Finally, a website! — Lucy Symons

Finally I have got my act together and have set up a website. It has been something I have been resisting I guess because of my fear of the technology, like my intransigence in recording my hypnosis sessions on to a cassette tape… I can see a tape, hand it over to my client at the end of a session and feel more confident that it has actually worked… but at Annabel’s insistence (due to client comment) I have been forced into investigating alternative options and now I am the proud owner of a Micromemo and so can record a wav file to my ipod and my clients can download that on to their own mp3 player, or I can burn a disc to listen to from a cd player. (I sound like I know what I am talking about, don’t I? Ha!)

I have also got a high quality mini studio set up for home so I can create bespoke recordings for clients who are too far away to have a face-to-face appointment. I am being dragged into the 21st Century and it is not so scary after all.

Sadly, I don’t feel that the medical community is embracing change quite as enthusiastically, and ironically it is not modernisation they need to address just a return to the good old days where women were allowed to have their babies naturally in the way that nature intended. In the eight years that I have been involved in this business, I have heard so many horror stories spoken by women not feeling supported by their local health workers in having the birth they choose and nine times out of ten decisions have been made for the woman that are not actually in her or her baby’s best interest. This is why I am so passionate about what I do, I think. I was so lucky in the births of my two daughters that I had midwives both times who bucked the hospital policy and did what I needed them to do not what the hospital policy dictated. Both times, the midwives stayed beyond the end of their shift to provide me with continuity of care and both times the midwife actively obstructed the doctors from being involved, in one case forcibly holding the door shut against them.

My births were straightforward although both babies presentation was posterior and consequently my labours were longer than “normal” (although who decides what “normal” is?) and although in neither case the baby was ever in distress, in both instances the hospital policy insisted on interventions. My midwives had my best interest at heart and, in both cases, I was “allowed” a perfectly natural vaginal delivery and recovered sufficiently to carry on my life in a matter of hours. I had no idea how lucky I was until I met other women who had such sad stories of Caesars and inductions, continual monitoring, breaking of waters and other interventions that were mostly unnecessary. These women had felt cheated by the system and consequently they struggled to bond with their babies. Breast-feeding was harder for them and their babies and so was their recovery.

As a member of the MSLC at Kingston Hospital I feel I can represent these women where it matters, witht he Maternity Services at my local hospital. I have taken distraught women back to speak to the Head of Midwifery to have their say and find a degree of closure on what can frequently be a very sad chapter of their life, reassured by the fact that their voices have been heard and so the chances of another woman experiencing what they did are smaller. I have met and worked with many midwives who are so saddened by the current policies and their work overload which forces them to give a patchier service than they would choose. I have also worked with midwives who are unhappy to support women in the labour of their choice, more driven by a need to meet hospital targets and dictates, these midwives continue to work and give women the message that they cannot do what nature intended and they should surrender to a speedy, medicalised birth rather than attempt a water birth at home, or a natural birth in a hospital labour room. Research is being done at Kingston currently to try to find the reason for the resistance of these midwives to embrace the current trend for women to labour in water; to try to find what their objection is and to attempt to educate them to better support women.

Most of the midwives coming in to the profession are more open minded, I find, and I have hope that the government is listening to women who want more choice in their birth, (perhaps this will end in more home births using water) and to be supported in the births of their choice, but recently was sent an article written by a doctor in the States which bodes very badly for us all.

I lived and worked in the States for 16 years and saw first hand how a system of exclusively private health care diminishes a woman’s choice and can bankrupt a family. I have seen how a fear of litigation has changed National policy there to better protect institutions and insurance companies regardless of the cost to mothers and babies. I came home to England, happy to be in a country where, although shabby and can be criticised, the NHS is largely well meaning and is full of lovely midwives like the ones I had first hand experience of. Our National health care is free at the point of contact, something we shouldn't underestimate in labour and birth. Imagine being in labour and being asked to fill in forms and prove your health insurance cover; where, if you would like an epidural you may find your partner whispering anxiously that it would cost nearly £2000; or discovering that your baby had a genetic problem which would be costly to your health insurance company if you carried the baby to term and so they refused to continue to insure you if you continued with your pregnancy? These things happen in America.

A friend in the States sent me the New Yorker article this week, which I read with open-mouthed disbelief, The Score. Do read it if you feel strong enough. Basically it suggests that as doctors and midwives become more and more frightened of litigation (and frankly more selfish about scheduling their time) they prefer to perform Caesars, which can be planned in advance around golf games and eliminate the risk of a baby being possibly born in an emergency scenario. Consequently, skills that have taken centuries for doctors and midwives to learn and perfect are being lost, as they are no longer taught and no longer performed. Forceps deliveries, a procedure that has saved babies and women’s lives for centuries, are no longer performed, the doctors preferring to perform a nice simple cs. The longer this continues, the more simple procedures necessary for a women to have a natural delivery when a baby is in a less than ideal position, will result in cs because there will be nobody available who is sufficiently skilled to perform the procedure. Already, breech births just don’t happen any more by vaginal delivery in this country and in the States it is almost unheard of for a woman to have a physiological third stage. Rather than wait and see how a baby chooses to present, doctors are scheduling a cs at 38 weeks to avoid “not knowing”. I have seen many women who were told they had to have a cs at 38 weeks due to a breech presentation refuse and whose baby turned perfectly naturally in time for their delivery, in effect the baby has up to four weeks to make that turn at 38 weeks, why not see if it happens? If it does, the mother avoided a major abdominal operation with all the attendant risks and the recovery that entails. Why should it not be up to the woman to make this decision rather than be told by the medical community that she has lost that opportunity? I cannot stress enough the emotional fall-out a woman can experience if she feels that her birth has been “taken away” from her which has long term ramifications that I doubt the medical establishment has taken as seriously as the benefits of being able to schedule births in an orderly fashion.