What Did Your Doula Do For You?

Giving Birth with Confidence has launched a blog carnival focusing on doulas! I’m psyched about this, because I love doulas, and this is why. It’s an older post, but it still is really the best way I can express what my doula did for me, and why I am such a huge believer in this kind of labour support.

Like Cara at Giving Birth With Confidence, Ialso want to shout, “Every woman deserves a doula!”  Doulas are awesome. And I’ve been learning a ton about how many different kinds of doulas there are over at The Radical Doula. I used to think it was just birth doulas and postpartum doulas, but I’ve discovered that there are full-spectrum doulas who attend women through a variety of experiences including pregnancy loss and termination, doulas who work with women in custody, and so many more who provide women with much-needed personalized support. 

So if you are pregnant or know someone who is pregnant, or going through a pregnancy-related experience and need support, consider finding a doula. If you can’t afford to hire one, there are often student doulas who are happy to provide services free of charge in order to gain needed experience. You can find a doula through DONA International among other professional organizations, or by asking your doctor, midwife or other birth professional.  If you’re local, ICAN Cowichan Valley keeps an up to date list of local birth and postpartum doulas, so comment here  if you need help finding the right support person for you.

Simple

It all really just comes down to this:

Stop pathologizing my body.

Prenatal & postpartum weight: giving up and giving in

“All new moms worry about losing the baby weight.”

How’s that for a major generalization? 

True, many new moms worry about this, maybe even most.  But all is a troubling superlative, not only because it’s almost guaranteed to be untrue (find one exception, and the hypothesis crumbles) but more importantly because it reinforces the cultural imperatives for women to be thin no matter what, and to put weight at the top of their list of concerns at all times. Statement:  All new moms worry about losing the baby weight.  Subtext:  If you aren’t worried about this, you should be because everyone else is.

Note that the article linked above, about so-called “mommyrexia” (could there be a more infuriating term?) invites women to share their methods for “stay[ing] slim in pregnancy or los[ing] weight after giving birth.”  I’m all for women sharing their experiences, but I find this formulation troubling. Surely there are better and less sensationalist ways of acknowledging women’s fears about the changes to their bodies during pregnancy.

As a pre and postnatal fitness instructor, obviously I have a vested interest in helping women maintain their health during and after pregnancy. This includes promoting healthy weight gain while growing a baby, and appropriate weight loss in the months following.  But I won’t do it in a way that upholds the paradigm in which weight plays a disproportionate role in determining a woman’s worth or which shames women whose bodies don’t conform to current weight and shape ideals.  Yes, exercise burns calories and can reduce body fat; no, we won’t talk about that in my classes.

I work to support prenatal and postpartum women’s health, not to help them police the size of their bodies.  Body size and weight are only two variables among many that indicate a person’s level of fitness and capacity for activity, and the jury is still very much out when it comes to conclusions about the relationship between weight gain, weight loss, health and pregnancy. Science and Sensibility’s recent series on maternal obesity demonstrates this beautifully.

Different women gain different amounts of weight during pregnancy for reasons that often have less to do with food intake or exercise than you might think. This can be scary for a lot of women. Larger women have reason to fear being treated as if they’ve done something wrong if their weight continues to increase during pregnancy, and they are likely to be categorized automatically as high risk and subjected to a variety of  prenatal and birth interventions as a result. Smaller women may have their own set of fears, especially if they usually go to herculean efforts to keep their weight at a certain level or maintain a particular shape. It’s hard to drop that mentality and to weather the pressure not to ‘let yourself go’ just because the stick has turned blue. 

But what does ‘letting go’ really mean?  There is some implication that it means giving up, giving in, and that these are inherently bad things to do.  But we could re-frame the concept as giving up our culturally-determined beliefs about how our bodies should look. And rather than giving in to the TV-land stereotype of gluttonous-pregnant-woman-eating-for-two, how about giving in to pregnancy, which is designed to ensure that women gain the fat and fluid they need to carry a baby to term, and have the energy necessary to labour and birth a healthy baby.

In this framework, giving up and giving in are important steps toward good mental and physical health, and they are perfectly congruent with staying active and eating a diet of nutrient-rich foods in amounts that satisfy hunger and thirst.  This framework promotes health for all women, all of the time, without prejudice or judgment about size and shape.

