The baby died two days ago at an unassisted home VBAC. The mother wrote on her Facebook page:
Dearest family and friends, baby Isaac was born 2-29-16 weighing 10 lbs 9oz and 23.5 inches long. With so much pain in our hearts and not knowing how to even say this but Isaac did not survive his birth. We are completely devastated. At this time we’re just asking for prayers of strength and peace during the most difficult time of our lives.
Today Isaac’s mother posted this:
…I wanted to tell you ladies that I went into labor NATURALLY ALL BY MYSELF (well after sex that night..) that in itself was awesome bc I have never had that experience before and was starting to doubt my body especially waiting so long! 42 weeks! BUT IT HAPPENED! I labored all through the night and day and PUSHED HIM OUT all 10lb 9oz and 23.5 inches with a 14.5 inch head …
…VAGINAL BIRTH AFTER CESAREAN IS POSSIBLE! UNMEDICATED BIRTH IS POSSIBLE. HOME BIRTHS ARE POSSIBLE. And most importantly OUR BODIES AREN’T BROKEN, THEY WERE DESIGNED TO DO THIS!!! I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE! lol
LOL?
She goes on to say:
TRUST YOURSELF, TRUST YOUR GUT, TRUST YOUR INTUITION AND BACK IT UP NO MATTER WHAT! …
Because all that trusting worked out so well for her. While she was busily trusting herself, her baby was dying because her intuition is worse than useless.
Of course, the mother now insists that the baby would have died anyway, although she doesn’t bother to explain why that should be so.
I can’t help but think of the story of the judgment of King Solomon. According to Wikipedia:
Two young women who lived in the same house and who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgment. One of the women claimed that the other, after accidentally smothering her own son while sleeping, had exchanged the two children to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other.
After some deliberation, King Solomon called for a sword to be brought before him. He declared that there was only one fair solution: the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. Upon hearing this terrible verdict, the boy’s true mother cried out, “Oh Lord, give the baby to her, just don’t kill him!” The liar, in her bitter jealousy, exclaimed, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!”
The king declared the first mother as the true mother, as a true, loving mother would rather surrender her baby to another than hurt him, and gave her the baby…
I guess King Solomon had never met a homebirth mother like this one. She was perfectly willing to let her baby die to have the birth she wanted … and then boast about it.
Hideous!
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Anything further regarding this mom? What happened if anything?
Disgusting – especially the lol at the end. Wtf is wrong with these people? I hope she’s unable to ever conceive again.
This gave me chills.
Even more chilling is that I have seen more than one post of this nature in the last 12 months. The baby was dead, but mum was a warrior, you guys! She birthed the dead baby vaginally, so it’s a win!
Chills.
That literally turned my stomach. Just unbelievable.
How…just how can anyone possibly believe that getting their dream birth is better than having a live child??!! How insane do you have to be to believe this? Wow. Nearly speechless. Just entered crazyville with this lady. Just one of the most selfish things I’ve ever heard.
I feel like this is very similar to saying,
“The experience I wanted was to smoke and drink during pregnancy, after all, women have done that for centuries and they had healthy babies. We wouldn’t be here it wasn’t safe! My smoking and drinking are part of my identity and I trusted that my intuition wouldn’t steer me wrong. When my baby was born early, sick, small and with fetal alcohol syndrome. What a smashing success! I got my drinky/smoky pregnancy! Look how great I am for doing it MY way!”
Bit of a stretch…. but the sentiment is the same. “I just felt like this was the right thing to do for me”, yeah, you got it wrong.
This is causing pain in my heart/stomach, I feel sick reading about it.
I wish it hadn’t happened that way. Just thinking about the agony of that baby’s short existence & the mother’s emotional agony (when she comes to her senses)…..
https://www.facebook.com/yolandi.kriek
naturopathy, fake cancer cures, and natural birth after cesarean content is found on her page.
She’s fucking sickening. Apparently has other children as well. CPS or the equivalent should be called to take them away. She’s just like those fucking antivaxers that put their kids at risk.
Don’t doxx the mother by linking directly to her social media profile. I flagged your comment for the admin. If she posts there publicly about this under her name or on her blog you can link to that. Her post about Isaac’s death was public and was shared, but it’s gone now.
(P.S. Szia szomszéd)
As a mother who lost a child during his birth (TOLAC>UR>EmerCS) I have to say that reading her post makes me feel physically and emotionally ill.
Voting you up in this because you showed your courage and spoke up.
Thank you for doing so. And I think that most of us here would offer our condolences, hoping that – even at this late stage – they at least let you know that it saddens us.
Amanda I’m so sorry, it must hell for you to read what she posted. 🙁
She “already accomplished what she set out to do” which was have a vaginal birth, the end goal was not a healthy baby.
I myself am a mother that lost an infant child, from my support groups, I know many mothers who have had babies born still. I don’t know a single one of us that wouldn’t cut out our own beating hearts if it meant our child would live. There is such a huge part of me that wants to say that this woman is in such deep shock and grief that she doesn’t really understand what she is writing, but I have never seen a mother go on in such a way after a stillbirth. Most are screaming and searching for what they did wrong, upset with doctors, yelling at anything that might be the cause. Their childrens births were traumatic to the point of PTSD.
This woman didn’t want a birth, she wanted a birth story.
“This woman didn’t want a birth, she wanted a birth story.”
^^^^ This! SO much this!!!! ^^^^
And – by prioritising the mode of birth of the life of the person to be born – she fucking got it.
Oh yea, she has her great vaginal birth story. Yay! What she doesn’t have is a 1st birthday, first steps, the first day of school, first tooth, first words — she gave up a lifetime of firsts for her first vaginal birth and has the absolute gall to act like this is a success story. This isn’t a success, the is the worst possible outcome. I just can not get over her writing, I actually had to read this three times before I realized that the baby had passed. Yea, writing is hugely therapeutic and I will be the first to admit everyone grieves differently, but this is a level of denial, shock and outright delusion that I have never seen before and I interact with infant loss parents everyday. It’s twisted, sad, and sickening.
What she has is a dead baby that she killed because she decided to play god at home. No sympathy from me, and the safest thing for any more kids she is likely to conceive would be a hysterectomy.
I cannot help but agree here. Much as it sounds draconian – it would not be a good idea for her to become pregnant again, since there’s nothing in her behaviour that would show her to be willing to consider an alternative way of going about the birth rather than what she did with this kid. She will put an ideology above the life of the full-term child.
Yes she will probably try this again as soon as possible and yes they do that all the time – because babies are just props to achieving ideological maximums.
Having been dipped into communist indoctrination when I was a kid, I probably have more understanding of the double tragedy of what she did. You know, people were often proud of themselves when they turned in their own children or parents to secret police. They were honestly believing how they were making the world a better place and helping others achieve enlightenment by having their loved ones shipped off to gulags or killed. That’s exactly what she did.
She’s very, very sick. I’m seriously running out of adjectives to describe this.
So sad. I don’t get how being arrogant and silly and having your baby die, then repressing the feelings of sorrow and trying to make it all sound awesome because you can’t admit that you were wrong is “empowering.”
She sounds crazy. Who the heck brags about the fact that their selfish choice likely killed their baby?
Her posts read to me as extremely painful and out of touch with reality. The all caps affirmations of her successful birth are cognitively dissonant screams for continued acceptance by this cult of birth-followers who are likely the last thing that she has to cling to to maintain a sense of self. What she is saying is callous, yes, and I don’t have a problem with anyone pointing that out. But if we think the problem lies within this individual, her choices, and her callous choice of words in a moment of crisis, and not with the CULTure that has brainwashed her into making this choice and into rationalizing it so callously, then we are pointing fingers in the wrong place. Today’s post about the cultishness of NCB hit the nail on the head.
This is how i read her post too, as a call to her fellow cult members to “Please don’t shun me! Please don’t cast me aside because my baby died!” I totally agree with you that her remarks are callous but I think continuing to be accepted by her fellow group members is a large part of her motivation.
As Jackie said below
“It’s obvious she is trying to bring positivity and encouragement to
those feeling discouraged… enough so that she is putting her feelings
last!”
The fact that she can even conceive of her vaginal birth as something positive and encouraging – as a silver lining – is because it is her only ticket in given that her birth failed otherwise. It’s actually chillingly logical.
The big issue was she VOLUNTARILY went along with the bullshit cultists. Nobody held a gun to her head and said “homebirth by natural means or we kill you”. No, she chose to do what she did of her own free will, and it was her will that killed the child by not seeking hospital treatment and an induction if necessary. To deliberately ignore medical experts, go 2 weeks over term with what may have even been a dead child in utero is a callous disregard and the ultimate in stupidity and selfishness. There is no silver lining to a dead child, vbac or otherwise and anyone who thinks the idea of doing a vbac at home just because they think they are more capable than a hospital full of OBs is one step short of being committed to a looney bin.
While yes, joining a cult is voluntary, cults use emotional manipulation and “mind control” tactics to keep you in out of fear and hope. NCB has all of these characteristics, and they only grow more powerful the deeper you go. She made terrible choices, and she made them voluntarily, but she also isn’t in control – the cult has hijacked her emotions and plays her like a puppet. I know because I’ve been there. Sure, I made my day to day decisions – but everything was filtered through the cult. It couldn’t even reach my conscious mind if it didn’t fit. Unassisted Birth is exactly like Scientology or a doomsday cult, minus the compounds to keep the world out.
Yes, just about all cults are bent on power and the leaders are as crazy as you can get. Scientology, Jim Jones Peoples’ Temple, the Genesis II church of bleach enemas, Westboro baptists, KKK etc – all dangerous cults or groups that poison the minds of their followers. Another one that is as bad as the NCB wankers is the antivaccine cult. They are off the scale when it comes to mind control.
And it’s even more complicated than that when dealing with this kind of indoctrination. It is not a religion or cult overtly with a building for the purpose and a leader at the centre calling all the shots. There is no signing of a lifetime commitment to the cause, no monetary obligations, no obvious signs of manipulation and power. People just buy into it gradually, little by little, one internet article or chat forum at a time until they are thoroughly submerged. A bit like the boiling frog analogy where the frog is placed in a pot of cold water and brought to the boil so slowly he doesn’t realise he’s gone til it’s too late. It is cult-like and its adherents have all the hallmarks and manifestations of cult-like behaviour to varying degrees but it’s very difficult to identify outright as there is no one group to apportion blame or be held to account.
This woman is undoubtedly responsible for her own part in her baby’s death but she is also a victim of natural childbirth ideology via the internet and support networks spawned as a response to perceived evils of the medical establishment.
I read her post as immature rather than callous as callous implies that she derives some form of pleasure from her baby’s death which of course she does not. Her pleasure stems purely from the achievement of her stated goal and that of her belief network, a vaginal delivery after a c/s.
Immature, gullible, ridiculous and unspeakably sad.
Sincere condolences to the family from a concerned internet stranger.
I did wonder too where the husband, Isaac’s grandparents and the siblings of mum and dad are in this.
The space in which you can live with your family’s choices can be any shape or size, and managing those relationships can take some self control. As we saw with whooping cough mum (Helen Dexter?), close family get carried along, for some reason unable to act decisively even when death is a real risk.
Imagine the horror of knowing your child/grandchild/niece or nephew was dead and that you might have done something, or something more.
If she’s in shock, why make the post? I know writing can be therapeutic – I endorse therapeutic writing 100%.
But why not let it sit and maybe edit the post later, once she’s out of shock?
i swear my husband should wait a week before he hits send whenever he’s pissed. sigh
WordPress.org has a neat function – you can make blog posts “private”, and switch them back and forth to “public” whenever you want. It is not a difficult action.
*snort* You can do this on FB, too
“Well, shave me down and call me a mole-rat!” (Ice Age, Sid)
This is a problem with the fact that everything is so easy to publish to a wide audience these days. People forget what “publish” means. It’s a great mode of communicating ideas, but it’s not so great as a substitute for personal connections and supportive relationships. The moment you hit “publish” or “post” or “share,” you are inviting the public in, and they are not all your friends. People who wrote for publication used to understand that, and knew that a thick skin was essential. When we collectively took away the barriers, we neglected to remind people that publishing has risks as well as benefits.
Case in point: “50 Shades of Crap”. Self-published when it never would have sludged onto an editor’s or publisher’s desk in the first place, like the slime that snails leave behind them.
I haven’t read it, but I hear it’s absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing started as a trashy Twilight fan fiction, which is also ridiculous, so how good can it possibly be?
Jenny Trout’s recaps of it are hilarious. The books themselves are beyond ridiculous.
Oh do I have a most wonderful gift for you. I couldn’t stop laughing. Especially when they read excerpts from the book.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=smD0_X3bQPE
ROFL. Thanks for the best laugh I’ve had all week!
You lucky lucky ladies. I take it that you haven’t read 50 Shades of Alice in Wonderland? Yeah, I thought so. When publishing houses were in desperate search of the new 50 Shades of Crap, I had to read Crap PLUS all kind of 50s in search of this new bestselling author. The bad part is, there were some pretty decent erotic novels. Too decent. Intelligent. Never would have sold.
50 Shades of Alice in Wonderland? People actually write that shit?
If you’re ever in a masochistic mood and really want to torment your brain, have a look on AAO3 (An Archive Of Our Own). There are some really great fanfiction writers on there, but there is also an incredible amount of awfulness.
AO3 is simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen to me re: fandoms. :p
“The price we pay for lack of censorship”
Sigh
It’s utterly ridiculous. I’m going to out myself here, but the author failed to do even basic research into the BDSM world. It could have been a good story, but it was so off base in what BDSM is really like, that even good writing couldn’t have saved it as it was.
I just read a few quotes. I think my IQ just dropped 20 points.
I read the first one because apparently I’m “approachable”, and people new to the BDSM world would show up at social events with all sorts of questions. I figured it would be good for me to actually know what was in it so I was better able to set the newbies straight on certain things.
or even read Dan Savage’s column. i’m vanilla enough for papal approval and even i know about safe words and the distinction between sadistic bastards and the more enjoyable (for other people) kind.
Safe words are just the beginning. First things you learn in that world are two phrases. The most important is “Safe, Sane, Consentual”. The entire 50 shades series pretty much ignores that Consentual part and mostly ignored the safe and sane parts. The other is “your kink is not my kink”. As long as it’s legal and among consenting adults, we don’t judge others. The other big thing about that series that bothers me is that at the end of the series they turn vanilla, as if kink is something to “recover” from.
oh, I’m sure it is just the beginning. Those are all things that’ve been in Savage’s columns over the years; i just couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. (Good thing i’m *not* writing any books)
I look at sex (between consenting adults, of course) is like ice cream. Most people like some kind or other, although a small percentage don’t, and some abstain even though they like it. Some of us love the basics best and others like more complicated kinds. Some just want one type all the time and others enjoy sampling all sorts depending on their mood. And while it’s polite to sample a new flavor, it is also okay to say no thank you and for the person offering to accept that.
Its shitty-ass BSDM is only matched by its shitty-ass writing. I have no idea how anyone can read it and get horny. That level of crap fanfic dries my vagina out like a box of desiccant. :p
I knew it! References to Mr C a dead giveaway. Hugs x
lol. Well, I call him MrC just because it’s fewer letters than any other way to refer to a life partner (we’re not actually legally married for reasons having nothing to do with anything of this nature…plan on it somewhere around 2020 or so). But I’ve come awful close to flat out admitting it in a few other comments.
Awww well congratulations in anticipation x
I found it very difficult to keep my mouth shut when people were going on and on about that godawful book. “It’s not really like that in real life”
“Ok Deb …..so enlighten us”
“Ummmm no”
Yeah, try that when it’s one of your teenagers asking.
My adult daughter kept recommending it to me! To this day I think she believes it was my moral high ground preventing me from reading it. 🙂
I’ve always been as honest as possible with my boys and their friends (if I know the parents won’t object). While they aren’t supposed to go o to our bedroom, we all know that kids often do things they shouldn’t and at least one of my kids have seen part of our toy closet. There were questions. When the movie came out there were lots of questions and I answered them as clinically as I could without going into my own sex life. I have boys. I do t want then thinking that Christian Grey’s behavior was in any way acceptable, should they choose to participate in kink when they get to be adults. I want their female friends to know that they don’t have to put up with a bully in the name of kink. I feel that the best way to keep kids safe is to arm them with accurate information, so as awkward as it is, I answer their questions.
Yes definitely. The waters are a little murky for me as my ex husband – the children’s father – was very abusive. My older kids have all left home now and have families of their own so that communication/education ship has sailed but my youngest daughter who still lives at home is very well educated and informed and could probably teach me a thing or two! I also have a transgender son – bilateral mastectomy 3 years ago and regular testosterone injections for life – who is very self aware and we have such a special relationship with no secrets. I guess with 8 kids I have a little bit of everything going on!
Can I just say that you are one of the most amazing people I’ve ever “met” online?
Awww that’s very kind of you to say! From some of the posts of yours I would say that you are not so bad yourself – with all the difficulties and challenges you’ve faced.
