel,
I only hear this from health
professionals. I don't hear it from women, not even the most mainstream hospy
birthing mamas with whom I deal. It's a very small percentage of women who
embrace this technology, and an even smaller number who knowingly embrace it. If
you read mainstream birth stories they usually start with "My baby was 10 days
overdue so my hospital/surgeon said I had to be induced." The women are
generally scared, although normal physiological birth scares them too, but have
no idea of the massive risks involved. When it all goes pearshaped, as it so
often does, the hospital/surgeon and those around them tell the woman she is
defective and can't birth "properly". It sometimes leads to ERC solely for
fear as women are so shocked by the assault of active management that they seek
to control the process in future by choosing surgery without the horror of
labour under these circumstances. Of course, the profiting surgeon is only too
happy to oblige.
Apart from women transferred
from BCs to labour wards, the most traumatised women I see are those who have
had active management foisted on them by hospital policies and the belief that
you can't say no. Not that saying no helps women in most hospitals anyway, you
only need to read those same birth stories to hear that also. Whatever MWs in
hospitals are being asked about induction and active management, women are
really not understanding what it is and I almost never hear of a woman who
*wants* to be induced, they just don't know they don't have to
be. Most women now believe that without interventions like induction and ARM
that babies won't come and that women don't know how to go into
labour.
Tragic but something I see all
the time. Try some mainstream birth forums to read the same story over and over
and over again.
J