The more we learn to listen to our bodies during pregnancy, to explore how they grow and change and to support their new needs, the more likely they are to respond appropriately to pregnancy’s demands.  And the happier our bodies are during pregnancy, when we’re feeding, moving and resting them well, the more likely they are to recover appropriately in the months that follow.

Grace under pressure: the challenge of a long pregnancy

A friend of mine is currently awaiting the birth of her fourth baby.  She’s a week past her due date, and going through the special kind of hell that is prodromal labour.  She’s frustrated, tired and in pain, and yet she is doing something that impresses the hell out of me:  nothing.

My friend’s approach to birth is that it will happen when it happens.  This is not rooted in idealism or the la-la land of the ‘trust your body’ mantra.  She has had her fair share of physical and emotional challenges in life, including in pregnancy and birth, and I think her willingness to go with the physiological process is a reflection of what she has learned from her own past experiences and observations of doing anything other than just going with it.

There is no shortage of evidence supporting the value of patience at the end of pregnancy. The first of Lamaze’s healthy birth practices is to let labour begin on its own.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of the medical arguments for and against induction before 42 weeks (the point at which a pregnancy is considered post-term).  Obviously there are times when an induction is medically indicated.  Those are not the times I’m talking about here, nor am I suggesting that induction is universally bad.  Like any intervention, it has its appropriate time and place.

I’m talking about the normal pregnancies that go past 40 weeks with no evident complications, and how difficult dominant cultural norms make it for women during this time to maintain faith in the physiology of labour and birth, and connection with their bodies.

The temptation to evict a baby who overstays his or her welcome is enormous, and there is huge cultural support for it.  North American culture is obsessed with rationalization, predictability and the clock.  Pregnant women have a host of pressures on them as they stare down their due dates:  care providers’ schedules and the desire to have a particular provider attend their birth; hospital and health care policies dictating where and how they can birth depending on the  number of days past their EDD; impending maternity leaves and a wish to maximize time off with a baby actually in their arms; demands to return to work or school within a set time frame, regardless of the actual date of a baby’s birth; the exigencies of travel for family and partners who want to be part of the birth process, and so on. 

More than that, by 41 weeks?  Pregnancy can really freaking suck. It hurts to be that pregnant. Take all the normal pregnancy “discomforts” and multiply them by a million.  That’s 41 weeks plus.  Fun times.  Add to that every friend and family member treating you like a watched pot (“have you had that baby yet?!”), every personal inadequacy you’ve ever felt bubbling to the surface, and care providers pushing interventions, and it’s hard to resist the urge to do whatever it takes to get labour started, from so-called natural approaches—homeopathic remedies, castor oil, pineapple, eggplant parmesan, hiking up hill, shoveling snow, acupuncture, sex, AROM, membrane sweep, and so forth—to medical induction.  

I worked so hard to get my babies born that I was physically and emotionally exhausted by the time I had them in my arms.  I was lucky that my first birth went well, despite finally electing a medical induction (I had no idea at the time that induction posed any risk). I was less lucky the second time, when I tried every “natural” trick in the book, and, whether or not there was a simple cause-and-effect relationship, ended up with a hypertonic uterus before I’d even hit 6 cm.  In both cases, in the final days, I completely lost touch with my body, baby, and pregnancy, and instead became consumed by thoughts of getting the pregnancy over with.  Both times, by 41 weeks, I was convinced that my body would never go into labour on its own, and as crazy as it sounds, that I would be pregnant forever.  Of course I knew at a rational level that the latter could not possibly be true, but after being pregnant for 10 months your mind can start doing funny things.  And the former was a self-fulfilling prophecy:  in neither case did I give physiological labour enough of a chance.

Whether or not a woman requires an induction is a decision that only she and her health care provider can make.  At the time, in both pregnancies, I was absolutely certain that induction was the right thing for me, and at 41 weeks 3 days, going ahead with a medical induction matches the protocol governing childbirth where I live. Yet even women for whom induction is indicated could benefit from a shift in attitudes and approach that honours and values the final days and weeks of pregnancy, rather than seeing them only as days of increasing statistical risk and unpredictable inconvenience. You would never take a cake out of the oven 10 minutes early just because you know it will burn if you leave it in 10 minutes too long, or because company’s coming and you just need to serve the damned cake already.  Obviously that analogy can only take us so far, but it is food for thought in this context nonetheless.

So I salute my friend who is weathering the end of her long pregnancy with grace, if not patience.  Given everything she’s up against, I think she’s amazing.