My mantra is always “just do the next thing” and that’s how I get by. Pretty simple when you boil it down lol
Now this amazing person had better do the next thing and get her ass out of bed!
Have a wonderful day xx
Whether or not her post is a result of shock, denial or genuine callousness isn’t the point. If a woman can be so enamored of vaginal birth as a goal in itself that this is how she reacts to the trauma of it having killed her child, the folks who promote a “natural” birth as not only a way to have a baby, but the best way, have some serious soul-searching to do.
This right here. Very well-said, @Squillo:disqus
I just can’t get past the fact that she was so enamored of a home birth that she either didn’t consult an OB when she passed 40 weeks, or she consulted one and then ignored her/his advice. I’m not a doctor, so I could be wrong, but it seems like any decent OB would have tried very hard to convince her not to go to 42 weeks, and then to not attempt a home birth at 42 weeks. I’m wondering if she got all her pre-natal care from a “woo” provider.
I’m still bemused. It’s all me, me, me in her posts. Almost nothing about the death of her baby. NOTHING about her husband’s reaction, her mother’s or the other (less important ’cause c/section) child. Are the other family members even speaking to her? Did anyone say “the baby wouldn’t have died if you hadn’t insisted?”
Of course, I’m sure *she* won’t post anything they might have said, except maybe looking for sympathy from the group (“sob, my husband/mother/sister/xxxx is being SO MEAN to me because they aren’t rejoicing in the fact I was able to push this dead baby from my vagina, they keep harping on the baby’s death”) and all the group will be all “there, there. They are so mean to you but we know what’s important.”
In my world, you want a live baby and mother as the outcome. I guess on Htrae, you only need a vaginal birth. Who cares about the baby?
“Me me, me me me me me me…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpcUxwpOQ_A
I feel sorry for this woman in the same way that I feel sorry for Trump supporters who make minimum wage: Yes, in both cases, they have reason to be upset and it is true that life has not played fair with them. However, they’re both acting vastly against their own best interests and hurting others in the process so it’s hard to have nothing but unalloyed sympathy for them.
Not about this case in particular, but I just thought about reasons why so many expectant moms get sucked into the woo. Here it goes: when people approach previously unfamiliar topic, they tend to believe first information they get and it’s hard to change this belief afterwards. Most women find out about their pregnancy after missing a period, so it’s 3-4 weeks along the way. Most HCPs won’t see pregnant women before 7-9 weeks, some even before 12 weeks. What do these newly pregnant, excited women do? Start googling, and off to the Babycentre (or other similar sites) they go to share excitement with fellow moms and ask for advice. You have an idea what “advice” they get, and part of them head to first appointment already with and inclination to natural birth cult. Not all HCPs can counter it (many don’t have enough time, some even don’t notice) and websites with good, evidence based advice (like Mayo Clinic) are not as attractive as “mommy forums”.
What to do? Maybe HCPs who arrange appointments for pregnant women could promptly send an e-mail with basic facts about pregnancy, suggestions for books and reliable websites, and carefully worded caution about believing people in internet in what regards to your personal medical decisions.
Good points. I wish every expectant mom did like my best friend, who started considering parenthood later in life (age 38) and was very anxious that everything worked well. So even before getting pregnant, she went to her PCP and explained that she was trying to have a baby, had stopped taking her pill, etc., and did they have advice for her? She went home with some folate, some sound nutritional & lifestyle advice and the address of a good OB/GYN.
Not that it inured her totally against internet woo and friends woo, but that was a start. Also, the doc was adamant that at her age, childbirth out of hospital wasn’t an option. Everything went well in the end, baby was born pink and healthy and mom didn’t suffer any complications. But she went in knocking l knowing that if anything happened, the medical team would have her back.
I think I’ve been “lucky” in as far as you can be lucky when you have endometriosis and a family history of infertility and pregnancy loss on both sides of the family that I got in to an OB when I first got married even though we weren’t in a giant hurry to get pregnant. Just know there’s a ticking clock and if things work out after my husband graduates this spring we may be able to start trying in the fall.
Knowing that there’s been a lot of complicated births and pregnancies we want to be in a relatively stable financial and insurance situation in case of hospitalization, long recovery, extra doctor’s appointments and all the fun stuff. None of it may end up happening but why risk it?
So I’ve had a good relationship with my OB who wants to know as soon as my husband and I start trying and get me in ASAP for just about anything.
Unfortunately not every woman gets that kind of relationship with their OB. I luck that live in an area where big families and therefore multiple pregnancies in quick succession are common so we have a lot of OBGYNs that stay in the area. Last I checked we’re a city of around 30,000 and I can rattle off five OBs plus one CNM all within about a five mile radius from my house. And i know that’s not every OB in the city plus there’s probably at least another probably dozen within the greater 50 mile area just in case you don’t like the ones in town.
The place I grew up which had a population of around 8,000 had like one OB who was only there a few days a week. I think he also served with only one other to the city to the North. Next closest ones were two hours of driving away in a larger metropolitan area. So there’s definitely advantages to where you live.
Good luck. Shall i send you imaginary pregnancy vibes? (3 women jokingly blamed me for their pregnancies last time) 😉
I will take all.the good vibes in the universe!
Given your track history though maybe yours will be the deciding factor. Fingers crossed?
Sure, but i should warn you, #3 actually held the newborn and got pregnant something like the next night ;p
Yeah, I was shocked when I called to schedule and appointment with an OB and was told they wouldn’t even see me until I was 12 weeks along. I felt really at a loss because I didn’t know anything about being pregnant.
That seems unusual, in the UK women have a booking appointment with a midwife or doctor (GP) that goes through medical and obstetric history, does booking blood tests, puts a care plan in place, figures out EDD and puts the woman on the system for her 12 week ultrasound scan. Booking usually takes place around 9 weeks but can be earlier depending on when women refer themselves for maternity care/see their doctor to confirm the pregnancy. Booking also provides women with lifestyle advice and can refer to specific services (smoking cessation, social services, teenage mother services). To wait til 12 weeks seems a bit mean, especially for first time mums, or for women who sadly miscarry early…not much support in place 🙁
My ideal time to see a patient for an initial OB visit is right around 10 weeks. That’s the point when I can usually listen to fetal heart tones with a Doppler. However the first ultrasound for dates is good to get between 6-12, and we tend to get women in much closer to 6 weeks so they can have that reassurance of seeing heart activity. Being an American private practice has the perk of allowing you to make exceptions to guidelines at your discretion. (I still want nationalized health care.)
The ‘heartbeat’ appointment is usually 16 weeks here, after the first uss because (from what midwives said to me) it’s almost impossible to hear the fetal heart before then, interesting to hear you say you listen in much earlier! 🙂
one advantage of IVF and FET, i suppose, at least at the Clinic. They want to do a confirmation TVUS asap. Not that the heartbeat does anything for me personally.
On a related note, my moderate conservative husband became strongly against mandating these for women who want an abortion after witnessing our son’s confirmation ultrasound. Even before he knew that heartbeats don’t register with me emotionally.
I had an ultrasound (regular, not transvaginal) at my first OB appointment at 6 weeks. The pictures are interesting. A little jelly bean blob with a teeny tiny four-chambered heart fluttering.
I did hate the water I had to drink while waiting for the ultrasound because I was in the throes of morning sickness. Gah, Fun times.
True enough
I’ve had those – were first you have to drink god knows how much water (why not at least juice?), and then get the ultrasound, then pee it all out, then get the different ultrasound. Water makes me puke at the best of times, and I’m NOT pregnant!
I assumed they meant “drink whatever you fancy, so long as you aren’t drinking more caffeine or alcohol than we’d recommend but water is of course the ‘best’ beverage.” I consistently drank decaf tea before every one that needed me to have a full bladder. :->
If I ever need a transvaginal ultrasound again, I’ll ask if we can use apple juice instead.
I did not have to drink anything for my transvaginal ultrasounds only the other ones.
It probably would have been “drink whatever you fancy”, but as I had been spotting and there was apparently some blood up around my cervix and my “advanced age* (I was 34 at the time) got me sent right down to the ultrasound folks and they were going to work me in. All they had was a water cooler and teeny, tiny cups to drink from. I set up by the water cooler with my tiny cup and drank and drank and drank.
I lived on Sonic lemon slushes, phenergan and Sea Bands for the first 14 weeks or so of my pregnancy.
Jamaican Fiery ginger beer, lemonade and Zofran for 20 weeks here…
The signs here just say “ladies, please ensure your bladder is full before your scan!”
I drank Sprite from the hospital vending machines, because water would have come straight back up.
oh, that ginger beer had the opposite affect on me…
When I was pregnant with my daughter I had some horrible cramps and bleeding very early on.
Thus lots of transvaginal scans.
My HCG was rising, but due to my super retroverted uterus and my daughter’s decision to implant at the fundus, nobody could see anything despite HCG levels indicating that they should be able to. It was all pointing to an (ectopic) pregnancy of unknown location, which was stressful.
Then, at the very last appointment, at six weeks, when we were told that if no intrauterine FH was seen they’d be recommending Methotrexate to end the pregnancy, the lovely obstetric registrar said “before I put you through another vaginal scan, let me just try an abdominal one. You’re thin, it’s nearly a week later, we might get lucky”.
And there she was, hanging out happily in my uterus, heart beating away.
If you say you are unsure of your dates, they will bring you in ASAP for a dating ultrasound, because it’s more accurate the earlier it’s done. I have very irregular/spotty periods, and even had some spotting during early pregnancy, so I wasn’t sure I could figure out when my last period was, let alone my due date. 🙂 It’s a TV ultrasound, which isn’t pleasant, but you get to see the heartbeat very early and you get a very accurate due date.
Other thing about not seeing pregnant women before 12 weeks is that the risk to lose pregnancy is very high in that period, and women who start bleeding have no idea what to do (or not do). In my country’s forums there are loads of women who ask for progesteron pills (prescription drug but you can get some from women who don’t need them anymore) and take them without consulting with doctor (though usually we can get appointment in a reasonable timeframe, but if you start bleeding a week before appointment it doesn’t help). Many emigrants from UK complain that they can’t see midwife or OB earlier than 12 weeks and nobody cares to save their pregnancies. I don’t know, probably it’s wise to not go above and beyond to save non-viable pregnancy if it happens first time (as opposed to already identified issues and approved treatment plan) but women are rightfully upset.
Even if the pregnancy couldn’t be saved, the miscarriage also needs a doctor’s attention. In my country, D&C is routinely done after a miscarriage, or when the fetus is dead but not yet expelled (“missed abortion”).
Yes to this. I joined baby center when I was pregnant with my first thinking that it would be fun to connect with other Moms. It was not fun. I was completely unprepared for the level of crazy I found there. I also had literally no idea homebirth was a thing outside of the Amish. I deleted my account after a few weeks and then I found this blog and was like “I’m home!”
Me too…there was a subgroup on there for non-crunchy moms and I was like “YES PLEASE,” and someone there posted a link from this blog. I haven’t been back to BBC since.
I was on What To Expect.
Obviously, I got into a lot of trouble with the moderators because I was not hesitant to state my mind (see my “no drama” comment above), but in the end, the reason I left was that it was just friggin boring.
You couldn’t actually talk or discuss anything, because someone would get all pissy about being mean.
So in the end, the conversations ended up being content free. It was all just crap like, “I’m having a boy!!!!” followed by a bunch of “congrats.”
Or “What high chair did you get?” with no criticizing other brands allowed.
I likened it to a thread about your favorite pizza toppings.
“I like pepperoni.”
“I am more of a sausage person”
“Ham and pineapple here”
Someone please stop the misery!
It was the most boring group I’ve ever seen, because no one could say anything that was in any way controversial, and if they did, no one could say anything about it.
So in my last post, I told them exactly that: you are the most boring people I’ve ever encountered. Have a real discussion about real topics, and not just your favorite color. No one cares.
And then I left and never went back.
I blame BabyCenter for a lot of the guilt-inducing attitudes about motherhood that I ended up with. If I’d known it was crazy-woo from the beginning, it would’ve been easier to ignore, but it seemed so mainstream.
I didn’t join babycenter, but I did join the bump forums after my first miscarriage, and another forum while dealing with infertility. The woo was very heavy, and it was hard not to get sucked in. The saddest thing is the woo in infertility circles…there are some awful snake oil salesmen that prey on their desperation. It’s hard not to fall for it, too. You’re so desperate for a positive test that you’ll do almost anything, even if it seems illogical. You figure, “it can’t hurt to try, right?”
there’s a lot of woo in my due-date groups on ravelry, too. i’m a bit of an outsider
I’m struggling sometimes when I see someone asking for advice in the board’s I’m frequenting – majority of answers will be woo-peddling and if I’m going to point out that scientific evidence says differently, it’s going to be an endless argument. I feel that I should at least say something and let OP decide what she’ll believe but often it feels so hopeless that I even don’t engage.
“NO DRAMA……Waaaaaaaaaa. I get to say whatever I want and you can’t disagree with me because it’s MEEEEEEEEEEN.”
I had a bit of that when I mentioned amber necklaces weren’t a great idea and posted the SBM article. She thought he was being snarky…I actually thought the author was minimizing the snark.
Oh gosh, I was so annoyed by my due-date group on Ravelry that I barely participated.
My first’s isn’t too bad most of the time, mostly because they talk a lot about other stuff. And there aren’t any serious anti-vaxxers among the regulars. That and our babies are 2 now. Hoping to influence #2’s a bit, since i joined before many women knew they were expecting in June.
I had to quit reading the pregnancy loss support group on Ravelry in part because of the woo by some of the posters. And you can’t say anything about it because then you’re not “supportive” enough.
I dont know this mama, nor anything about the professional side of being an OB but what i do see is your heartless cuntery! You are disgusting and pathetic to use this mothers tragedy for your douchebaggery blog post! Having lost my father a few weeks ago, I’ve seen first hand how everyone around me copes with death and EVERY SINGLE PERSON handles it differently. Whether they use humor or silence as a defense mechanism, they all hurt the same! It’s obvious she is trying to bring positivity and encouragement to those feeling discouraged… enough so that she is putting her feelings last! You’re a disgrace and far from professional. This is a very unfortunate event but I hope this, far from sympathetic blog post brings you all of the bad karma you deserve!
-Jackie
Well, aren’t you just the perinatal turd that got accidentally kept when the baby was accidentally slung out in the waste?!
You’re actually supporting someone who bet the life of her baby AND LOST … who has then gone on to fucking crow about how great she was at sticking to some fucked-up ideological objection to what would have been a hospital birth in which the child would have been born alive.
You really are a shitty person.
What is truly repulsive are people like you Jackie who will
ignore that this perfect, healthy baby died a preventable death
will spend many, many words to say how writing about the preventable death of this baby is wrong, ugly, disgusting
and will in all of the words you spend to voice your feelings about this blog
only briefly brush off on the baby
but will with typical utmost “cuntery” that we have seen so many times before
only manage to call this preventable death of this perfectly healthy baby
an “unfortunate event”.
A “hiccup” as Ruth Rodley put it.
So um yeah fuck you Jackie and everyone like you.
Are you for real?
Here is a mother who put her child’s life at risk – she decided to have a VBAC at home, going 2 weeks overdue with a big baby.
And for what? So that she could have the kind of birth she wanted, her personal self-assuring birth adventure.
It killed her baby.
In every other situation this kind of medical neglect leading to the death of a child would be seen as outragous, her “LOL” reaction afterwards as callous. But you defend it because you see it as someone trying to bring “positivity and encouragement”?
She killed her child for that!
Do you really see it as positive that she wants to encourage others to do the same? So that more children will die?
A “very unfortunate event” indeed…
I think it’s a bit more than a very unfortunate event, you know. I have my reservations about the way Dr Amy has written this particular piece, but let’s call it what it is.
1. Karma is not your personal hitman and you are misrepresenting a fundamental belief of 4 religions when you use it as such
2. Count the times this lady said “I” or “me”in her posts. She was doing anything but “putting her own feelings last.”
3. This baby’s death was most likely ENTIRELY PREVENTABLE and what she is advocating will lead to the death of more babies
Jackie, I have lost sleep over the horrors visited upon this infant struggling to be born and his mother, laboring in EXCRUCIATING pain. She now needs to justify her tragic event as a triumph lest she loses all her friends/support network. We here would welcome her with an open mind, and not reject her. How many of us here suffered in births gone from bliss to crisis? We who recognize that the slick marketing of Homebirth, natural birth, Lactation EXPLOIT women rather than empower them. THis blog serves as a living lesson , an ever evolving forum for women to be debriefed and set free from the brainwashing ‘You go Mamma” misinformation masquerading as evidence based practicies.
Absolutely. However, her “Look how great I did!” attitude would not be so welcome.
