Enduring Childbirth — A Story Too Common

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My daughter was born in 1981 at Lower Hutt Hospital. I’d had my seventeenth birthday just three months prior. I was in a shitty, three-year relationship with her father (that stretched to five years by the time I got brave enough to dump him), and I was totally unprepared for what was happening to me.

I was too young to know what to expect, too young to understand how childbirth should be, and too young to say ‘NO’ to the ancient gynecologist who was in charge of the birth of my baby (and who had also birthed her father).

I was used to doing as I was told, and so I did.

I’d seen Dr Rutherford a few days before my daughter’s birth, and he’d sent me for an X-ray (Yes - they X-rayed unborn babies back then as there were no scans). My baby was supposedly overdue, but because I’d had no idea of my dates, we had no real due date. According to Dr Rutherford, I was a month overdue.

It was around 7pm a couple of days after the X-ray when I got a phone call from the hospital… “You’re supposed to be here. You’ll be induced in the morning.”

I hung up the phone feeling scared and trapped. Like an animal trapped in a cage, with no way out.

Scott (the father of my baby) wasn’t there. I didn’t know where he was. In the short time we’d lived together, it had become normal for him to go to work in the morning and not come home. Sometimes for days. His priorities were drinking, getting stoned and getting laid.

His sister Simone and her boyfriend were living with us in the flat we were renting above the shops, across the road from the railway line. They were there. I packed my bags, called a cab, and they rode with me to the hospital. With a small amount of feigned concern, they dumped me at the door and took the cab back home.

After being admitted, I spent the night in the delivery ward. I lay there, unable to sleep, listening, frightened, as a woman screamed and screamed and screamed some more. I had no idea what to expect. To this day, I have never felt more alone, and more terrified, than I did that night.

A nurse came to fetch me in the morning, and I was taken to a small room. They asked me to lie on the narrow bed with wheels, and they put drips in my arms. Then they attached me to a monitor, and I wasn’t allowed to get up. I wasn’t even allowed to get up to use the toilet. I had to use a bed pan to pee.

I lay on my back on that bed for over nine hours as the pains in my belly grew, and they did things to me, with little explanation and no consent.

Scott turned up around mid-morning, full of apologies and excuses. I guess his sister eventually found him and told him I was about to give birth to his baby. I was glad to see him. It was a relief to not be alone.

As the pain in my belly grew, they told me they were going to inject me with Pethidine. They didn’t ask. They just did it. The instant relief from the pain was welcome, but short lived and I had no understanding or thought about what this drug might be doing to the tiny baby inside me.

When the pain grew stronger again, they told me to roll on my side and curl up in a ball. The nurse said they were going to give me an Epidural.

I didn’t know what that was.

The pain from the needle going into my spine was bad, but once they started pumping stuff into me, the pain went away.

All of it.

And the beeps on the monitor began to change. The nurse looked concerned.

“Your baby’s heart rate is slowing down too much. I think… Or it might be the monitor playing up. Tell me when you’re having a contraction.”

I can’t feel my contractions. I can’t feel anything.

“Tell me when you’re having a contraction. Your baby seems to be stressed, and the heart rate is slowing. I think it’s when you’re having a contraction.”

I can’t feel my contractions. I can’t feel anything from my waist down.

“Tell me when you’re having a contraction. You must be able to feel them.”

I can’t feel anything.

This went on and on. I was wasting my breath. I just wanted it to be over. I had no feeling from the waist down, and I thought my baby might die. I was confused, and scared, and tired.

Then Dr Rutherford arrived.

“I’m going to examine you before we take you into delivery.”

Legs spread. He’s down there between my legs. Fingers inside me. Not much feeling. Still numb.

“Hmmmm. There’s an arm in the way”.

What do you mean?

“I’m going to have to try to push the baby back to move the arm out of the way, or your baby’s arm could be damaged.”

I didn’t understand and he didn’t explain. I just wanted it to be over. I was wheeled into the delivery suite.

My feet were up in stirrups hanging above the bed, and then a large group of young male doctors were herded into the room. They gathered behind Dr Rutherford, arms folded over clipboards or hands in pockets, white coats on, staring intently and waiting for what was about to take place between my stirrup-held legs.

I could hear Dr Rutherford talking to the student doctors, but I don’t remember the words. I just remember the discomfort, both physical and emotional, as I lay there, a ‘thing’ to be used for demonstration purposes.

Without consent.

Without explanation.

With zero regard for me and what I might want while my baby was being born.

Dr Rutherford used a ventouse and forceps on my baby’s head. In case you don’t know, a ventouse is like a cup which is stuck to the baby’s head using suction. Kind of like a toilet plunger, but much more aggressive.

He used the ventouse to push my baby back into my body, reversing what had just taken nine hours to achieve, and although I’d not been able to feel my contractions since they put the epidural in, I felt that!

I felt it a lot.

Then he used those cold tools, the ventouse and forceps to drag my baby from my body.

“Congratulations. It’s a girl.”

She was taken and wrapped quickly. A nurse brought her to me, but didn’t give her to me. I saw my baby’s face for a few seconds, and then she was taken away. Out of the room.

Where are you taking my baby?

“We need to x-ray her head to make sure there are no skull fractures.”

The fear returned. I didn’t know what was happening and they didn’t explain.

The stitching of my insides and outsides took a long time to do, and months to heal. My daughter’s head took longer. She spent two weeks in an incubator in the special care ward where the nurses went against my wishes every single night, bottle feeding my baby rather than waking me so I could breastfeed as requested, until she couldn’t be breastfed because she was so used to the bottle.

I spent two weeks in the hospital, waiting for my baby to be allowed out of her incubator. Many mothers asked me, with concern in their eyes, where my baby was, and I’d have to explain, again and again, my short ‘acceptable’ version of what had happened.

Many nurses looked at me with pity in their eyes as they told me I’d had such a hard time. Had I? I didn’t know any different. I didn’t know how childbirth should be. This was my only experience. It just was.

The last of the scabs from the damage done to my daughter’s head by the ventouse finally came off when she was close to six months old.

The scars on both of us still remain.

I look back now at my experience over fourty years later, knowing what childbirth can be after the birth of my son, with so much sadness (and anger) that my daughter and I had to endure that. I feel sad that her entry into the world was so traumatic, painful and damaging, when it didn’t need to be. I feel sad that I didn’t know enough to say NO.

I feel angry that I was never given the opportunity to say NO.

And while I’m certain that my rights to be kept informed, or to make decisions about my body and my delivery were regarded as unimportant because I was a seventeen-year-old unmarried mother in 1981, there are many stories today that tell us that this type of experience is still happening to women of all ages, giving birth in countries around the world.

At a time when one would hope that women should be empowered to make their own informed decisions and choices, where they should have the power to say NO to things that others want to do to their bodies, they are instead still finding themselves being bullied, coerced and manipulated into accepting procedures, examinations and treatment that they don’t want.

Sadly, this is still a story that is all too common. Babies are still too often being born inside sterile delivery suites, with bright lights, cold metal tools and unneccessary drugs, to uninformed mothers, by doctors whose priorities have nothing to do with their patients.

Childbirth can and should be a natural event that produces a healthy, undamaged baby, bonded to a mother whose right to birth her child fully informed and in the way she wants is the number one priority of everyone involved.

One day, in a better world, this will be normal again. Healthy babies born to healthy mothers in a healthy way.

One day soon….