Birth community and a little update

A while back I posted about wanting to generate a birth network here in the Cowichan Valley.  But the crazy few months that followed meant that that wish never got too much further than a blog post and a couple of discussions with friends.  So I was super excited when I was invited to join a circle of women at the new Matraea Centre in Duncan, called together by Sarah Juliusson of Island Mother, Dancing Star Birth, Birth Your Business, and other cool projects. Sarah took the initiative to bring a group of people whose work supports pregnant and birthing families for a Birthing from Within training for professionals and discussion about our local birth community. 

I was tired and rushed last night, and had had one of those days where it’s lucky I work mostly from home because other humans would not have appreciated my mood.  But I made it to Matraea nonetheless, and am so glad I did.  I already knew some of the women there including the midwives, and a postpartum doula (aka goddess) who founded the New Mom Centre, and I met some others whose services include pre and postnatal yoga, and prenatal dance and art.  It was amazing to be sitting in a room full of so much excitement–excitement about Matraea, excitement about building connections in this community, excitement about sharing a common enthusiasm for supporting women and families. 

It was exciting and also educational.  Sarah took us through an exercise designed to help us examine the way we listen and respond to women when they talk about pregnancy and birth.  We worked in pairs to practice not only reflective listening but also body language that shows our clients that we are ready to ‘meet them where they are.’  I took away the message that we need to really hear what women are saying, recognize the validity of their position, and work with them so that the choice they make is truly theirs and not an empty reflection of our values.  This process focuses not on the outcome–not on what a woman ultimately chooses to do–but on how she gets there.  Does she feel supported?  Does she feel confident?  Does she believe that she is the most important person in the equation?  Does she own her own pregnancy, birth, and body? 

Tomorrow I’m going to start going to one of Sarah’s Mama Renew groups.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to do the whole session; I may have a scheduling conflict, but I won’t know for a while.  So, in the meantime, I’m going and I’m really curious about what it’s going to be like.  I have pretty much no idea what to expect!  But I hear it’s an awesome group of women (8 or 10, I think), so I figure it can only be good. 

Tonight is the first ICAN meeting here at my house for the Cowichan Valley chapter.  I’m nervous, which is funny because there’s really nothing to be nervous about.  I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time, as I think a group like this can really make a huge difference in a woman’s life, if it’s there for her at the right moment.  So, even if no one comes, just spreading the word and waiting so that ICAN is available for any person who may need it at any point in the future is good enough.

Q: Why make such a big deal about birth? A: Feminism

People often ask why I invest so much energy in birth activism, and why I care so much about how women have babies.  After all, babies are born every minute of every day, all over the world.  Why make such a big deal about it?

I started caring about pregnancy and birth when I started linking it to my identification with feminism.  I’d always known about both:  for the duration of my childhood, my mother was a family doctor with a busy obstetrical practice, and she was (is) a feminist.  I don’t recall her linking the two explicitly, at least not to me.  (Although we did have a book about Judy Chicago’s Birth Project on our coffee table, and I understood without any doubt in the 1970s that the fact my mother was a doctor at all was because of this feminism thing that she and her friends sometimes discussed.)  But I knew from the time I could be conscious of anything that supporting pregnant and birthing women was worthwhile and that feminism, defined very simply as empowering women to do whatever we wanted to do, was good.

I got that birth mattered, and that women deserved to be treated with care and respect.  I remember little things like my mother’s answer when I asked why she had short nails without nail polish:  so she wouldn’t scratch her patients when she was delivering their babies.  That made deep sense to me as a child, illustrating in an utterly comprehensible and practical way the things we can all do to make women more comfortable when they are vulnerable and in need.

Birth mattered and it also seemed absolutely mundane, and often annoying.  I was not amused as a child by having trips to the park and the pool interrupted because my mother was on call and some lady was having a baby.  I did like making pictures with all the colourful tape at the nurse’s station in the hospital where I sometimes had to wait for my mother while she worked.  But I didn’t like having to wait. And sometimes I was impatient:  I once told her to “just do a c-section” when a patient seemed to be laboring for an awfully long time, interfering with whatever it was I wanted my mother to do for me.  Yeah.