Look, I came here years ago to preach the gospel of natural childbirth, vbac, attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding, the family bed, holistic medicine etc…I thought I could teach you all a thing or two about birthing, parenting, breastfeeding the “right way”. I was scoffed, laughed at, made to feel foolish but there was enough folks here with room in their hearts to give me the benefit of the doubt and with science on their side, I evolved and peeled back the layers of patchouli scented unicorn magical thinking I had been numbing my ability to think rationally under. You all forgave my stupidity and lambasted me for not taking responsibility for some of the harm i had caused. I invite all who have been suckered in by the Homebirth/Midwife/lactatists hustlers to come here and come clean.
Exactly. We did not “welcome” your scented unicorn thinking. We lambasted it. We scoffed at it, we laughed at it, we made you feel foolish.
That unicorn stuff is unwelcome. Regret for your mistakes? Always welcome, and let us help you in any way we can. You’ve lost a child? How awful. Again, let us help anyway we can. Yeah me, at least I had a vbacs? Sorry, no.
It is unlikely that she would make that rationalization here. That is because such a rationalization is not a requirement to be a member of this community, like it is for her to remain a member of the UBAC/HBAC cult of trust-birthers. If/when she’s ready to disavow that community, this one will still be here.
If she said “Look how great I did!” and her baby died, there would be cricket chirps here.
You are seriously more upset about the tone here than you are about the callous disregard for a child’s life displayed by everyone on that UBAC site? I’ve seen nothing here on SOB but grief over a death that didn’t have to happen. No names were used in this post, we don’t know who this woman is (at least I don’t, and I’m not going to try to find out because why would I?), it was posted here because *maybe* someone who is planning a home/unassisted birth against medical advice will see it and rethink their decision.
And it’s posted here so that baby Isaac will be remembered. Because I’m sure he’ll be swept right under the rug by that UBAC page that cheered his mother on.
I’m sorry for you loss
But If you father had died because someone else had decided to drive drunk and this post was blaming the person who killed your father, would you feel that way about this post?
This is about the baby. A baby died a preventable death and those responsible for it need to be held accountable.
His mother made a bunch of stupid choices that resulted in the death of her child. It wasn’t a very unfortunate event, it was totally preventable. It needs to be brought to light so that other mothers don’t make the same mistake and kill their baby.
“It’s obvious she is trying to bring positivity and encouragement to
those feeling discouraged… enough so that she is putting her feelings
last! ”
It is extremely telling that this woman’s community would produce accounts of disastrous births where the fact that the baby exited the mother’s body vaginally counts as a “silver lining” that could encourage or bring positivity to anyone. No. Most of the readers here are protesting the idea that the vaginal birth of a dead baby is a silver lining. No, not ever.
So, she caused the death of her baby by making a selfish and dangerous choice and wants to encourage others to do the same? How is that a good thing? It actually makes it seem worse.
So she’s the one that caused her baby’sdeath and then glibly posted about how wonderful her “natural” birth. It’s not an unfortunate event. She should nver have put her baby’s life at risk. She’s the heartless cunt. Everyone on this thread deserves bad karma??? Really Jackie, don’t talk shit!
Well you’ve certainly changed my mind with your cogent, respectful and thoughtful contribution.
Not.
I don’t know if this woman is a bad person, or if this is part of a grief reaction. But you know who I’m angry at? Those women who presented themselves as experts, gave her bad advice, and cheered her on to her babies death. Those women who will not learn one damn thing from this. Those women have blood on their hands.
And they don’t care one little bit. They are Devoted to some Occult Birth Arcana, which I believe Require Human Blood Sacrifice. How else can Rationality hope to get understanding of this so we can move forward & develop methods to end this Bloodthirsty Abomination with it’s Insatiable Perverse Hunger for Baby Humans?
This is frankly Absurd. This mother is either: 1. Fully Indoctrinated & Brainwashed. 2. Addicted to some mind altering Substance. 3. having a severe Mental Health Issue. or, 4. Some combination of the previous 3.
#1.
Probably 4
Combination of 1 and 3.
1 & 3
-Attempting a home VBAC
-Waiting until two weeks post-term .
These are very dangerous choices that led to the worst outcome imaginable.I hope that every pregnant woman with a history of c- section’who reads this mothers post can see it as a warning and not as an encouragement.VBAC in general can be risky and attempting it at home is just a catastrophe ready to happen.
Although this was chilling to me too, this woman is literally days past her son’s death. Who knows what kind of defense mechanisms she might be employing to get through this. We needn’t judge her at this stage, in my opinion; if it was a complication of the home birth which was complicit in his death, her path forward will be even that much more difficult, and I imagine a hefty dose of denial would be a pretty normal response for a lot of people.
Well said.
Although a horrific outcome and unimaginable response, her successful VBAC may be her only silver lining at this point in the middle of an utter nightmare.
That begs the question of what is actually silver about the lining of a VBAC?
Even worse, the straw man of “a VBAC is possible”?
I really wouldn’t call her VBAC successful.
What is her definition of a “successful VBAC”? Sounds like it’s simply “baby came out my vag and I didn’t die… too bad about the dead baby.” Which sounds like something only a sociopath would say.
Sorry, but going “my son died but I got my VBAC, LOL” is not a defense mechanism. It is a sign of narcissism. I have zero sympathy for her and I can bet you good money that her story will not change weeks, months and years from now, unless she gets out of the woo. This is not the first case where some selfish woman kills her baby and feels no remorse. I have seen these homebirth Facebook pages, these mothers who murdered their babies talk about how successful their homebirths were, never mentioning that a live baby did not result, and that thought continues long after the murder.
The fact that she posted this encouraging other women to still do UBACs and VBACs at home is disgusting. She not only doesn’t give a shit about her baby, but no one else’s. I am hoping though, that at least one mom read her tripe and thought “this is insanity” and left the group and any ideas of homebirth, UBAC or VBACs in the future because she prefers a live baby over an experience.
It reads as denial to me, and that is indeed a defense mechanism.
Plus, “LOL” does not mean she’s literally laughing out loud. I don’t know this mother’s age, but the way LOL is used by younger generations is complex and nuanced. It can also be unthinking. I would not read a lot of meaning out of her use of it here.
It means she a dumb cunt who forwent the best possible treatment at a hospital equipped to deal with these things for some fucked up vanity and a round of applause from some pseudoscience dumbfucks. She may have practiced a homebirth like it was fucking 1916, but this is 2016 and there is no room in society, science or medicine for imbeciles playing god with their kids.
We don’t use “cunt” as an insult in this group. It’s one of the ways we try to be more civilized than the NCB ideologues that parachute in to call us cunts.
In her case, it really would be an insult to cunts, given they are useful. But, if in doubt, call them as you see them, and her actions were the epitome of an uncivilised person.
Sounds to me like the sort of ideology that prioritises the mode of birth over the life of the baby being born.
I’ve a number of very feminist female friends who would themselves call this woman a ‘cunt’ for her behaviour.
No, it does not mean that at all and your gendered insult is not welcome here.
So do you think she deserves sympathy for basically killing her child by refusing to get PROPER medical help? Actually, calling her a cunt is an insult to cunts. She, whatever she is, does not deserve respect for being so fucking lassez faire about the death of a child she was giving birth to. All because she chose a method which was complete pseudoscience bullshit.
Your reading comprehension is very poor. I think any woman who lost a baby they loved deserves sympathy, but I never said I supported her bad decisions. In this thread I am maintaining that her use of “lol” is highly unlikely to be a significant indicator of her attitude toward her baby. It’s a word people use to mark irony or something that is said without full seriousness. It is used liberally in some idiolects, often almost reflexively. She is not actually sitting at home laughing out loud that her baby is dead. You’re making her into a monster when the real monster are the NCB cult leaders who led her to believe her choices were wise.
Bullshit. In this case, the stupid bint decided to forego medical help and treatment for a “fad” and outdated procedure (homebirth) because she wanted to play god with a child that never had the opportunity to be born and survive. Her attitude in the missive she wrote proves she is a callous bitch and deserves no fucking sympathy whatsoever. Her posting LOL on the missive and bragging to other shitty people on her friend list about it proves what an uncaring callous bitch she is. If she were stupid enough to follow NCB (whatever the fuck that is) then the more fool her. Seriously, before questioning my reading comprehension, maybe you should question her rationale in refusing to get PROPER fucking medical help instead of worrying about semantics. And maybe the best thing she could do for any future pregancies would be to get her fucking tubes tied.
While I understand that what she did is repulsive to those of us who know how dangerous homebirth is, cursing her out like that is not going to change the mind of anyone who wanders over here looking for the other side of the coin. If anything, it will be even more off-putting and they’re less likely to listen to what we have to say.
It’s okay to disagree with her choices, but we do try to keep it respectful and I’m sorry but your language will rub people the wrong way.
Also NCB = Natural Child Birth movement. It promises women empowerment which is why seemingly intelligent people seem to fall for it. Because who doesn’t want to feel empowered?
Blame the ones who sucked her into the woo. Blame the ones who encouraged her to embark on this dangerous path. Blame the ones who convinced her that her previous c-section was a ‘failure’ on the part of her body and thus made her strive to prove otherwise through this dangerous stunt.
And yes, she should shoulder some blame too for falling for it, for going through with it. But once the shock wears off, she’s going to realize that she was complicit in the death of her baby and that’s a burden she’s going to have to carry the rest of her life.
Sorry, but pseudoscience, woo and so called natural bullshit does not deserve respect and nor will I give it. Pure and simple, this pariah should be ridiculed for the fucking demented bellend she is and the callous attitude shown to a now dead child that SHE MURDERED. I hope she does carry that fucking burden for the rest of her life, but given her LOL on the subject, I’ll bet my balls she doesn’t.
If reckless endangerment can be proven (it can) then any death to which it leads can be tried in court as a murder, since the person whose act it was clearly disregarded the likely consequences of the act and went ahead and committed whatever act it was.
Technically – yes, she’s a murderer.
And those woo-fuckers are all accomplices – as accessories before, during or after the fact.
Oh, trust me – we blame those pieces of fuck-clump as well.
I don’t think you’re in the right place, quite frankly. Your utter derision of a woman in pain is sick.
My sympathy lies with people who deserve it. Frankly, this woman killed her child by not going to hospital, and pretending she could play obstetrician in a wading pool in her loungeroom. Her decision, her fuck up. And it cost the life of her kid. Yeah, getting her tubes tied, or a fucking hysterectomy would save the lives of any future kids she’d be thinking of spawning, due to the fact they wouldn’t have to put up with a selfish bitch like her.
I thought she eventually ha to have surgery that will mean she can’t have any more kids?
If that is true, then it makes it academic about her attempting this stunt again. She may have been led by the nose into the woo pit, but she went willingly and showed complete disregard for her child. She also claims her husband and the child’s grandmother were there – if they sat by and did nothing to get her to hospital, then they are equally as guilty of killing the kid as she is.
Fuck off, tone troll.
The woman killed her fucking child.
Why the fuck are you fucking defending her – and why anonymously?
Cowardly piece of shite.
It would be if she were in pain. She’s fucking NOT!
The woman, although wooed into the cult, did have the choice to seek medical attention. She ignored it, and killed her baby.
“You’re making her into a monster when the real monster are the NCB cult leaders who led her to believe her choices were wise.”
Fuck off!
She made herself the fucking monster, you fucking tone-troll. Mr. Craven is not adding anything to the facts of what she fucking did herself. Maybe it is YOUR reading comprehension that needs to be brought up to fucking speed.
I fucking HATE people who will use tone-troll tactics to try to defend a woman who prioritised a fucking vaginal birth over the life of the child due to be fucking born. Kindly explain: which bit of ‘woman who prioritised a fucking vaginal birth over the life of the child due to be fucking born’ is too fucking complicated for you to get your incredibly small fucking head round?!
When people ask me why I’m such a fucking misanthrope … I point them towards the comments of people like you.
Then they comiserate and sympathise.
I happen to be very proud of my cunt. My husband has a very high regard for it also.
*nods smilingly*
Have you ever called anybody a ‘dick’?
Dick, when refering to your privates, is pretty neutral. I don’t know any woman who refers to hers as a cunt.
Agreed, a fair few people seem to use “lol” as punctuation these days.
I don’t think it is listed in The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation as a legitimate example of a comma, period, semicolon or colon. Or a hyphen.
Just because it is commonly used does not make it correct.
It may not be correct grammar, but we’re not judging her writing ability here. A number of people here are judging her worth as a human being based on her use of “lol” in a post about how her son died. So whether the grammarians accept “LOL” as proper grammar (though it was recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary), how THIS mother used it is more important. If you understand it to mean she is literally laughing out loud at the death of her son, she is a horrible person. But it is *highly* unlikely that that is what her intent was.
Dictionary, maybe. As a word of sorts, not as a type of punctuation. But whatever her intent was, it reads as incredibly cavalier.
I don’t think anyone thought she was LOL at the death of her son but she definitely found some humor in her experience.
I did wonder if she was laughing. Then I figured she was a sociopath.
Exactly. The dictionary that would have it listed as a part of proper grammar is a load of shit. LOL is what it says – short for “laugh out loud”. And that is what this demented fool was doing. Laughing and seeking attention.
Thanks for stating the obvious.
You are most welcome.
I was wondering about that. It seems so flippant.
It WAS flippant.
I’ve had my times that I’ve been in shock, and I’ve never used ‘lol’ as a punctuation – even since the introduction of text messaging and the internet. But then – the things that shocked me… I took them more fucking seriously than the woman discussed in Dr. Amy’s article took the death that she caused to her kid by fucking and farting about trying to do something she’d been advised against fucking doing.
So, if you’re thinking that it seems flippant… you’re right: it is.
Usually, if I’m in that level of shock, typing “lol” in a text or other medium would not be on my list of priorities.
Friend of hers?
Not to me, it doesn’t.
Denial is where the person ignores a fact.
This woman knows that her child is dead but STILL crows on about how she stuck to the ideology. THAT is not, and never was or will be, denial.
Oh, but she’s ignoring all sorts of facts. She’s ignoring the fact that her body failed at the task of producing a live baby. (The particular part that failed was her brain, which, in proper working order and without conflicting programming, should have told her to seek help when she was in terrible pain for a prolonged period of time.) She’s ignoring the fact that it is overwhelmingly likely that she would have a live baby if she’d gone to the hospital when she was in labor. She’s ignoring the fact that her “friends” in the NCB encouraged her to make decisions that were fatal to her child and damaging to her. She’s ignoring the fact that she is the perfect demonstration of why home birth in general and UBAC in particular is dangerous.
But she’s not ignoring the fact that her baby is dead, which is the most salient point. Maybe I should have said that it’s a special type of ignorance: one based on refusing to believe certain facts. I’ll grant you that she’s in denial about the science and stuff; but she’s not in denial about the fact that her kid’s dead. That’s the denial to which I was referring. And my point was that her obvious callousness cannot be attributed to a defence mechanism of denial … it was a total disregard for the life that she basically caused (by her actions – or, more correctly – inaction) to end way too soon.
“(The particular part that failed was her brain, which, in proper working
order and without conflicting programming, should have told her to seek
help when she was in terrible pain for a prolonged period of time.)”
A particularly fucked-up form of organ failure, that is.
“”(The particular part that failed was her brain, which, in proper working
order and without conflicting programming, should have told her to seek
help when she was in terrible pain for a prolonged period of time.)”
A particularly fucked-up form of organ failure, that is.”
Darwinism = she should be dead. Or eaten by a lion. That’s what happens in nature when you do something stupid nd reckless like this.
I agree that judging the mother is callous, but I judge her words without judging her. Because they were posted to a group that encourages reckless home birthing, accounts like these need to be criticized – because otherwise they are used to justify future mothers’ risky homebirth choices. I have all the compassion in the world for a woman who was misled about the safety of home birth. I hope this one isn’t reading any of these comments right now. But we’ve got to put an end to the idea that what really mattered was her home water birth, not Isaac’s life.
I hope she IS reading these comments, because she needs to be taught a fucking good lesson in how to stop making the issue about HER and to realise there was a baby that she killed through her neglect. Misled – bullshit. She openly declared her intention to “achieve” a vbac at home and fuck the consequences. Check her FB page out for all the bullshit woo she gladly volunteered for.
https://www.facebook.com/yolandi.kriek
If she didn’t want to be judged, she shouldn’t have posted on the Internet about it. The Internet is not about keeping things private – never has been.
But she DID want to be judged. She wanted everyone to tell her how wonderful she did and how she inspired them to go for their vbac just like she did.
Judge her favorably : wonderful
Judge her negatively: where do you get off?
But if people judge her harshly, as they should, she cannot be permitted to whinge about it later.
She can whine about anything she wants. No one has to give a shit, either.
If only we could make the whining silent. Duct tape would work.
Yep. Poor wee baby.
Poor baby. I am so sorry for him.
The more I read about these situations, the more I’m beginning to believe that this needs to be approached more like a cult intervention than anything else. The leaders of the NCB cult have done a great job of reprogramming women who need to feel “in control” and “validated as women”. They teach women that they’re lesser beings if they need medical interventions (including formula), and that they are inherently better than other women if they can deliver naturally and breastfeed exclusively. They are so indoctrinated that the death or injury of the baby, which would have horrified those same women before the cult programming, is considered as just an unfortunate complication.
