The thing no one can understand unless they have been pregnant, and been faced with giving birth or have given birth is how terrifying and animal of an experience it is.
Humans these days are used to convenience and ease and predictability… having a baby forces you to confront the chaotic nature and sheer mammalian nature of us.
Women facing birth for the first time, especially in this era where they have little support or experience to draw from, and lives where everything is controlled and understandable, are terrified. They reach out for these communities because they feel insignificant to the doctors and nurses and midwives they meet in the system and they are scared.
It very easy to sit back and scoff at women when you have no idea at all what it’s like. You don’t know. You can’t know, but you aren’t even trying to know.
People without direct experience should be doing more listening and attempting to understand, and less judging.
I’ll scoff at every moron who trusts pseudoscience over medical professionals.
Hospitals must do better with birthing parents, but this shit isn’t an answer. If I can be insensitive for one sentence, trusting somebody who calls themselves a ‘birthkeeper’ on social media fucking reeks of laughably obvious bullshit from my perspective as an outsider. I can only find sense in it, in the double whammy of psychological trauma and physical trauma from a bad hospital experience, especially during such an emotionally intense life event like giving birth. Having PTSD from an awful experience would make one vulnerable to medical woo, and its why hospitals must do better.
There’s also a lot of anti-caesarean rhetoric, which is disturbing. I don’t want to say its ‘on the rise’, as anti-caesarean rhetoric has been a long-running theme in pseudoscience. As the other reply to this thread says, its antivax nonsense applied to birth. I can concede discussions on potential medical over-reliance on caesarean might be worth having, but there is an ideologically-driven medical woo side who actively want caesareans to be a procedure performed rarely to never. Its part of the misogyny of medical woo, the slight possible negative impact caesareans have on potential future pregnancies matters more than completing your current birth safely. Antivax nonsense applied to birth sure, but also prolife nonsense applied to birth; protecting children who don’t exist yet at the cost of parents actively giving birth and the children who are currently being born.
Yeah, no shit. Its basically antivax nonsense applied to birth.
Giving birth in a hospital has its fair share of horrors, but child birth used to have a really high mortality rate (and still does in parts of the world). Anyone who wants to go back to that is ignoring history.
I dunno if I quite agree.
There’s a happy middle ground where hospital births are the rare occurrence and not the routine default.
if your goal is to increase birth related deaths.
Nah.
It’s great to have hospital as a fallback for emergencies but there’s problems with hospitals themselves too.
The answer is to fix the hospital issues, not to play Russian roulette with mothers lives. “Fallback” is no good if the mother is bleeding out, or the baby is not breathing, and the hospital is 10 minutes away. Every second counts.