It was all very matter of fact until after my first baby was born.  I realized then that birth might be common but it’s actually never mundane, and that all the care and respect that I received as a pregnant and laboring woman—that I took for granted from a family doctor who my mother had trained—was not necessarily the norm.  I learned after the fact that I was lucky to have grown up believing the things I believed about women and to have had the kind of birth I had, and that my total, unfailing trust in my doctor and my mother’s medical angle on birth might be worth questioning, even though they believed in the medicine they were practicing and my outcome was good.

My daughter’s birth almost fifteen years ago radically altered the way I understood women’s relationship with medical approaches to childbirth.  The high I felt after giving birth, the incomparable sense of accomplishment and power, was so incongruous set alongside my unquestioning willingness to let my doctor manage my pregnancy and to accept—even anticipate—interventions simply because they were ‘normal.’  I began a long process of reframing and rethinking, asking questions, demanding justifications, searching out evidence of benefits and risks, wondering what ‘normal’ even meant and why anyone automatically believed, in the context of intervening in pregnancy and birth, that it was good.

It didn’t take long for me to recognize that the framework for my analysis was feminism.  Feminist thinking made it possible for me to de-center medicalization without demonizing individual doctors, and to explore other approaches such as midwifery without romanticizing them.  Feminist thinking encouraged me to look at pregnancy and birth first from the perspective of the women who experience it, and consider the ways in which ‘normal’ pregnancy and birth are constructed by particular social, historical, political and economic contexts.  Feminist thinking made it impossible for me to look uncritically at any action that interfered with women realizing or being supported in realizing the unhindered potential of their bodies, and allowing their bodies to take up space, and be noisy, messy and inconvenient.

It probably comes as no surprise that this has all led to some *cough* interesting conversations between me and my mother.  We agree on the fundamentals:  birth is not a medical emergency, interventions should be kept to a minimum, and women deserve respect.  We agree on many critical points, including a shared sense that today’s skyrocketing caesarean rate is a problem and the importance of supporting all women in making truly informed decisions about their own reproductive health.  But then there are other topics, such as the relative safety and advisability of homebirth, where the discussion gets a little more complicated and I have to remind her:  intentionally or not, you raised me to think this way.

Believing in women’s bodies and their capacity to grow, birth and feed babies without undue intervention, and in women’s right to control their own reproductive labour—not only whether they give birth, but how they give birth—is central to my belief in women’s capacity to be agents in their own lives and effective political actors.  I don’t reject medical intervention when a woman needs it.  I do reject the dominant medical model that says intervention is almost always necessary.  And I reject the notion that just because birth is common we shouldn’t care about it or that birth activism makes mountains out of molehills. Minimizing issues that are unique to women is a time-honored tool in the war against us.  And it’s often in the struggle for autonomy in our everyday lives—including what some consider the mundane, uninteresting work of pregnancy, birth and mothering—where we discover what power really means.

ICAN of the Cowichan Valley

Forgive me, readers, for it has been many months since my last post.  I took a little professional detour (can you detour from an already diversified path? hmmm…).  It was interesting, and among other things, gave me an opportunity to reevaluate my values and priorities. 

And now that I’m back from my sojourn, I’ve re-prioritized my work around birth advocacy.  To that end, I’ve (finally!) gotten around to doing something I’ve been talking about for years:  I just started a new chapter of ICAN, the International Cesarean Awreness Network, here in the Cowichan Valley.  ICAN of the Cowichan Valley, like other ICAN groups, will offer resources and information about cesarean sections, and provide support to women who are recovering from a c-section or trying to avoid an unecessary surgery. 

After I had Annika, I attended one ICAN meeting down in Victoria.  But for a variety of reasons, including distance (it was a 2-hour drive, round-trip), I never managed to get to another one.  I’ve always regretted that, and wished I’d had a practical option beyond suffering in isolation with the aftermath of her birth.  I did have a wonderful circle of online friends who helped me through those years, but there is a lot to be said for face-to-face, local connections, especially in the postpartum phase.  And there is also a lot to be said for a specialized group like an ICAN support group.  It’s often hard for women to talk about their experiences with surgical birth, as many people still trot out the ‘but you have a healthy baby!’ dismissals, and unecessary c-sections have become normalized in our society.  ICAN groups can offer a safe place for women to connect with others who are likely to empathize, and willing to listen without judgment to their stories.