I think we’ve now seen that simply presenting the science and pointing out how much safer birth is with doctors won’t work. I think that doctors and other support people need to start thinking like a cult-deprogramming center if we’re really going to make a difference.
I tend to think it’s very important to send a message to the partners of pregnant women that ‘support your partner’ does not mean ‘support your partner even if you think she’s doing something stupid and crazy’.
This is the best explanation anyone has come up with.
My bigger question is, what has become of women that they feel the need for this validation? How did this happen? We are more free; more liberated; more entitled than ever before. We can climb the corporate ladder, perform brain surgery, and achieve next to anything we wish – particularly many of these women, for whom socioeconomic barriers to opportunity do not really exist. Should we not be more preoccupied with all of these other things?
Why are we regressing as a group?
My understanding/opinion has always been that emotionally and psychologically weak people are drawn to cults. They’re easily manipulated and perhaps even dim witted. They lack confidence. They’re seeking to fill a void. Certainly that can’t be true, exclusively, of this population. So, again, why are women regressing their behavior like this?
Is it the epitome of privilege and boredom? Everything worth while has already been accomplished? Grrr.
Those are all really good questions and I don’t have an answer. I am, however, coming to believe more and more that it *is* happening and we *do* need to find those answers.
It’s fascinating and scary as hell!
Can’t we just go back to superficially judging by how pretty we are, how much money is in our bank accounts, where our zip code lies, and how many diplomas hang on our wall?
When did biological processes like birth and boob leakage (ascribed status) start trumping achieved status?!
For real. Having gotten a Masters before I could legally drink (by four days) and being CFO at a pretty decently sized company before my 30th birthday means nothing, because I formula fed my child. I shit you not. I talk about my personal achievements when introducing myself to a Mommy group, and immediately get asked to add what is “really” important – how I gave birth, how I fed, etc. Sorry I dare to have a life outside of my spawn.
Thank god my current Mommy group likes to ditch our kids once a month and go drinking. We just did the drinking and painting thing last weekend and it looks like something someone in LSD would have done, it’s glorious.
Damn, I want a mommy group like that.
Having gotten a Masters before I could legally drink (by four days) and
being CFO at a pretty decently sized company before my 30th birthday
means nothing,
Well, I’m impressed.
Me, too!
Bet you vaccinated too.
You MONSTER!
How *dare* you have activities and desires outside of your spawn! Don’t you know that all the best mommies are NEVER separated from their children, breastfeed till college, homeschool (so they can breastfeed till college) and attachment parent because THEY KNOW BEST!!!!
Anyway – I’m impressed, too. I got my MS long after I could drink. And the fact that you like math enough to be a CFO – my hat is off to you! If I still had young children, I’d want to join your mommy group, too!
I cheated – I had no social life in either high school or college. I had a boyfriend for about three months between high school and college and didn’t have another until I graduated Grad school. I went to school and worked, that’s all. And if it hadn’t been for my now-husband being very determined to take me on a date after we’d been work friends for awhile, I’d still be single and spawnless. For a guy whose usually pretty easy-going, he can be stubborn as a mule when he wants something. We’re going on seven years in May.
I went to one of those painting with wine things and I told my friends that next time, I’m coming for the wine but not painting. Save the paint for someone with a modicum of talent. 🙂
I started trying to paint with the wine, if that tells you anything. I don’t remember this, but the friend who holds her wine best told me all about it.
This requires photographic evidence!
Have you ever been to the Tate Modern in London? They literally think a pile of human excrement is an art exhibit. My husband almost tripped over a paint can in the middle of one hallway. He figured someone had left it there and gone for a tea break.
It was an exhibit.
Post code lottery is a real thing in the UK. 🙁
It’s a real thing here in Finland as well. And the chances of being the winner are even lower.
🙁
Personally I think part of why we (as a whole) are more open to this sort of crap in regards to childbirth is for the same reason we are more open to this crap wrt anti vax – our lives have gotten so safe that we now fear the very things that made us so safe in the first place. Why do some women fall so deep into the woo that even close friends and family, and HCPs that were (formerly, before the indoctrination) trusted can’t get through? That’s harder to explain. Since the most ardent NCB and anti vax enthusiasts tend to be white, middle to upper class women, with at least some education, it seems to be a matter of privilege. They know, at least at some level, that should the shit hit the fan, they can seek emergency care and hopefully they and/or their children will be saved (never mind how ironic it is that medicine is not to be trusted, unless it’s an emergency… smh… Never understood that logic), whereas those who have no choice but to give birth “naturally” and leave their children unvaccinated would give anything to have access to the interventions and medicines these privileged women seek to avoid for no other reason than mommy-cred from their crunchy peers- the women who don’t have access to OBs and NICUs and epidurals and efm also quite often don’t have access to adequate resources in an emergency.
Much like with the anti vax crowd, attempts at educating them only does so much. And sometimes attempting to give them real info seems to backfire – they already feel inadequate, proving to them that their fears of inadequacy are correct can often make them double down. Back to the echo chambers they go, to have their superiority and “mommy wisdom” affirmed. Why they value their egos more than their kids I don’t quite understand, but psychology isn’t my field. Someone in the mental health field really ought to study this… It strikes me that there must be mental health issues at play.
My grandmother “freebirthed” her eldest during a bombing raid. She has described it as many things but empowering was not one of them. Interesting how she could birth whilst at risk of being blown into little bits whilst a friend of mine was told by a midwife that her labour stalled because she clearly wasn’t comfortable in hospital and should have stayed at home and avoided her section.
Blame any and all birth complications on the mother. Fucking predators, all of them.
Yeah, I mean women have given birth in concentration camps, on slave ships, during sieges, chained down in prisons. I should imagine the chance of mother and baby safely emerging from the process is a lot lower than it would be under ordinary circumstances, but it’s happened and it’s happened a lot. I don’t want to speak for the women forced to give birth in those situations, but I think it’s a safe bet they weren’t feeling very comfortable at the prospect.
There is a thing in sociology about “us vs them”, or maybe it’s psychology – sorry, my coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. People need to sort themselves into tribes, groups that they feel will protect them and their spawn. Sometimes they do this unconsciously – like trusting that the science of vaccination will ultimately be good for their spawn’s survival. It’s a cult mentality. Again, really sorry I’m not making much sense here!
for me…it was that 3×5 index card posted next to the scale at my ob/gyn’s office with the name and phone number of a c/section awareness support group. I called and their smooth marketing disguised as friendship pulled me in.
I wonder if it’s around being overwhelmed by choice, wanting to belong to something bigger than ourselves, and the good old internet making that possible in a way it never has been before?
Many high achievers get to somewhere just above the ground floor by running on rails-go to school, go to university, do this travel, join those clubs, meet these people. Then they get up a few levels and the book isn’t written, they don’t know what to do next. There’s choice everywhere, as you point out-and for some, I’d suggest particularly bright, high achievers, that’s new and intimidating. What if I take the wrong path? How will I know what’s best?
At work, there will be networking groups, mentors and so on. For the rest? If you’re lucky, there are good friends, family, peers who are positive influences. If not, in comes someone with confidence-reaching out and speaking to you about food, exercise, childbirth, whatever it is. Join us, we will make you quicker, smarter, thinner, more of a woman than you have ever been, and certainly more than you can manage on your own. We will love and accept you (the ‘while you follow us to the letter’ is unspoken). Once you get this thing right, the rest of your world will fall into place.
It’s always been out there, the internet supercharges it because you don’t need physical proximity and you can be whoever you want on the internet.
I think you hit on a lot of truths here. Yes, as humans I believe we all desire inclusion in something greater than ourselves. Some seek that even more than others, I think there has even been speculation that there could be a genetic predisposition to “faith”. It’s powerful, and it gives people all kinds of positive feedback.
TBH, I’ve noticed this over the years because I’ve always been slightly jealous of people who have a lot of faith, whether it is a religious faith or other kind of certainty. I have never felt it myself, and sometimes I think maybe life would be simpler if I could feel that kind of unalloyed, absolutely confident faith in something.
try some empathy instead of judgment and you just might understand other people and their motivations.
I find it impossible to get into the head of a person who ignores all advice, and insists everything went fabulously well if we just disregard the dead body (his name was Isaac) in the corner.
Empathy is a powerful emotion-but I can’t empathise with wanton negligence and indifference.
You said you can’t, but only presented reasons why you wouldn’t want to in the first place. I am 100% certain that as a human being you’ve ignored good advice before. I’m sure you’ve been blind to the consequences of your actions before. We all have.
Of course-but I’ve yet to kill anyone. And if I did, it wouldn’t be because I’d taken a losing gamble with their life.
Empathy? For what? People who flat out refuse to listen to actual scientific evidence, then end up killing or maiming their child because of that? I have lots of empathy…for the child. Not someone who has flat out chosen to ignore rational thought to the extreme where a dead child is fine as long as they got their VBAC.
I find this thread really puzzling. Do you want to understand why this happens, or not? It’s easy to empathize with people that you already feel inclined towards, but you don’t learn a whole lot. It is hard, but insightful, to try to understand people that are very different from you.
We differ in our assessment of why this happened. That doesn’t mean that we don’t understand and you do.
For the most part, I don’t have a problem with people believing differently than I do, or that someone can read the same information/data and come to a completely opposite conclusion than I do. For example, some people view a 75-85% success rate for a vaccine as a positive (yay! it reduces my chance of contracting X disease by 80% and if I do catch it, it will most likely be a milder case) while others view it as a negative (Why would you want to risk a 15-25% failure rate for X when you probably won’t catch it anyway). I can follow that line of thinking, even if I fall into the Yay! category.
Or that because you have some beliefs in common, you somehow subscribe to the entire party line, hook, line and sinker. I am Catholic; I converted because the Catholic religion satisfied something in my soul that I wasn’t getting from the other denominations. I don’t agree with some of the Catholic dogma, I never have. I have one child, didn’t breastfeed and have an IUD firmly installed, but I identify as Catholic.
As for blind spots, yeah, everybody has them. However, I tend to listen to DH, my mom, by best friend when they tell me I’m not being rational or my blind spot has been activated. I may not like it or agree with what they are saying, but I will at least acknowledge that I’m reacting emotionally and consider a less blinkered opinion.
What I have a hell of a hard time even trying to understand is the eschewing of medical help/attendance at a birth (I’m having a HBAC/UBAC!!!! Shouldn’t that be “I’m having a BABY!! But it is process over outcome…) only to lose sight of their goal and call the EMT’s when something goes wrong. Why are the doctors/EMT’s summoned at all? They make a point of ignoring medical advice, hell it seems to be a point of pride that they stopped going to OB appointments or that they have hired a wonderful, friendly CPM who totally *gets* them and won’t make them do a GBS test or test for GD.
Sometimes, things go amazingly wrong in hurry, and “5 minutes from the hospital” becomes at least an hour and the medical folks at the ER have to cope at high speed with a train wreck in which there is precious little information provided. And then, the people who have to clean up the mess are also ripped to shreds because “OMG!! They cut the cord without asking me. I could have killed that guy” or “I didn’t get skin-to-skin because they took the baby to the NICU for cooling therapy because of oxygen deprivation” or for not catering to the mother’s every whim because they are trying to salvage a bad situation.
So no, I don’t think empathy is my strongest suit, perhaps it is my own blind spot. But I recognize it as such.
Empathy for elitist, self-centered, priviliged, bored-ass women with too much time to Google? Naww. I’m not donating money to the “Save the Rich Fund” any faster than I will *ever* empathize with first world indignant ignorance. There are starving people, abused puppies and other shit worthy of my empathy, thanks.
No, empathy for the women who are victims of deadly natural childbirth at all costs ideology. Empathy for the women who are victims of online birth predators like Meg Heket. Empathy for the moms who ended up so brainwashed that they believed they were saving their babies from a fate worse than death (a hospital birth or a CS).
There are two victims in this birth story worth our empathy , and plenty of guilty instigators, ideologues and enablers to blame other than the mother.
Sounds like the way my mom likes to rationalize my brother’s heroin addiction. Like it just came up and got him out of nowhere. It was those pesky peers he had in high school, the drug dealers who take his money and encourage him to buy more, the prison system who doesn’t want to “get him the help he needs”…
Nope. He sticks a needle in his arm every day due to a series of dumb-ass decisions that he chose. Period.
This woman killed her baby due to a series of completely voluntary, dumb-ass decisions. Period.
I think you made a great point – I agree that this mom had as much voluntary control and *choice* in what she did as a heroin addict has over what they do.
Then you aren’t going to learn anything about why this happens and how to stop it. If that isn’t your goal then quit pretending like you care about stopping another tragedy. If your answer is “these people are just inherently worse than I am as people” then don’t bother asking the question “why are they doing something I don’t understand?” You’ve done nothing to help anyone with that attitude. You’ve only aimed to make yourself feel superior.
But you seem enlightened, so share. What are their motivations, in your opinion? Shit, you probably capitalize on said motivations. So, tell me – how do you make your money?
Ugh stop it please. The person you’re attacking actually donates time and effort to stop those who make their profit by lying about how dangerous OOH birth truly is:
https://safermidwiferyutah.wordpress.com/about/
I write critically about homebirth despite the threat of lawsuits from the local community for doing so. I make no money and actually endanger my financial well being in order to expose problems with home birth. My opinion is that you can’t take a phenomenon like home birth and accurately say “everyone is doing it because of motivation x”. Anyone who tries to tell you that they have every single home birth parent pegged is a liar. There are people who genuinely believe its the best thing for their babies and themselves. There are people who are afraid of physicians, either for good reasons or bad ones. There are sociopaths and narcissists. There are people that believe in it as a part of a larger religious belief.
Empathy for what, exactly? Empathy for hubris?? Empathy for valuing over outcome?
And as for judgement? Maybe we *shouldn’t* judge her, but we can state that she is making incredibly risky choices and that we don’t agree with those choices. But crowing about your dubious, ill-thought out “achievement” and expecting praise for it while minimizing the fact that the baby died, that, that right there will draw ire, incredulity, sharp sarcasm and disapproval. Which it has.
So what exactly are we missing?
Empathy for human beings. For people that do things differently than you would. If you say “I want to understand why people do x” then you have to extend some rudimentary form of empathy to actually learn anything. It’s clear that your offended because you think you should be able to understand other people without having to actually relate to them at all, and although it would be nice to be able to understand other people while looking down upon them as fundamentally different (and lesser) than yourself it doesn’t really work that way. The reality is that there isn’t a line between you and them, the people who are getting suckered in by homebirth simply have a different blindspot than whatever you happen to have. It doesn’t make you a better person than they are, just a luckier one because your own blindness hasn’t resulted in such a tragedy of such gravity. I guarantee that you, like everyone else, are completely wrong about something that is important to you. Be glad it wasn’t this.
Because women are now able to do all these things, it follows that women feel they must have a vocation and not merely be dependents of their fathers and husbands, which is how women were seen in the past. While not all natural or home birthers are SAHMs, it does seem to be a bigger deal amongst women who see motherhood as their vocation or their “job”. It then follows that many women will conclude that in order to perform well in their job, they must bring special effort and personal creativity to work. Motherhood has immensely confusing and complex “KPAs” and part of the attraction of NCB, EB and AP is that they consist for the most part of an easily determinable checklist of tasks to perform, or actions to avoid – eat kale, use a birthing pool, skin to skin, no epidural, no c-section, no formula, no CIO, etc etc.
I follow a lot of different types of woo, and this is pretty much consensus. It is very much like a religion, in that it’s practices (in whatever woo discipline with which you are dealing) are articles of faith, and your strength of faith is what determines your value in the group. This goes for Anti-Vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, cancer-cure woosters, “clean eating” orthorexics, whatever woo you care to name.
It is not true that cults attract the “emotionally and psychologically weak”, nor do they attract stupid people. It’s been suggested that being intelligent is actually likely to make you more susceptible to woo, BECAUSE you feel you’re immune due to your intelligence. It’s Dunning-Kruger at work.
Bingo.
I was to a talk this afternoon, nominally about what it takes to get people (including women) to be scientists. It was noted that the sociology literature is clear on this. What it comes down to is that you have to make it someone’s identity – it is who they are. When something is your identity, it means that you will deal with hardships and you won’t let them stop you.
I thought of this post, and this mom. She took her UBAC and made it her identity – this is who she is: she is someone who can give birth vaginally, damnit, and she set herself to it.
The baby died? Just a hardship that she is not going to let detract her from her identity. See? HER BODY IS NOT BROKEN! She can give birth vaginally.
I think you have a point there. To be good at *anything* you have to define yourself as that thing. My middle son is a figure skater first and foremost. He does other things, but those things support the skating. He dances ballet to improve his artistry. He plays football because it helps with strength. His entire identity is built around skating.
