Thursday, October 27, 2011

On birthing

I read this today:
If you've never gone through unmedicated labor before, there is no way you can understand the urges your body has to birth a baby. I had no idea how natural it would be to want to push. How irresistible.
 That's not true.

Darling daughter, if you decide to have children, I want you to know that the above statement is not true.  It may be true for some women, but not for all women. It may be true in some situations, but not in all situations. I was medicated and you were born via c-section, but by God, I felt the urges fully. I felt the need to push. I felt the phases of consciousness change. I felt it all.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I now feel bad for writing the above as it does seem to engage in the dreaded mommy wars. I take back the placenta part! But I do find the original statement just as annoying as you do. As you know, I didn't have any pain meds and I NEVER felt the urge to push until the final push. That one felt urgent and I wasn't going to listen to anyone telling me to stop. But for the hour and a half of pushing before that, it felt like I was doing some repetitive exercise (I suppose I was sorta doing squats). I pushed because I was supposed to, not because I felt like I needed to. Every birth is different. Just because I had one, doesn't mean I can speculate about anyone else's. That's all I'm saying.

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  3. I felt the urge to poo, and actually walked over to the bathroom, until I realized - oh wait, that's a baby head. From that moment on I knew I couldn't make fun of the "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" women.

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  4. Your first post wasn't THAT bad!

    And yeah, the urge-to-poo is that pushing, right? If I had money to fund scientific research, I'd research the hypothesis that the reason women have crippling constipation in pregnancy is to get us used to pushing for prolonged periods of time using same/similar muscle groups. SCIENCE!

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