I’m still in the process of getting the group up and running–it was only officially registered yesterday, and I have yet to plan any actual events or meetings!  My hope is to find a central space where we can gather, perhaps beginning in late May or early June, and go from there.  So, local folks, please help to spread the word and encourage people to contact me at icancowichan@gmail.com.  Local and far-flung, like our Facebook page. Thanks to all of you for helping me let people know about this important new resource.

Taking traumatic births seriously

I went to see a new doctor this past week.  I’ve been trying for five years, without much luck, to find a doctor who is a good fit for our family.  But we live in an underserved area, and unfortunately there just aren’t a lot of good choices–the doctors who are recommended most highly have full practices and won’t even take names for a waiting list.  So I had  high hopes when I went  into the new clinic on Tuesday, and I went in with a positive attitude:  this will be The One.

Unfortunately, I think I was wrong.  It was all going okay until she asked me if I had any concerns I wanted to address right away.  I said yes, there is one.  I decided a few months ago that it’s time for me to see some kind of counseling professional to go through the details of my second child’s birth, and process what it all has meant in the nearly four years since.  Although Annika’s birth was extremely traumatic, I made only one attempt to discuss it with a professional.  When she was a few weeks old, I went to see the nurse at the health unit who was responsible for counseling women with postpartum depression.  I don’t know if I was suffering from PPD per se, but I was definitely suffering emotionally, and she was free, so it seemed like a logical choice.  She was nice enough, but after I explained the situation (planned homebirth turned emergency c-section after 5 days of prodromal labour and all kinds of crazy things happening, etc.), she told me that I had to stop “wallowing” in self-pity, accept that I had a healthy baby and move on with my life.  Given the fact that I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to remove the bandage covering my incision, and I still needed help getting in and out of bed because of the pain, I thought her remarks were insensitive and, at the very least, awfully premature.  Needless to say, I didn’t try to talk to anyone about it again for a long time.

But on Tuesday, I decided the time had come.  I’m working with pregnant and postpartum women now, and want to ensure that I don’t project my own issues on to them.  It’s a professional responsibility as well as a personal necessity.  It’s not easy to ask for help, especially with mental health issues, but I sucked it up, put on my big-girl panties, and decided to give it a go.  To be fair, I was nervous and probably didn’t explain very well, but I was assuming that a trained family doctor wouldn’t require a whole lot of detailed explanation, that she would have either seen this before or at least have some sense of how to handle it.  The conversation went as follows.

Me: ”Um, well, I’m wondering if you can recommend a counselor or a therapist who I can talk to about my daughter’s birth?”

Doctor:  “Why, did something happen?”

Me:  “Well, it was really hard–I had planned a homebirth, but we ended up with an emergency c-section, and I was pretty depressed for a long time afterward.”

Doctor:  “Is your daughter okay?”

Me:  “Yes.  But–”

Doctor (interrupting):  “Well, then, why do you need to talk to someone?”

Me:  “Um, well, I want to figure it out…figure out why I’m still bothered by it.”

Doctor:  “But your daughter is fine.”

Me:  “Yes.”

Doctor (laughing):  “Maybe it’s like some kind of [laughter increasing] post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Me (feeling ridiculous):  “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far…I don’t know what to call it, but it’s hard.”

Doctor (still laughing):  “I don’t know anyone who really does, uh, that, but I can ask around.”

Cue me feeling like a complete idiot, totally dismissed, and wishing I’d never brought it up.

Luckily, sufficient time has passed and I’ve been around the block enough times with doctors and therapists that I could handle this–I wasn’t destroyed by it, although it was humiliating.  And I could put it in context:  her reaction wasn’t about me, it was a reflection of a large, systemic problem–ongoing stigma and ignorance about mental health issues–and a smaller problem that is a subcategory of the first:  a tendency to dismiss women’s mental health concerns, particularly around pregnancy and birth.

So instead of being destroyed I got angry.  Not in the doctor’s office, of course; there, I was a good girl, laughing with her as though she were right, as though I was silly to have brought it up at all.  I played my part in the cultural script perfectly, even though it went against everything I believe in; it wasn’t like I decided consciously to play the part, it was the only choice I could make–the possibility of pressing my concerns, of insisting she take me seriously, evaporated the second she started laughing. 

What is it going to take to change this?  I was struck while Annika was a baby by how little support there was for me to access.  Once the 6-week postpartum visit came and went with my midwives, I was on my own, and there was really no one there–outside of family and friends–to provide any kind of meaningful or helpful assistance.  And while I put on a brave face and muddled through, I think women can expect more than that–I think women deserve more than that. 