I think though, that women have been getting fed a line that to be a “good woman” they have to do things a certain way, those women who fall for that need to have that “natural” birth in order to feel like they’re good women, even if it means that the baby dies, because hey, that’s natural too.
No doubt, in order to have something become your identity, it often happens because others facilitate it. That is (was) kind of the point of the talk I went to – in order to get people (girls) to be scientists, we have to help them make it their identity, because if it isn’t, they won’t stick through the tough times.
The other connection I made was with veterinarians. I tell people that, one thing I learned when my wife was in vet school, is that veterinarians are not normal. They have something that I call the “it” factor that sets them apart. It’s not just that they love animals, it goes beyond that. I could see it very clearly in my wife and her friends. I now realize what it is – it is their identity.
One of her classmates breeds snakes. Another fosters cats from the humane society in her apartment – like 40 at a time. My wife spent years doing wildlife rehabilitation. These aren’t merely animal lovers. It is way beyond that.
And that’s why they got in vet school. They showed in the interviews that animals were their identity.
Or they are off the scale brilliant. Oddly, those are the ones who end up in pathology.
I feel compelled to point out that other people have to see it as your identity too because there’s nothing more devastating than to say “I’m a scientist!” and have people say “Girls don’t do that.”
For sure.
Actually, this was mentioned in the talk yesterday. There are two types of hardships that need to be overcome. One is that things get hard, because science is hard. You can’t quit when it gets hard. Everyone faces them.
And then there are those obstacles that others put up to get in your way. Not everyone has to face these.
Without a doubt, we need to find ways to eliminate those obstacles that others put in the way.
You still need to make it their identity because of the first type of obstacle, but for sure we need to eliminate the others. That’s not right.
There actually are a vast number of experiences that are much, much “more devastating” than that. But I hear you that it matters that others accept your self-identification.
Guess they never heard of Sophie Germaine or Marie Curie. That’s depressing.
My husband and I watched a program last night – a series about Henry VIII, hosted by David Starkey (Sorry for the digression, I love history documentaries!!!!).
Naturally, it included extensive information about his wives, and Henry’s quest to sire a male heir. Poor bastards didnae know back then, it was HIS sperm that clinched the deal, so instead he blamed the women in his life. Catherine of Aragon – his first wife, had something on the order of SEVEN miscarriages/stillbirths. She bore him one living child, Mary, who would grow up to be “Bloody” Mary Tudor. We don’t know why Catherine had so many baby deaths, but all the same, I felt so bad for her.
I’m glad that with the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s second child, a girl named Charlotte, the British Royal family has FINALLY made it OK for a girl to inherit the throne. Enough of this nonsense.
Actually they passed that rule before Prince George’s birth…if he had been a girl, he would be next in line for the throne regardless of whether there were any brothers born after. As it should be. 🙂
And about bloody time, too. Yeesh.
I’m fascinated by the life and wives of Henry VIII…if I remember right, his second wife Anne had many miscarriages as well, her daughter Elizabeth being her only surviving child. It was bloody terrifying to be a woman back then.
Yep. Anne had only one surviving child…who went on to kick some ass.
And Jane Seymour, the one Henry VIII regarded as his one true wife, probably because she was the only one (execpt a mistress Bessie Blount) who gave him a son, died of puerperal fever.
many of the remaining European monarchies are doing this now, aren’t they?
Catherine had a son (Henry) before Mary. He only lived a few weeks, but long enough to not count as a stillbirth.
Do we know why he died?
Wikipedia currently states an “intestinal complaint”. i gather he looked hale enough at first, but there were so many things to carry off anyone in those days, nevermind a 6 week old in February.
I don’t know. It was my identify for a long time. Then a combination of bad advising and my inability to understand calculus put an end to my science dreams. I am now the other kind of doctor.
If the choice is between my body being broken and my baby being dead, I’m going to choose the broken body every time.
They Tap Primal Symbologies & absolutely Exploit them to their own Ends through the delicate sciences of Behavioral Subversion. Certain Terrorist groups run in a very similar fashion. To WIt my dear Blessed Mothers: **A Presence, manifesting Powerful Sprituality, is Invoked under Arcane & maybe Occult Stricture, with the end being to Tap into these Primal Motivations with high efficfiency & strong ability to Subvert Rationalities near-instantly. {btw see “Brain Washing’ for more conceptual Info on this subject}. Mom is under Pressure, truly Jovian pressures when Brrth is afoot. She wants to Be A Mother, nothing More & certainly nothing Less. Her Inadequacies are generated & Exacerbated by the Coven’s Adept Witches who insinuate an Illusion of Ancient Powers by going to “Natural Birth”, in which there is no real Authentic Human Control possible nor desired. In NCB The Sacred Feminine Reigns, & if Mother & the Doulas & Midwives make the proper Occult Supplications to this Mommy Force she surely will be Blessed. If she does not Comply, The Goddess often Withdraws her Blessing. Secrets must always be Kept, Sacrosanct. The penalty for Violating this is surely Accursed & often Brings Death. Any hint of Masculine will cause Disfavor of the Sacred Birth Presences. Of Course it’s a Fucking Cult & an extremely Bloody one.
So, serious question then: Do cult deprogramming centers WORK? Because if so, we should be using their techniques on anti-vaxers as well.
Depends on the deprogrammer. Coming out of cultthink is an incredibly vulnerable time.
As a cult survivor, I agree wholeheartedly.
For those who are focused on the doctor who (she says) told her it wasn’t the ubac that killed the baby….I have been on the receiving end of emergency home birth transports for almost 20 years, so I’ve had more than my share of dead babies to deliver. Here’s what it’s like: You get an emergency patient, often with little or no notice. Mom may not trust doctors and may not be willing to talk to you, or she may be so ill (shock, infection, blood loss) that she can’t give you a coherent story. If there’s a midwife with her she may have forgotten the records (funny how that happens!) and what she tells you is almost certainly going to be incomplete, if not outright full of lies. If you do have the records they are going to be pretty close to useless, because (God help me!) the stuff that’s been charted is more focused on mom’s social-psychological issues than on the actual course of the pregnancy, and often the midwife has encouraged her to skip every test that might elucidate the pathology involved.
So you’re flying by what you can see with your own eyes right then. It’s not as if anyone comes in and says: I refused timely delivery because I was out to prove my body wasn’t a lemon. Or: I’m in this facebook group and I’ve been educated that HBAC is safe. In fact, it’s usually weeks before I have all the bloodwork and autopsy to address cause of death. And the cause is indeed never ‘homebirth’ or ‘UBAC’. In the absence of anomalies incompatible with life, the cause is asphyxia (from shoulder dystocia, from cord compression, from placental insuffiency) or infection or trauma.
Usually we talk about cause of death at a post-partum visit (if the cultists let mom come back for a post-partum visit). I’m honest but not judgemental. I have never had a mother ask me if her baby would have survived in a hospital—by that time they have generally figured it out.
This is a good reminder. The doctor who spoke to her might not have realized her goal was UBAC and might have thought this woman had a precipitous labor and a homebirth.
Exactly. The typical receiving physician has NO idea what’s going on on these VBAC/UBAC boards, and certainly wouldn’t have known about the way she was cheered on as she went so far post-dates.
Same here. I’m never ever going to tell a family member that their child suffered or was crying for their mother before they died. We recently had a HORRIFIC case of child abuse in which the parent freely admitted what was done. Think suffocation by “rebirthing”, but worse. The parent didn’t understand that these actions were wrong. I wanted to scream at this pitiful excuse of a human. But I couldn’t. Just calmly got the information and helped save the child’s life.
If a child is critically ill, dying, or dead, I am never going to tell a family that their actions contributed to the situation. Even if they did, it serves nothing at that moment. I may be thinking, “Yep, your baby died because you drive drunk and didn’t use a car seat. You killed your child. It’s YOUR FAULT!” But I say, “I’m so sorry. We did everything we could but Junior died. I’m so sorry.”
I am so glad that there are people like you to do your job. I am not sure I could – instead of saying something measured to the parents, I’d be sobbing in a heap in the corner. As a parent, I thank you for being there for the kids who need help.
I’d be smacking the shit out of the abusive/neglectful parents, and then weeping for the poor child as I sat in the back seat of a cop car after being arrested for assault. So it’s good that I didn’t go into medicine.
Ethically, what if the parents are criminally responsible and the situation warrants calling police, social workers, etc?
Then we call. I call CPS all the time. Police, too (SOP for any sexual assault). We don’t have 24/7 social work in our ED, but they are utilized regularly when they are in house. But the medical team is there for the medical part. But if someone admits something, we just make sure to document it.
Full disclosure: I could care less if you smoked pot or drank booze under 21. If I called the police or CPS for every crime (smoking in a car with minors, teens smoking pot, consensual teen sex before age of consent, whatever), I’d never get any care done. But if you admit to beating your child or diddling your 6 year old cousin, I will call. I’m a mandated reporter and required to by law.
“I’m mandated reporter and required to by law.”
Let’s hope all doctors are like you.
I can relate to the desire to have an all natural no interventions birth after a c/sec. I too joined ICAN and soaked up their propaganda. I also was talked into believing that I was of less value to humanity if I did not birth naturally. I was talked into and encouraged to take risks, to lie to my doctor, to keep my plan a secret from my husband all in the name of having that empowering natural birth. I now know that I was extremely lucky. I had a vbac, albeit in a hospital ( for which my ICAN pals snubbed me). I also had a cadre of support from my same aged sister-in-laws who were woo-free and measured their self worth in currency other than their vaginas.
I’m glad you’re no longer “under the influence”. I think being told to lie to my co-parent would be a red flag.
I very briefly considered another pregnancy and a “healing” vaginal birth (in a hospital) after my twins were born. Part of it was living in a very crunchy area, and part of it was the fact that my C-Section sucked: my husband wasn’t there, and I barely remembered my babies’ births. I’d been so looking forward to holding them and getting lots of pictures, especially of my daughter, who was facing open-heart surgery (my father died shortly after cardiac surgery). I was so zonked out I had to wait 12 hours to hold them. Breastfeeding didn’t work out. Blue Cross kept running tv ads of a woman giving birth vaginally, with her partner there. I felt robbed.
Counselling helped, as did the passage of time and the realization that a second pregnancy was not in the cards for me. I also discovered how close I had come to dying: post-partum pre-eclampsia is relatively rare, but it’s the deadliest type because it’s easy to overlook. Medical intervention is the reason my daughter is alive. The birth experience is such a tiny part of parenthood. It’s not a baby’s job to fix their mother’s emotional problems.
“It’s not a baby’s job to fix their mother’s emotional problems.”
most definitely yes. Dad would talk far too much to me about his emotional baggage, especially after his psychiatrist told him he didn’t need his (the doc’s) services anymore. He crossed an important line between talking to me like a parent of an adult child and talking to a best friend. His girlfriend would tell him off whenever she heard him do it, but i guess the habit was hard to break.
one of my biggest worries is that we’ll somehow infect our kid(s) with their parents’ mental problems.
I’m my mother’s marriage guidance counsellor and I have been since a very young age. This is why I’m trying very hard to hide my crazy from my son.
I third that. My mom told me EVERYTHING…I hope to avoid repeating that with my kids!
It’s a hard temptation ot resist with adult kids, particularly when you are close to them. But the boundaries are important for all sorts of reasons-their mental health, their relationship with others you might be talking about, your relationship with them (because they may not always see things your way).
I’m seeing it in some of the relationships between kids friends and their parents, and it isn’t good for either party.
Another reason why i cringe at my parent/child is my best friend comments. Why??
I admit to having issues with this with my adult daughter- she is EXACTLY like me in so many ways and really is one of my few friends. I have to step back and think before I speak a lot.
I am so glad to find out that I am not the only one. I make a very concerted effort to be very careful what I say to my kids about finances or their father. They do not need to know everything. My mom still complains to me about my dad. They are still married too.
I’m in the same boat. I have both parents sniping about each other to me behind the other’s back. They are also still married and probably shouldn’t be.
But of course I can’t say that. So I just nod my head and make some inane reply because really they’re just venting.
And no matter how many times I tell them I don’t want to hear it, I wind up hearing it.
I went through this as a child, too – my parents argued a lot, mom was crying and throwing fits in my presence and I had to calm and reassure her. Really fucked me up and made me think that I have to be perfect to make my parents love each other and not to argue. Fortunately, I got a year of therapy (after having anxiety attacks and constant headache in my early 20s) and it sorted many things out.
Yeah as a kid I was terrified of my mother because she always yelled. I walked on eggshells all throughout my teenage years and in high school I worked SO hard to gain her approval, only to realize when I was 15 that no matter how well I did, NOTHING was EVER going to be good enough.
The result of that is I’m now a perfectionist who has trouble being emotionally or physically selfish and has guilt trips and panic attacks whenever I do something solely for myself.
My dad was a balancing influence who tried to shield me/stand up for me as much as possible but always wound up weathering the backlash.
For that reason I am more willing to give my father the time of day and not my mother. Especially now that she has fallen back into old patterns and is basically saying she’ll babysit my daughter, but only really when it’s convenient for her. Which is annoying because if I want them to take my daughter for a weekend, I basically have to ask my father first (who always says yes because he adores her and loves having her around) and then he and I kind of have to work around her, which can turn into a logistical nightmare.
My worst nightmare is turning into her.
Erin and Nomofear, maybe we should start a support group!
In my case, unfortunately, there usually wasn’t a girlfriend in the picture.
Between being expected to be his sounding board/best friend (he didn’t really have any friends), take care of the household, cook for the family and raise my 3 younger brothers (bottles, diapers, baths, bedtimes, getting ready for school – all of it), I was basically his stand-in wife. Add in the mental, physical and sexual abuse and yeah…to say it screwed up my head is an understatement.
That’s definitely worse.
The girlfriend stepping in only happened in the last few years since he retired and went back home, and only if she could overhear him talking to me.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to “one-up” you or anything; I hope it didn’t come across that way.
No, you didn’t come across that way. My own clunky way to try to be sympathetic while admitting my situation was fairly middle of the road.
It’s not a baby’s job to fix their mother’s emotional problems.
I’m just posting to highlight and celebrate and emphasize that sentence as much as possible. THAT IS THE CRUX OF IT! That’s the truth that too many women don’t understand.
You and me both! I read that email list a few times a day, and it was nothing but “just have a home birth,” “you can’t trust anyone in mainstream medicine,” “just show up in active labor and act like a jerk,” etc.
What pushed me over the edge was how they treated the woman who’d had a rupture. Her very presence threatened their existence, so they lashed out. And the ringleaders had already figured out how to monetize their devotion to woo.
I hate posts like this. I’m not trying to defend the poster or criticize Dr. Tuteur, but it seems so much like kicking a person when they’re down. I see a woman who has been through hell and is now clinging desperately to the one positive (in her mind) aspect of the experience.
A friend had a stillborn son in a hospital last July. She wrote a lot of posts about planning a memorial service and picking out a gravesite, then said the one thing keeping her sane was the knowledge that it was one of the few things she would be able to do as her son’s mother.
HBAC is possible, as long as you don’t care about the outcome. I wonder what will happen when the mother realizes that her decision to have an HBAC probably killed her son? Will she be able to forgive herself?
I see a lot of people who can’t stomach the fact that some people, as Dr. Tuteur wrote below, are just not nice people. It’s a lot easier believe her actions stem from PTSD/grief/shock/something, anything other than, “This is actually who I am.”
It’s my nature to assume the best in people, despite contrary evidence, especially people i have had only the briefest intro to.
It’s mine, too. I believe most people are mostly good most of the time. But some people aren’t, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.
Mine too.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them. The first time.” — Maya Angelou
But she hasn’t really, not for me. Maybe she’s as fully sociopathic as you and Dr. T seem to think. One facebook post is hard for me to get an impression of the person as either sociopath or just crazy with woo and grief. Probably not someone i want to hang out with, but then I don’t want to hang out with lots of perfectly nice people who just have a personality i have trouble with.
I fully admit to being a bit oblivious and pollyanna-ish.
I didn’t say that I think she’s a sociopath. I just think that attributing her behaviour to shock/denial/PTSD/meds/etc. is reaching, and a lot easier to do than to acknowledge that some people are genuinely malignant assholes.
Maybe. But the idea that someone who’s just lost a child couldn’t be acting out of any form of denial, shock or indeed anything other than what they’re normally like also seems rather reachy-ish from where I’m sitting.
Okay. I’ll save my sympathy for the Mom who turns her back in Sears and loses her child forever. Or the Mom down the street from me whose husband left their son alone for 5 minutes while he went to the bathroom and said son choked to death on a piece of popcorn. I’ve dealt with too many people who truly are as they seem, and I’m done trying to rationalize crappy behaviour.
This has nothing to do with your sympathy, though. If she’s in shock, she’s in shock regardless of whether you sympathise and regardless of whether you know more appropriate recipients of sympathy. Same if she isn’t.
Attributing her shitty behaviour to shock is a form of sympathy. It’s a way of showing pity. None of us know whether she’s in shock or not. I’m just throwing out that she might just be an asshole.
Some people are assholes, most people would be in shock at this. You may choose, of course, your preferred assumption.
I’m not making any assumptions. Her behaviour is repulsive. Whether it’s as a result of shock or something else, I have no idea. I also have no idea if “most people” would be in shock at this, since I’m not an expert on mental health.
I, on the other hand, AM an expert in mental health (and specifically trauma, as well). Licensed, credentialed and the whole nine. Trust me: they would be.
So your not just making assumptions, you’re offerings a diagnosis based on her Facebook post. I guess if all you have is a hammer…
What diagnosis have I offered? I said that her trauma is consistent with one which could cause PTSD. I said most people would be in shock.
You’ve said that “most people would be in shock”, without offering any evidence other than “trust me, I’m an expert.” What is “shock”, exactly?
It occurs to me as it did to a poster above — why are we to believe that her actions are a result of being “in shock” when none of the prior actions we are privy to are at all inconsistent with her current behaviour?
Sorry for typos, I’ve been typing on my phone in the dark.
Sorry about my possible dual posts. I can’t figure out this forum and how it updates. You may see me respond twice to the initial comment. As I said (not sure if it posted), a diagnosis similar to “shock” which is a colloquialism in the mental health field is acute stress disorder (and I am not diagnosing her with this). Shock according to the dictionary means “a sudden upsetting or surprising event or experience.” What I mean by it is that most people would experience this event as so upsetting that it causes them to have strong emotional responses which may very likely provoke irrational behavior. I guess I would have expected that to be clear from context.
How do you know how most people would experience this event? What is your evidence for your assertion?
Do you have any prior experience in dealing with NPD, HPD, or ASPD?
I am a licensed clinical social worker who has a private psychotherapy practice and about 5 years past work experience in a community mental health clinic where I dealt with copious amounts of trauma. My current specialty is DBT so I work with many disorders previously referred to as “Axis II.” NPD yes. HPD yes. ASPD….I do not believe I have ever had a client who has this diagnosis to my knowledge. That is, their symptoms would have been better explained by another diagnosis, and I am loathe to give out that sort of label without excluding other ones first. It’s very pathologizing.
Also, I know of 0 clinicians who would ethically dole out a diagnosis of ASPD given the evidence we have here. Or any diagnosis for that matter. For all we know, she has every diagnosis under the sun, but I see no evidence of anything other than ignorance and trauma reaction here. If she continues to write like she did above a year from now, or two years from now, definitely we revisit the issue. In my opinion.
Whoa. Who said anything about doling out a diagnosis? Not me. I just asked you a question.
A certain segment here always gives the loss mother a Limited Time Offer pass on her behaviour. Shock/PTSD/meds/etc. I find it quite awful. We don’t know this person — maybe she’s just a dick, is all I’m saying.
Just in case anyone’s forgotten, she killed her baby, then bragged about the how great the experience was for her on Facebook.
If you weren’t wondering about the eligibility of those diagnoses, why did you ask about them, though? I absolutely give her a limited time offer pass on her behavior. SHE JUST LOST HER CHILD. If we don’t give her a pass on that, what would qualify? The fact that it very likely may have been due to her own actions makes it worse for everyone. Maybe she is a dick, and if that’s the case, the truth will out. No reason to pass judgement so soon. Maybe she’s not, in which case we are well served by withholding that judgement. Obviously, you and I differ in this perspective.
You are passing judgment, though. You’re choosing to judge her behaviour as being a result of “shock” and “consistent with PTSD” because “most people would be.”
And sorry, I don’t give every mother responsible for the death of their child a Limited Time Offer pass. Not the ones who kill their baby then brag about how awesome it was on Facebook.
No, there you’re wrong. I’m not judging her as being in shock or experiencing PTSD. I’m withholding judgement because that’s a strong possibility given the trauma she has JUST gone through. You can try and try and try to frame it as me assuming that this possibility is the correct one, but you’re out there. I’m simply assuming it’s a possibility.
Not sure why this is so confusing to you. Perhaps I’m not expressing myself clearly, although reading my previous comments it certainly seems that I am, to me. Or perhaps we are just so incredibly different on our understanding of the nuanced nature of human beings and how they act. I don’t choose in this case to pass judgement on something I know very little about, no matter how sordid that little bit is; possibly this is because after years of professional experience I have seen that things are often more nuanced than they initially appear.
You choose not to withhold that judgement, which as I said is how we differ. You seem to believe that the explanation that you think likely is the only possible explanation, although you are given extremely minimal information.
With respect to the conversation and the discussion at hand, we seem to be going around in circles. If there’s anything NEW I can clarify, I am glad to do so, but otherwise I think I’ve said my piece.
You haven’t clarified anything at all, other than shock is apparently mental health colloquialism used by you and mental health professionals you know.
You responded initially by stating that “most people” would be in shock after such an event. Read your own words, again. You’re saying you’re withholding judgment? I don’t believe that’s what you’ve done at all. We’re both judging, let’s be honest here. You’re right in that we view this situation very differently.
“Unintentionally” ? “Likely contributed” ? Do you want to go around in circles on what constitutes intent? What about deliberate indifference?
Here’s the thing — I have no idea why this woman is behaving the way she is. All I know is that she’s bragged about what appears to have been paramount — having a vaginal birth — despite the fact that her decision to do so in the manner in which she did killed her baby. I think it’s possible that this woman is simply a narcissistic asshole, and I also think it’s infinitely more palatable to explain away her appalling behaviour by framing it in the light of “shock/PTSD” etc.
No, I do not want to go in circles, so we will agree to disagree. Be well.
“It occurs to me as it did to a poster above — why are we to believe that her actions are a result of being “in shock” when none of the prior actions we are privy to are at all inconsistent with her current behaviour?”
There is no possible realistic parallel previous in her pregnancy to her reaction to one’s child’s sudden death, surely?
I’m referring to her decision to UBAC in the first place.
Can you see the response I made to this post?? I have written it twice, I can’t find it.
Diagnosis? I haven’t made any diagnoses. I said most people would be in shock. The diagnosis most similar to that would be acute stress disorder, I suppose. But even if I said “most people would have acute stress disorder” (which I didn’t), I didn’t speculate that SHE does.
I think there would be an element of shock for anyone. Shock is part and parcel with a ‘sudden’ unexpected loss.
I’ve never lost a child (and I pray I never do) but about a month ago, my beloved cat Mischief was mauled by a dog that had gotten loose from its property and subsequently died. We’d adopted her from the shelter when she was 1, and we’d had her for 8 years.
When the vet came out of the back room to tell me that she was gone, there was shock. It was like being doused in icy-cold water, my knees gave out and my husband tells me that I let out a wail that was distinctly inhuman and set a couple of dogs in the waiting room to barking/howling.
There was no room for denial because there was her lifeless body in front of me, wrapped up in a tasteful cardboard box. But the shock remained.
I don’t really remember calling my mother. I don’t remember posting on Facebook to let my friends and distant family know. All I remember is bouts of intense crying and bouts of what would seem to outsiders as ruthless practicality, like giving away all our remaining pet food to a friend who also has a cat.
Was I callous for giving away the food? Possibly, but realistically I knew we didn’t have any need for it, so what was the point in having it around as a reminder?
So yes, unexpected grief hits us all in different ways. And we all react to it differently.
Maybe, just maybe this woman is operating in the bounds of shock.
What I think is MORE likely is that she is being reassured by the other cult members who are reinforcing the process over outcome, especially since the outcome was ‘bad’. And thus she is just parroting back what they are telling her in order to try and reassure herself that it wasn’t her fault, that it was inevitable etc etc etc. Because I think the reality of knowing that she killed her child would destroy her.
Even now, a month down the road from Mischief’s death, I keep thinking things like ‘If I’d gotten to the vets just that little bit sooner, would she have lived?’ or ‘What if I’d kept her inside that day?’
The what ifs are a killer.
It’s not either/or, is it?
What is the evidence that this is due to shock? This is what she was like before, too. That’s why she was doing a ubac and crowing on a vbac Web group
Afterwards she is boasting about it on the same Web group. What changed that you need to invoke shock to explain?
Having had a baby that died. That’s quite a big change.
That’s not evidence that she’s in shock. That’s an assumption on your part.
Yes, indeed it is, but no more or less so than the people who are asserting that she’s not in shock. We’re all assuming.
No. This is an assumption on your part. It’s perfectly possible to think someone was in shock and also show no sympathy whatsoever. Conversely, one could also not think someone was in shock but have all the sympathy in the world for them.
Once again, you need to not conflate the two: what any of us may think of her and what her mental state is are different things entirely. Or to put it another way, it’s not about you, or any of us. It’s about her.
Sarah, I’m not conflating anything. The fact is, there are people here who want to rationalize her shitty behaviour as “shock.” I’m saying, MAYBE her behaviour isn’t a result of shock. MAYBE she’s just a shitty fucking person.
You are though, and the problem is you’re saying a bit more than that. The fact remains that you have no idea whether people who think she’s in shock are sympathetic or not. That’s what you’re conflating, when you say that attributing her shitty behaviour to shock is a form of sympathy. If all you’d said was that maybe she’s behaving like this because she’s a terrible human being, that would be fine and there’d be no argument there.
Is there any reason to think this is not what she is normally like?
For pete’s sake, the whole reason she did an unattended birth in the first place was to thumb her nose at the doctors who told her it was too risky, which she interpreted as “it’s not physically possible.” Hey, even midwives thought it was a good idea, but those darn doctors…
Then after it’s over, she digs in and defends it even more strongly. How is that acting other than normal? It looks perfectly normal for her. She took this position before this happened, and she is going to fight to defend it to the end.
That’s not acting out as a result of this, that is holding a position in the face of reality.
Do we know the circumstances of her choosingba ubac?
Meg Heket and the rest of the online birth killers instructed her to stop going to her OB appointments. She took their advice.
“Is there any reason to think this is not what she is normally like?”
Yes. That people who have just experienced an event which qualifies as PTSD-provoking trauma often experience denial and shock.
“Then after it’s over, she digs in and defends it even more strongly. How is that acting other than normal? It looks perfectly normal for her. ”
That is acting normal for the average joe. For us to experience something traumatic due to factors we ourselves have created or enacted is incredibly difficult. It’s not at all uncommon to defend your actions in response, because losing a child is painful enough–being responsible for it must be nearly impossible to deal with. I think many people would want nothing more to psychically erase the fact that the choice was bad or wrong if at all possible.
“Normal joes” don’t do UBAC.
My point was not that she was a normal joe (maybe she is a normal joe who made an incredibly bad decision, maybe she is absolutely bananas). My point was that this reaction to a tragedy is incredibly common, even amongst typical people. I personally don’t understand the UBAC thing either and my own childbirth experience (as the mother, that is, not as the child) was pretty much the opposite of that–vaginal birth with an epidural, and all of the assistance I could gather around me.
Precisely: people can have a normal psychological response after having made an abnormal decision.
I’m not sure where we’ve got the idea that this is an either/or situation. It’s perfectly possible for someone to have various negative personality traits AND be experiencing shock, denial or any number of other things after losing a child.
But if this is her normal trait, why is there any reason to think it is a response due to shock?
Because I think most people would be pretty shocked in her situation. But if you think someone just lost a child they didn’t expect to lose and shock couldn’t possibly have anything to do with how they’re feeling, that’s your prerogative.
I’m going with my cult theory. I believe the leaders and only some of the women are actually sociopathic, but I also believe that most of the women are victims of a cult leader’s programming similar to Jim Jones and the leaders of the Branch Davidians.
My biggest quarrel with her is about the decisions she made before she went into labor. I’m appalled by her words, but I’m willing to concede she might not actually be as callous as she sounds about the death of her child. I cannot forgive her for allowing herself to go to 42 weeks and then attempting a HBAC. I’ve never been pregnant, and even I know that 42 weeks and HBAC are dangerous separately.
I didn’t know 42 weeks was dangerous until i started reading here regularly, several months after my kid was born. I could tell my ob was uncomfortable letting me go beyond 41 weeks but he was too circumspect to tell me specifically why. (Kid was born 40 1/2 weeks)
Home birth, though, that i always knew was more dangerous than at the hospital.
See, your friend’s reaction is a normal one. Memorial service, gravesite, these things are acknowledging and processing her loss. The desire to do something as his mother. OK, typing this is making me cry. Your friend is showing a healthy response to something heartbreaking and terrible.
This other woman – I don’t know her. I don’t know what kind of person she is. I don’t know how much her reaction was influenced by these UBAC folks she’s surrounded herself with. All we have are her words, and her words are, frankly, awful.
I think it would be wrong to let someone claim the likely directly resultant death of their baby was a ‘good/desirable birth’ without comment, especially when you have an environment like these Facebook groups, where anecdotes and laymen are the only things most mothers are being exposed to.
Grieving and traumatized (or not) call aside, it’s important to remind other mothers reading “you’ll almost certainly love having your child be alive more than you’ll love being at home, despite what you’re reading here”. Tone can be argued, but most people on this UBAC mom’s side were going to take offense with any tone…
And racked with guilt or not, calling out ‘lol’ is pretty darn reasonable to me
I’m guessing no one in her echo chamber called her out?
If I hadn’t seen the screenshots with my own eyes I could not have believed anyone would ever actually write such a thing. I am without words.
If they did, they would be banned from the group and their response deleted, guaranteed. That is how these psychopaths work.
“My body did EXACTLY what it needed to do to get the baby out.” I think she meant “to get the baby out *alive*.” Oh no, wait, that part doesn’t matter.
I like the way she avoids saying HE WAS BORN DEAD by saying she had “the most unfortunate outcome after that”.
These women have a really hard time saying DEAD.
He didn’t come Earthside. He’s still on Mars.
Someone on another forum pointed out that a broken fingernail is an unfortunate outcome. A dead baby is light years past an unfortunate outcome.
The RN in charge of my CNA classes just went to a conference that was talking about the vocabulary medical professionals use regarding death. The consensus at the conference she was at took an interesting stance. That we should use the words “dead” and “death” instead of euphamisms like “passed away” or “no longer with us” because it’s led to family misunderstanding about whether their family member is indeed deceased and to definitely avoid things like “went to heaven” as not everyone’s beliefs are the same and some may find it insulting.
Thoughts?
There are some people who think it’s possible that the first man to reach the top of Mt. Everest was George Mallory – it can’t be proven because he died on the mountain (along with his photographer). People have speculated that if they find the camera and there are photos taken from the summit, does that mean he gets the place in the history books now taken by Edmund Hillary? Mallory’s own son says “To me the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive. The job is only half done if you don’t get down again”.
I don’t know how anybody can consider a birth to be successful if the baby dies.
The statistics for Mt Everest deaths are actually broken down by those who died on the way up, and those who died after summiting.
Believe it or, it’s almost 50/50 on when you die. Basically, you are just as likely to die on the way up as on the way down.
George Mallory’s son also said that he’d have rather had a father at home than a hero dead on the mountain. I’d like to think that if Mallory knew he was going to die – even after reaching the top – he’d chose to live rather than die for the place of first man on top of the rockpile.
Yes, just as most women would rather have a baby in their arms than an “ideal” birth experience that ended with the baby in the morgue. Poor George Mallory. He sounds like a very sensible guy.
Sorry to be a nitpicky asshole but I’m pretty sure the first man on Mt. Everest was some unknown Sherpa.
That’s very unlikely. It’s possible some Sherpa in prehistory climbed to the top but without climbing gear, it would have been nearly impossible.
Fair enough.
I believe there was some controversy over whether Hillary of Tenzing Norgay was the first man to step on the summit. I’m pretty sure that the men themselves said they reached it together, but history remembers Hillary – there’s likely a good dollop of racism involved in that.
Hillary was one step ahead of Norgay according to Norgay himself. Norgay had his hand on Hillary’s shoulder as they reached the top. Certainly attitudes at the time were why Hillary got most of the press but Hillary himself was always known to give his partner equal credit. There is no photo of Hillary on the summit but there is one of Norgay taken by Hillary himself.
And don’t forget, Tenzing Norgay was probably the one who placed the ladders and the fixed ropes.
This is the best example I have seen of failure to “bond” that natural birth promoters and lactivists talk about. Maybe that is why some are so concerned about the postnatal “bonding” process: they personally don’t care about their children until they are skin-to-skin and breastfeeding. They love the sense of accomplishment that giving birth and lactating gives them- not the actual babies.
It scares me that this is likely true. It scares me that people can be so narcissistic that they are willing to wrap their entire egos up in the natural childbirth/attachment parenting/lactivism movements.
They’re in it for the ego strokes and back pats, and even a negative outcome will garner them some attention and sympathy for a while. Until they come to their senses. Until they realize that maybe, just MAYBE the negative outcome COULD have been avoided. Until they start asking questions that would lay the blame at the feet of those who SHOULD be shouldering it but believe themselves above it.