If a woman is traumatized by the nature of her birth experience–for any reason, whether or not you believe her trauma is “justified”–she deserves care, and she deserves to be taken seriously.  She is not “wallowing” or making a big deal out of nothing.  Birth is a major life event, and for some women it is one that may require days, weeks, months or years to process.  Is it wrong to ask for healthcare professionals whose jobs include pre and postnatal care to assist with that?

The doctor I saw on Tuesday should not have laughed at me.  I wish I hadn’t laughed with her, because I don’t believe it’s a laughing matter.  Birth trauma is serious.  It can destroy a person’s quality of life and impair her ability to parent appropriately; it can hurt a whole family.  Women’s feelings matter; women’s experiences matter.  Birth matters.  Stop laughing, stop dismissing, and listen.  Asking for help is really hard–if a woman has the courage to go that far, give her the courtesy of going with her and doing what you can to offer some support.

Healthy Beginnings

I had the pleasure this week of being a guest speaker at a couple of Healthy Beginnings meetings, which are drop-in groups for young children, babies and their caregivers sponsored by the local health unit.  I spoke to one group in Duncan earlier in September, and two groups on Thursday in Shawnigan Lake.  I did a little demo of core work with the women (all moms except for one nanny), and checked a few for diastasis recti (everyone was good to go!).  But aside from encouraging more people to strengthen their pelvic floors, I really wanted to get two points across:  a) let them know that I’m here as a resource for them in the community; and b) emphasize the notion that fitness is holistic, and that postpartum fitness, especially, has little to do with fitting into pre-pregnancy jeans.

Let’s talk about the second point first.  I’ve written about this before here so I won’t repeat those points now.  But I was struck at the drop-ins by how much women focus on changing their size after pregnancy.  Of course I already knew this was the case, but every time I see signs of it, the red light starts to flash in my head: teachable moment!  teachable moment!  There are practical reasons to want to get back to pre-pregnancy size–the most significant of which is probably financial, as buying an entirely new postpartum wardrobe right after buying a new maternity wardrobe is an onerous expense.  But there is nothing wrong with taking time to get there, and moreover, a healthy lifestyle + time is the best formula for healthy and lasting post-pregnancy weight loss.  Anything extreme–extreme exercising, or even not-so-extreme dieting–is dangerous, plain and simple (and most likely ineffective).  

The thing is, we all know this, and beating people over the head with such information doesn’t work.  So instead, I tried to focus on the positive:  rather than telling people what not to do, I suggested what they can do to improve their health and wellbeing after baby, and to strengthen their bodies so that they can move with freedom, and with the knowledge that they are protecting their bodies from injury. Even more importantly, I tried to emphasize that they can do that without having to be away from their babies.  (Although there is nothing wrong with working out solo either–the point is, women have lots of options and they can pick and choose what is right for them at any given time.)  And I’ll tell you–it felt very good to look around the room at women’s faces and feel like they were soaking these messages in.  I know the relief I often feel when someone in a position of some authority/expertise gives me permission to be kind to myself and to follow my instincts about what is right or wrong for me as a parent, and I hope I was able to do that for some of the women there.

On the second topic: although part of my reason for going to the drop-ins was to let women know about Fit 4 Two, I had a bigger purpose in mind, and that was to let them know that there is a place they can go if they have questions about things to do with health and fitness during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery.  I got involved with Fit 4 Two because I wanted to reach out to women as someone who is not a clinician of any sort, but has other kinds of information to share, and is happy to be a source of support.  Sometimes people hesitate to call on professionals when they have questions they feel are minor, or they have questions that professionals may not be equipped to answer (even the best birthy clinicians may know little about exercise physiology, for instance).  I wanted to introduce myself to the women as a fitness professional, but more importantly as their peer:  I know a lot about pre and postnatal fitness, but I’m also someone who has struggled through the pre and postnatal phases  and can lend an empathetic ear if they too are facing challenges.  So I was so glad to have the chance to go into these groups and let the women there know that they can email or call me any time with questions; if they are within my scope of practice, I’ll answer, and if they are outside it, I can help connect them with appropriate resources.  The point is that they aren’t alone, and they don’t have to pay a penny to be supported at this time in their lives, when so many women end up feeling isolated, inadequate, and often (sadly) at war with their own bodies.  Of course I’d love for them to take my classes, but it’s not about that; it’s about creating genuine relationships, and meeting women where they are, whether they are ready for and interested in a group workout or just need some basic information about how to work with their pregnant or postpartum bodies.

Oh, and I got to cuddle a newborn.  That was probably the highlight of the whole thing for me, personally.  There is nothing better than holding someone else’s newborn baby… 

An epidural is not the only way to protect your pelvic floor

There has been a lot of discussion this week about press coverage given to a new study suggesting that epidurals may prevent trauma to the pelvic floor during delivery. Basically, the idea is that an epidural relaxes the muscles such that they don’t tear. I don’t know whether or not that is true. I haven’t read the study itself, only representations of the story in various places. I know that Amy Romano at Science and Sensibility is sceptical, and I think she is a pretty trustworthy source of information. It has been interesting to follow the discussion between her and the study’s authors in the comments section of her blog. (And ire-provoking to see the known ideologue Dr. Amy Tuteur’s $.02 popped in there, too—but I digress…) Whether or not the study’s conclusions have merit, the coverage of the study, particularly in the Globe and Mail, has been quite atrocious.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with epidurals. They have an appropriate time and place, and the only person who can really say for certain whether or not an epidural is indicated is the woman with the baby descending through her pelvis. I’ll trust her to be the judge of how she wants to manage those sensations. So, this is not an anti-epidural rant. Hell, I was practically desperate for one with my first baby—got to the hospital in transition and begged for one. I was too far gone, at 8 cm, to qualify—and in retrospect I’m glad that was the case, as it was a very cool experience to give birth without drugs—but at the time, if someone had tried to suggest that I was wrong to ask, I’m sure I would have wrung his or her neck with my own bare hands. That said, there are definitely risks involved with an epidural, just as there are risks with any invasive medical procedure. Risks v. benefits. That’s the name of the game.

So, there may be benefits to epidurals that we didn’t know about before. That’s awesome. It’s always good to learn new ways of preventing women from lasting harm to their bodies. Women want good options when it comes to health care. But a) this study isn’t saying epidurals prevent tears—it’s saying epidurals may play a role in preventing some kinds of pelvic floor damage; and b) the uncritical coverage of this study has not explained that there are also many other steps women can take to safeguard the health of their pelvic floors. The point is: there is nowhere near enough data to say that epidurals are necessarily the best approach, and they certainly aren’t the only one, either.

What else can women do? There are the often-cited birthing strategies that include not giving birth on one’s back, but instead choosing a position that is more in synch with physiological processes occurring and can benefit from gravity; avoiding fundal pressure; and pushing spontaneously, rather than following directions for pushing. But there are other things women can do as well, before they get to the moment when they are actually in labour—a moment when they may or may not want/be able to think about those strategies.

Women who perform simple pelvic floor exercises during pregnancy and after delivery can greatly reduce their chance of pelvic floor trauma and the speed of postpartum healing. The stronger the pelvic floor, the more flexible; the more flexible, the more likely those muscles will get up and out of the way and not tear while a baby passes through. A strong pelvic floor can also prevent/reduce the significance of other common pregnancy- and birth-related concerns, such as hemorrhoids, prolapse, and urinary incontinence. And as a bonus, contracting the pelvic floor automatically gets the transverse abdominus to co-contract, helping to tone the abdominal muscles. These are seriously awesome exercises that can be done anywhere, at any time of day, with no special equipment.

 So, what do you do? Basically, you want to do a modified Kegel, which can then be performed in various series, at various speeds, and in various patterns. If you’ve never done a Kegel before, the idea is to draw the muscles of the pelvic floor (PF) up and into the body, as if you’re stopping yourself from going pee. Draw them in, breathe, hold for a few counts, breathe, relax. Once you get the hang of that, you can move on to combine PF work with other core strengthening exercises such as curls (unless you have diastasis recti), superwoman, and cat-cow. You can do them sitting on a chair or an exercise ball, standing, lying on your side, on your hands and knees, in child’s pose—there are many positions that work, all of which have a slightly different benefit.

The bottom line (pardon the pun) is: strengthen your pelvic floor. Pregnant or not, this is a good thing to do. But if you’re pregnant or contemplating giving birth at some point, strengthening your pelvic floor is a noninvasive, key step in minimizing the risk of tearing and other significant trauma to the perineal region.