Until those communities turn on them, accusing them of poisoning the waters, of sowing doubt and mistrust and then basically telling them the one thing they’ve been trying so hard to deny: your baby’s death was ALL your fault.
What happens to all that narcissism and ego then? I’d like to think it acts like a cold shower and wakes them up to how stupid they’ve been, but from what I can tell it does the opposite. They double down on the woo, they try again.
And that is why the NCB movement is pure insanity.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Of course, if they DO get different results, like the baby being born okay, they don’t see it for what it really is; luck.
I think the mother’s thinking is disordered- either it’s narcissism/psychopathy or some kind of grief/postpartum mental illness/shock/etc. I just can’t see how else anybody could come out of an experience like that with a sense of accomplishment. It’s like she viewed the doctor’s recommendations as a personal insult, that she was incapable of having a natural birth, and she proved them wrong. Yes, her body CAN push a large baby out without any help. It’s all about her personal strength and innate bodily wisdom. I can’t think of another reason why she would write this besides some cognitive pathology- the extreme denial about how her actions likely killed her son and why the doctors recommended CS (live baby?), the fact that she boasts about it online, the warped priorities, etc. It’s just incomprehensible.
I guess it’s impossible to know if she will ever understand the gravity of what she has done. Maybe she truly believes (and has been confronted with no evidence to contradict) that her son would have died even if she had followed the doctor’s advice. I hope for the sake of her future children and any expectant mother she interacts with that she figures it out eventually.
It’s possible, though, that she actually is just more concerned about the birth than the baby because that’s how she is. Some narcissists feed on sympathy and the feeling of victimhood- a dead child might be a totally acceptable outcome. There are real, live people who act like the worst characters from fiction. I can’t say what is going on this particular woman, but there are women out there who truly don’t care about the wellbeing of their children.
“Some narcissists feed on sympathy and the feeling of victimhood- a dead child might be a totally acceptable outcome.”
This is very true.
I also often had an uneasy feeling reading stories of homebirths resulting in a handicap for the child, which almost seemed to be yet again another opportunity for the mother to be get admiration and compassion. Like Dr Tuteur said, some people are just not nice, and the pathological potential of narcissistic mother seems endless.
I do not get the “bonding” thing.
I did not touch my son until he was more than 24 hours old. I did not hold him until after 48+ hours. I did not breastfeed him until 6 weeks of life. We are perfectly bonded to one another. He calls me during the night when he needs something, he is more than happy to see me when I get home from work, he did throw a tantrum the first time the nurses put him inside his incubator after kangaroo care, etc, etc.
I did bond to him so well I was happy to risk my own life in order to give him as much chances of making it as possible. I am still happy to wake up a 4 am for a bottle and more than happy to spend a whole afternoon playing with him.
I do not get the “bonding” thing, I must be pretty silly. Either that or we are not bonded at all and I do not know it because I have not had a “proper” experience… Actually that sounds like something Brooke would say…
I don’t either. I volunteer with foster kids. These kids were abused physically, mentally, and sexually. They were ditched with anyone they could be ditched with so the parents could go get high or rob or whatever. Their parents sold them to their drug dealers to be raped and assaulted. Yet these children are still so bonded to their DNA donors that they will refuse to be allowed to be adopted, even after parental rights are forever terminated, just in case they can go “home” again. If those kids can bond with abusive assholes, non-traumatized children with living parents can bond perfectly fine as well without the lies of needing to breastfeed, do skin-to-skin, co-sleeping and attachment parenting.
“… at that point I’ve already accomplished what I set out to do.”
SMH. There are just no words. That poor, poor baby.
And here I thought what one “sets out to do” when in labor is to have a living child and a living mother (with both as healthy as possible). If anyone ever questions Dr. Amy’s repeated assertions that these “people” (and I use the term loosely) care more about process (vaginal birth) than outcome (living child) – the proof is right here in black and white – she “accomplished what she set out to do” – have an unassisted home VBAC. The child was an afterthought (at best); she doesn’t even seem particularly bothered that the kid is 6 feet under… I can’t even 🙁
The mother is from Africa – more specifically South Africa. (but lives in the US). I can’t understand how someone who comes from a continent where poverty and infant mortality are both rampant would choose to put her life and her newborn’s on the line in order to have a vaginal birth.
I am an American raised in a third world country and – I – know better. Childbirth is not safe…but hospitals make it safer.
You know, I got pretty steeped in the woo after my first child was born (with an OB, in a hospital, induced, epidural). I contemplated a HB with our second child. My husband is the one that really dissuaded me – he quietly pointed out how difficult it would be to live in the place that your baby died in, and that no matter how remote that possibility might seem, if it did happen, we would all be traumatized by having to continue to live there. Initially I brushed it off, but that seed was planted. I opted for an OB-CNM combo practice and delivered at the hospital. Now my six year old, who is currently home from school with a cold, is arguing with her three year old sister while the 7 month old is taking a nap. I gotta wonder how different things might be for our family if he hadn’t planted that seed of doubt in my mind. I think it’s time I thanked him for that…
How do people know where she is from/ what her other children are called?
Are they looking her up on Facebook?
I looked her up and several of her posts are public.
She may well be from the South African middle class. I doubt there’s much exposure or cross-cultural contact between the South Africans who live what we would consider normal lives, travel internationally, etc. and the ones who experience rampant poverty and infant mortality. Kind of like America in that respect, come to think of it.
True. My family is Upper Middle Class but while I didn’t grow up in poverty, I was still aware of the deaths caused by lack of proper medical care in Brazil. It is impossible to ignore.
Sigh. What will actually reach people who want an unassisted birth? What will actually prevent this from happening?
OT: If Spawn #2 hangs around for the next 4 weeks, we will be having her at a hospital with a nicu. I feel better about that. (They also brag about their free doulas and stuff, but that i don’t give a rat’s feathers about that.)
Holy crap! Have you hit a complication or has time just passed that quickly!!??
No, i’m just always aware that crap happens, sometimes unexpectedly. I had pre-e last time and I’m “old.” My daughter’s 25 weeks. We already know i’m not entirely rational. I feel better knowing i don’t need to be transported AND that my blind husband can find the hospital door without too much difficulty.
I live in a city with 3 really good hospitals that are easy for me to get to, and they (the insurance company that’s about to sell our policy) want me to go to the further away, suburban can’t-get-there-from-here, we’ll transport you 45 minutes away if there’s a bad enough problem hospital. jaysus, it’s not like I live out in the country.
OMG, that brought tears to my eyes. On and on about the perfect birth experience, and the baby died and was barely mentioned amid all the self-congratulatory stuff?. How can people act like this?
She’s either in a state of delirious shock right now, since he just died, or she’s a narcissist who at best only thinks she cares about her kids.
No. I was in a state of shock after my son was born. (He was alive but in the NICU.) I was in no conditioin to write Facebook posts, and if I had been, they would not have been littered with “lol”s.
I was in shock when my second was in the NICU too. I’m told I sent some ridiculous blase texts. Lol is not a word I use, but if I did it might have been in there.
The denial that I see is on the part of people trying to rationalize this woman’s callousness. The truth is that some people aren’t nice people. They may be mean; they may be narcissists; they might not love or care about their children. There are women who abuse their children, and, in my view, this is a form of child abuse.
Child abusers have lots of excuses for why they “needed” to whack their child around, or “discipline” them by beating them and even killing them. When they hurt their children, it isn’t an accident (although they sometimes claim that it is). It’s a deliberate attempt to address their own psychological issues.
This woman might ultimately accept responsibility for what she has done, or like many abusers, she may never accept responsibility. The issue for me is that she is surrounded by a group of women who encouraged her, cheered her on, and apparently learned nothing from this death. They promote a mindset that a woman’s WORTH and sense of self-worth is on the line with every birth.
Imagine if a group promoted drunk driving and then dismissed the deaths of others as meaningless so long as the drunk driver managed to get home alive. When a member killed someone in a drunk driving accident and the other members CONGRATULATED her, would you feel sorry for her or for them? I wouldn’t. I would be appalled.
And I’m similarly appalled by the senseless sacrifice of Isaac’s life on the altar of vaginal birth and by the fact that the people who cheered her on WILL DO IT AGAIN when the next woman comes to them for support and more babies will die.
“Imagine if a group promoted drunk driving and then dismissed the deaths of others as meaningless so long as the drunk driver
managed to get home alivehad a good journey.”I didn’t even make the connection of his name being Isaac in this case. How horribly fitting. At least Abraham was unhappy about having to sacrifice him – he’d never have gone home and blogged about how he’d pleased The Lord with his sacrifice.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I personally feel that anything written in the immediate aftermath of losing a child is eligible to be stricken from the record. You get a pass. Just my opinion. After she adjusts to what happens, if she continues to write the sort of thing she wrote here, I will be happy to pile on.
Dr. Amy, do you know anything about her pre-natal care? Did she see an OB or a woo provider? Would any OB be comfortable with going to 42 weeks and then attempting HBAC?
I guess if you look long enough, you might find someone. Even Dr. Oz is apparently a doctor.
But most OB would recommend induction way before 42 weeks. Most don’t support home birth. Many will only support TOL after a c-section under very strict circumstances (and probably never at home)
What is TOL?
“Trial of Labor”, basically trying to have a vaginal birth after a C-section instead of going straight to a second C-section.
Trial of labour.
“Bronson was natural with no pain meds. Mason was cesarean but only bc my doc was a douche and scared me bc he thought he may be “too big.” (He was almost a pound smaller than Bronson) so this one I want to go as natural as possible. I’ve done a lot of research on VBAC and even the midwives say I’m an excellent candidate. I prefer to do it at home tho, no more hospitals.”
She posted this on her FB page. Too bad that her baby is dead now. All I see is a lot of ME ME ME ME.
She wanted this one “to go as natural as possible”… Well, she got her wish! Nothing is more natural that DEATH.
That “douche” of a doctor probably saved Mason’s life.
“even the midwives say I’m an excellent candidate”
Even? I’m sorry, is there a CPM anywhere who has told any woman that she’s not an excellent candidate for VBAC?
Yes, speculation as to whether this is a “real” story or not can be squashed. Not only has she had her name searched over 45,000 times in the last day – she is a real person, who had a real pregnancy, and posted multiple times about a VBAC, HBAC and happily going weeks beyond her due date …which is not real, by the way, according to her. Due dates are guess dates, at best. She has several memes to prove it.
One would think that a woman who was born and raised in South Africa where poverty and infant mortality are both high, would know better than to attempt this stunt!
I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that nationality should be related to being a smarter or more functional person. It’s a slippery slope when you start making those insinuations.
I never said nationality played a part in this. What I am saying is that when you grow up in a poor country (like I did), your outlook on things are usually different because you have seen the other side of the coin. You have a different perspective on things unlike privileged white American women who think it is cool to forgo medical care for the sake of doing things the “natural” way.
My youngest uncle died during a home birth that my grandmother had no way of getting out of because she was POOR and lived in a poor country. She would have given an arm and a leg to give birth surrounded by true medical professionals and in a safe place.
I understand what you were trying to say, I just disagree with you’re insinuation.
I feel that Army Chick was saying being from a country where poverty and lack of access to healthcare is a constant issue for many, would make one more *aware* of the risks of NCB. I didn’t feel she implied it made you *smarter*.
I, too, was born in a poor country. It is why I am fervently pro-vax, and for science-based medicine, public policies etc. You don’t get to be blissfully unaware of the suffering of people around you… unless you are living in an incredibly privileged, gated community, and poor people somehow become beneath your notice.
You have both reexplained the same thing again. My first comment was obviously to nuanced for you to grasp. Your comments smack of privilege. You can criticize this woman and this situation for many things, but I don’t agree with the suggestion that women who don’t come from privilege should somehow be more responsible and wiser than the rest of us. Also, we are talking about South Africa, so this would raise a lot of questions about whether or not she’s actually from poverty or a marginalized community. And stop trying to play poverty poker, the “I came from a poorer country than you so I know better” thing is also something that only privlleged people do. POC and African women have enough to deal with right now without being told that they need to be smarter and wiser than Americans. Anyway, explain again if you must, your words are still offensive.
It’s offensive to suggest that lived experience of poverty and its effects is likely to affect a person’s future outlook?
And that would be what, exactly?
I don’t understand this mentality at all. I’ve encountered my fair share of jerk docotrs and nurses. I’d still take a jerk doctor over an unassisted birth. Maybe that’s because the reality of what used to happen in “the good old days” is all too real for my family. When we visit my grandparents’ graves, my dad occasionally makes a stop to visit the grave of his stillborn brother.
I can’t even! My mother lost FIVE babies before she was able to have me. 4 that would have been barely old enough to have a chance in the late 70s/early 80s including a set of twins, one was a full-term stillbirth. Her heart still breaks, 40 years later, about these children she never got to hold. As both she and I nearly died during my birth, my parent decided they were done as they finally had a living child.
“OUR BODIES AREN’T BROKEN”
Well, your kid’s body is, but who cares about that.
I’m speechless.
I have no words. None. I can’t believe someone would be so callous over the death of any baby, let alone HER OWN.
I’m with the others who are hoping that she’s just in shock right now and trying to justify everything.
We can hope…but we all here have seen too many crunchy birth stories along these lines, where the mothers crow about “their perfect birth experience” and downplay the costs to their babies – even if it means the baby died.
To cope with death, they’ve even invented euphemisms for it: “born sleeping”, “angel baby”, etc. These terms make me sick.
Dead. Her baby isn’t sleeping or an angel, he’s dead. I just can’t get over this – he was alive two weeks ago, swimming around, kicking, ready to get out and breathe. How on earth did her self-esteem become dependent on risking his life? Would she have loved him so little if he came out via scheduled C-section that it was better for him to be dead than born that way?
Here’s a pillow in case you feel the urge to face-desk with me.
To be fair, those euphemisms weren’t invented by the NCB crowd. And they do provide some comfort to those who have lost children. The vast majority of people in my bereavement support group have hospital births and the range of experiences goes from infertility to difficulty maintaining pregnancies for unknown reasons to difficulty for known reasons to known terminal diagnoses to knots in the cord to who knows what. And these are women who take doctors’ advice, get autopsies, etc. and investigate what to do next to help future pregnancies be healthy with good outcomes. And we use those same euphemisms.
I think those euphemisms came about when people started facing infant death face on again after the years of just whisking the baby out of the room and telling the woman, “Don’t worry. Something was wrong. But you’ll be okay. Don’t even think about it anymore” and not giving the woman or family a chance to grieve.
Also, it’s not mentioned here, but the family did go to the hospital with the dead or dying infant right after the birth. Theyy had an emergency team at the scene when the infant was at least partway out. Is this something that UBAC groups encourage? Go unassisted birth, you can always have a medical team there at the very end if you need it and send them home if you don’t? Or did she realize something dire was happening before the baby was fully born?>
Yes, it’s very curious as to why the “emergency team” (that consisted of whom, exactly?) was brought in by her. Why did she feel the need and at what point?
The way it’s phrased, it’s sounds as if the emergency team arrived between the head being born and the body being born. Which to me suggests there was a significant time gap – likely shoulder dystocia. I wonder if the emergency team were paramedics who were called when a dystocia happened.
I can’t even imagine how horrible these situations are for the emergency team. The death of a baby must always be awful, but a completely preventable death caused by extreme silliness and narcissim must be traumatizing.
It was EXACTLY this situation that drove me out of ICAN, where Dr. Amy was routinely demonized (as were all mainstream doctors and nurses) for being MEAN. A woman had a stillborn baby, and the ICAN ladies were all crowing about what a wonderful VBAC she had.
All I can think of is, “But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” It’s the same thing here.
Yeah, that Dr. Amy, such a BUMMER amirite?
LOL???? LOL??? I HAVE NOTHING.
I need to leave work and snuggle my artificially conceived, C-section delivered babies. I can’t with this today.
*passes the soft toys* I think I need to go curl up in my blanket fort with my cats and colouring books.
I have no words…
I’m tempted to just call this shock, on her part. She hasn’t completely grasped what happened, yet. That has to be it.
Either shock, or the inability to process her error. I had a patient, many years ago, who called her MD with signs of abruption. He told her to get to the hospital *immediately*. He called L&D, we had the OR up and everyone set for the stat section. And we waited. And waited. And waited. We tried calling her several times – this was long before cell phones, wondering where they were. 2 hours later (mind, she lived 20 minutes from the hospital), she walked in. They’d stopped for her husband to get something to eat! Unfortunately, the baby was dead, and then she started bleeding and ultimately lost her uterus to save her life. First baby.
3 days in ICU, another week recovering, and she still didn’t understand why everyone was upset she didn’t come in to the hospital as the MD had directed. (And yes, she never denied he’d told her that). Denial can be amazing, to protect oneself.
Oh sweet freaking… *facepalm*
Many, many years ago, my absolute asshole of a grandfather dawdled in getting my grandmother to the hospital while she was in labor. He did it every single time, for all six pregnancies. He’d insist on getting something to eat first, since they were never “in the city”, all while my grandmother was laboring. This habit of his actually did kill one of the children. My grandmother’s fourth pregnancy was a set of twins, only one of which survived. The twin might have lived if they’d gotten to the hospital sooner, though he might not have. 64-odd years ago obstetrics wasn’t nearly as good as it is today, but that baby would have had a better chance if my grandmother hadn’t had to wait the extra couple hours while my grandfather ate.
WHAT? They called because there was a problem but his stomach was more important? I can’t believe it! I wonder what kind of meal was worth the asshole’s child’s life.
I smell some abusive relationship there. Total power and control.
Same here, actually. She calls the hospital because she was presumably bothered that there was a problem and then her reaction is to stand by as the asshole stuffs his face? Doesn’t ring true to me. If she was concerned enough to call in advance, she was supposedly concerned enough to follow the freaking advice she called for in the first place.
Maybe they just didn’t understand the severity of the situation. Even with the doctor telling you to come in ‘immediately’ without medical knowledge, some people will be unable to realize it might be a life or death situation.
When I was a receptionist at an emergency vet clinic, I got a call at around 6pm from a woman who told me that she woke up in the morning. Found her dog laying on the ground, panting, unable to get up, with a distended abdomen and constantly trying to puke. She didn’t call then, she left for work. Then came back at 4pm, found her dog in the exact same position, now covered in puked saliva and wimping none stop. She made dinner for her and her kids. Ate. And then called me at 6pm.
When I told her it was an emergency and she needed to bring the dog RIGHT AWAY, she answered that she would bring it after she bathed her kids and put them to bed and called over a baby sitter. After some more arguing she finally understood how severe the condition was and that the dog needed to be seen right away. She lived 2 block away from the clinic. The dog was dead when she arrived 10 minutes later. She was actually surprised that the dog had died…
That’s one of the reasons I don’t have any pets. I love animals and I get along with them pretty fine but when you have a pet, you essentially get yourself ‘nother child, and one that isn’t going to grow up. Ever. The responsibility is a great one indeed. I wonder if the owner from your story would have been this negligent – yes, negligent – if this was one of her furless kids. Somehow, I think not. She wouldn’t have had a problem realizing the severity of the situation. Frankly, she sounds almost as big of an asshole as the father from the original post.
If you’re unable to grasp the severity of the situation in such dire conditions, then you’re too dumb to be a parent or dog owner, sorry.
The feathered pets are even worse when it comes to having another kid that never grows up. The larger birds can live 70 years or more. One of the discussions I’ve had to have when contemplating getting a macaw (and I still want one, even though I got Leo), is “who will take care of the bird when I’m gone”. Even if I get a 20 year old bird, chances are very good the bird will outlive me, and I’m only 40.
Wow! That’s a serious consideration, for sure.
I get so mad when people take pets as if they buy dolls for their children. Hello? Anyone in there? That’s a living creature, you asshole. You have responsibility. Ever heard the word? It means being obliged to take care of another being, human or not. But I guess that’s a long string of smart words for some people.
Birds come with all sorts of considerations that people just don’t think about. Some birds live longer than others, but even birds with “short” lifespans still live 15-20 years, and we actually don’t know how long they can really live in captivity. Supposedly cockatiels only live 15-18 years, but Cookie, our cockatiel is 25 and I know of a lot of ‘tiels that are in their 20’s. The fact is that well cared for birds, like well cared for cats and dogs, that live the cushy life of a house pet simply live longer than their wild counterparts. Since birds have only been kept as pets for at most 2-3 generations, and we’re still learning a lot about how to care for them, their lifespans are just getting longer and longer, and we really have no clue what the upper bounds are for the various species.
NO! Stop attributing this to shock, people! Have you ever BEEN in shock? I have. This is not shock. People in shock don’t brag on Facebook with an “lol” after every other sentence.
I’m willing to give that woman the benefit of the doubt. When I’m typing stream of consciousness style, I tend to use ‘lol’ a lot, especially where, if I were actually speaking, I WOULD put in a self-deprecating or nervous laugh (I do tend to do this a lot when I’m speaking).
I have typed lol in text conversations where it probably wasn’t appropriate and have gotten ‘what’s so funny’ replies. Unfortunately, TONE is not easily construed from just written words as we don’t know which words would be emphasized if they were speaking or what inflections they’d use.
It’s why it is an often imprecise communication medium.
And the all-caps emphasizing how amazingly successful her birth was? I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. I was in shock after my son’s birth, he was alive but in NICU. I was not even in a condition to use social media. I did not respond to text messages from family members or let anyone visit except my husband and my therapist. Unless someone comes on here and says that their reaction to being in shock after a traumatic, frightening experience was to brag about it on Facebook, I don’t believe it.
People respond to trauma in different ways, and the range of “normal” is vast. I’m just as disgusted at this situation as you are, but I agree Chi about the shock part of it. I’m also willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
As to the situation itself, I have a thought, and when I get to the end of the comments, I’ll post about it.
They might … babbling to the people who have been supporting you is a perfectly natural reaction.
…i’m sorta normal in something?…
I think we’re just trying to understand the incomprehensible. I have never lost a child, but I like to think there’d be a large variety of reactions to a shock this huge. They might range from total immobility to frantic posting/rationalization. She may be clinging frantically to what people on her UBAC page were telling her.
Or she could be a sociopath who truly doesn’t care.
Honestly, it sounds to me like she’s just regurgitating talking points.
All right. I can see how someone with very little insight into themselves or ability to self-reflect could cover up shock/grief by seeking ideological reinforcement from a cultlike group, to tell her that it was “worth it” and so on. That explanation doesn’t give me any respect for her, but it’s certainly plausible.
I think a lot of us have no respect for her. Sympathy, yes, respect no. Because she CHOSE to put herself in that situation, she chose to ignore the recommendations of health professionals in order to ‘prove’ that she wasn’t broken.
I have no respect for anyone who buys into that cult mentality that birth needs to be an empowering experience because their children are the ones who ultimately pay the price for it and they don’t seem to even realize or care. It’s like they simply cannot comprehend that bad things happen during pregnancy and labour and that no matter how ‘low risk’ you think you are (or midwives convince you you are), that those bad things COULD in fact happen to them.
I agree-and would still have no respect for her had Isaac been well, and whole and alive. She rolled the dice, and Isaac lost.
I agree, although I find it hard to muster up any sympathy as well. As I find it hard to generate any sympathy for those who happily, giddily and gleefully state that they are giving the medical professionals the middle finger. They are so self-righteously smug about it all and make no apologies for their fuckitall attitude towards medicine and science.
Calling the doc that attended her second birth a douche because he recommended a CS based on the size of her first child and somehow wrecked or ruined her, since the second baby was smaller than the first could be construed as (I’ll be generous here) venting about her CS.
But the defiant decison to HBAC/UBAC just to show *everyone* that she was right, the doctors were wrong and that she was going to do whatever she damn well pleased while ignoring the fact that there was another participant in the birth: the baby, Isaac.
No fetal heart monitoring, no dilation/effacement checks, going two weeks over the due date, sex as induction method, all of that plus the veritable CROWING about delivering the head before the EMT’s arrived (why call them, if this was a natural, “fuck the medical people” birth), claiming that it still counted as a UBAC even after the rescue squad arrived, everything she describes is about her. SHE got what SHE wanted, well, everything but a live baby.
You make ill-conceived choices and boast about them, then you can expect some criticism about that. Do I think she’s a bad person? I don’t know. But I do know she makes poor, ill-conceived and somewhat irrational decisions. And that garners no respect and very, very, very little sympathy.
I see Imminent Mental Breakdown / PPP Onset here. This woman meeds to be professionally watched lest this pending breakdown becomes Homicidal / Suicidal / Infanticidal or all 3 soon.
I have to wonder how much this mother’s post was coached, much like her dangerous birth decisions. Originally she had made a comment about how the method of birth isn’t as important as being able to take your baby home.
This deadly UBAC group may be her only support network and if she came out against HBAC/UBAC Meg Heket wouldn’t hesitate half a second to boot her ass out and delete all her posts. Because even though she was coached into this, if she crosses the line they won’t care about her at all.
That’s heartbreaking about the initial comment.
Either coached or carefully edited.
Hey you! Hope all is well.
Hi! Thanks for the well wishes. I’m doing great. Been hanging out more in the Facebook groups than here. Things are final (FINALLY) so feeling a bit more free and less…stalked. LOL 😀
So pleased for you. I don’t do Facebook but great to see you pop up here and hear that the new normal is happier and better than the former.
I read it as boasting. I don’t think there are signs of any deeper grief reaction or need to psychoanalyse this woman to give her the benefit of the doubt , although it’s tempting to do so as its hard to believe anyone could be this awful. But she does very much comes across as completely callous and insightless. Not sure why we are surprised though, it’s a natural albeit extreme manifestation of the Homebirth mentality/ culture.
Exactly.
There is nothing there that looks like the behaviour of anybody in shock.
OF COURSE you can have an unmedicated, spontaneous labor and delivery, even after 42 weeks, even at a hospital. Sometimes even after cesarian. My mother had all but the previous cesarian when she had my sister. (fortunately, she was smallish for a post-term). Mom was sensible enough to have my sister on a bed in a hospital and her paternalistic 1979 obs didn’t even make her use formula.
Mom never bragged about her unmedicated births, and barely ever mentioned her stillborn first. Probably hurt too much. Certainly she didn’t brag about her body knowing what to do; she assumed it was luck of the draw. When your first 3 are stillborn at 8 months, live at 7 months, and 1 live twin and 1 long gone twin at 10 months (so she told us), you have to have serious blinders on to think otherwise, even at 24.
my labor was spontaneous and i’m not apologizing for my epidural.
Makes me wonder if this woman has ever read about birth before obstetrics or in places today where there is little or no access to medical care. Does she think that it’s rare to go 42 weeks or to go into labor naturally when you reach that point? Seriously, before there are all the evil doctors and interventions, women went to 42 weeks and beyond. Women labored in agony for days. Women and babies also died because of that. There are women in South Sudan probably doing that now. She is so privileged she didn’t even realize that she is just another statistic, albeit a throw back type.
she probably doesn’t read HIS-story
Re the “LOL” thing: I read the use of LOL in this comment, just after an admission that labor hurt, a lot, and she wanted it to be over, as a dismissal of her own pain in order to stay in sync with the NCB party line. “Oh, silly me, thinking that labor hurt, isn’t that funny?” The second one, I don’t know what to think about that. Maybe, as was suggested down thread, a sort of verbal tic. Again, maybe a dismissal of her own pain. “Look, my body ‘worked’, isn’t that great and can’t we ignore everything else?”
i’m hoping she’s actually as clueless as my uncle who thought it meant lots of love. My aunt confirmed he is indeed that ditzy.
This is a difficult one.
I suspect she’s in shock, and for that reason sharing her words and judging her by them bothers me a great deal. I doubt I would make much sense two days after losing a child, thankfully that remains in the realms of the hypothetical for me and long may it continue. On the other hand, it’s a dangerous message she’s spreading and that needs to be countered. It needs to be countered regardless of how much she’s suffering, in case her words persuade someone else to do the same and leads to them also suffering a loss. It’s a tough one. I think including and discussing the post here is acceptable, but some of the language Dr A used is unnecessary and is inevitably going to be used by some people as an excuse to ignore the message.
I think I agree with you. I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child, and I shut down and stop thinking straight for much less. I don’t find it hard to believe at all that this woman is in some very deep denial, and may be even feeling some things that seem inappropriate due to postpartum hormones. I would hate to think that grief should become yet another thing women have to “perform” correctly in order to avoid harsh judgment. That being said, she is posting on social media and thereby opening herself up to commentary, criticism, and judgment. It’s not as though Dr. Amy is tut-tutting an overheard conversation at someone’s home. And her post does read as incredibly callous. So yes, I think it’s important to call out what amounts IMO to monstrous negligence (both the post dates UBAC and the encouragement for others to do the same), but I also think there is a strong chance this mother will be horrified herself if she rereads her post in a few months. Not that sparing her feelings is more important than potentially saving some future baby–just that it’s possible to be sickened by this and also feel compassion for this woman.
They generally don’t listen to what Dr. Amy says anyways. And will often dismiss. However, in that crowd of women who dismiss whatever comes out of Dr. Amy’s mouth (seriously, Dr. Amy can and has said homebirth should be an option for women and they still dismiss it) also love to crow about how evil Dr. Amy is, there is a woman who will stop and say what’s all this hub bub about with Dr. Amy. She will find herself here, perhaps disagreeing with what she reads, but she’ll stick around long enough and ask questions and will really listen to the message and that will save the next baby.
This woman put her story out there. Sure, she might be grieving and has no idea what she’s saying, but showcasing the hubris she has, even in her grief, to act as if everything went perfect might make someone who’s pregnant and planning to UC rethink that action. It honestly can’t make that group of people hate Dr. Amy anymore than they already do. It isn’t about what Dr. Amy says, it’s about what she represents to them. They think she’s trying to take away their choice, not make people who fell down the rabbit hole see that they and their babies deserve better than poorly educated midwives who keep moving the goal posts of what’s a low risk pregnancy.
Depends who you mean by ‘they’. Clearly the likes of Meg Heket aren’t going to be receptive whatever the tone. But I don’t think it’s implausible that someone who’s wavering might read this and find it offensive in a way that they wouldn’t if it were written differently. The woman you mention could very easily be bothered by the tone. Plenty of us have been.
She’s not in shock.
May I ask, are you qualified to make that assessment? I fully admit that I’m not, but I would like to know whether you are beyond having been in shock and reacted differently yourself. I don’t mean that to sound rude btw.
No, I’m not qualified.
Here are the DSM-5’s criteria for Acute Stress Disorder (the official term for what we’re calling shock): http://traumadissociation.com/acutestressdisorder
I just don’t see any of these symptoms suggested by this woman’s reaction. Denial, yes. Inculcated ideology, yes. BUt obviously, even if I were a psychologist (which I’m not) I would not be able to psychoanalyze her on the basis of a FB post.
I don’t think that all instances of “shock” (which is not a clinically defined term) are or become Acute Stress Disorder. Acute Stress Disorder is basically the precursor to PTSD (which can only be dx’d after a longer period of time passes). It may not make sense for us to debate whether or not she is in “shock” because we have no clear definition for that term.
Acute Stress Disorder does not inevitably turn into PTSD. I’ve been diagnosed with both for different things and I do at least know that.
If we’re not talking about Acute Stress Disorder (which is what I had after my son’s birth) or at least some sub clinical version of it when we say shock, then I have no idea what we’re talking about. It seems that people are trying to invent a psychological response to explain this woman’s words. I will go with the cult theory and bow out of this conversation, since it’s upsetting me too much and As you said, doesn’t really make much sense.
I’m torn. I can’t help but feel sorry for her because I know in the aftermath of my son’s arrival I felt like I needed another child to “fix” what went wrong with his birth, felt that I needed a “normal” birth and could have pursued that at all costs. Okay in my case something akin to sanity kicked in but whilst we have this culture of sections equalling bad, abnormal, broken…my medical notes say “failed natural birth” after all then babies are going to keep dying. In the UK at least even the mainstream maternity are in on the act, not realising or not caring about the harm they are doing and I think everyone who pushes the message of natural equals best in every situation needs to shoulder some of the blame.
Someone I’ve known since childhood is contemplating trying for a baby and because of existing medical conditions should she conceive, the child will need to be born by section. Out of curiosity I spent a while in a large bookstore looking for an honest birth book which covered sections accurately and couldn’t find one. Despite page after page dedicated to normal birth, sections were mere footnotes. If recovery was described at all, it described recovering from medieval torture not being able to walk out of the hospital on your own two feet. The book on birth and pregnancy the Nhs gave me doesn’t even include c sections in the giving birth chapter….
So I blame that culture far more than I do a woman who has been lied to, beaten up by her perceived failure and no doubt egged on by women who should know better.
I can only imagine that once reality hits, she is going to be in a hell of her own making and for that, there is enough room in my heart to feel sorry for her.
It’s horrible and tragic and such a waste of a life.
I agree with you. I do feel very sorry for this poor woman. She’s obviously still in shock and denial of what happened.
I guess she felt like you after her c-section. Like she was broken and failed. And then she fell into the trap of all those nut job natural birth activist while she was vulnerable.
You have put it very well. Even on the Internet the info on c-section is scarce and mostly biassed. Like, it couldn’t possibly be anything one would be looking forward to. What about those like your friend? Do they have to be spending all pregnancy scared and depressed? And pesonally even the word c-section doesn’t give me a positive association. If it were Cesarean Birth or smth it would sound better. When you hear c-section it’s almost like the sound of a knife slicing and it’s anything but empowering.
Here is one book. Maybe we should begin a campaign to purchase these and donate to our libraries. I am going to check on this myself. http://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Cesarean-Natural-Birth-Plan/dp/1616145110
You may find that there is no need to make a campaign. Many library systems have a “purchase request” form.