The one subject I insist be in my daughter’s high school curriculum – Pregnancy and Childbirth

And sadly, I probably was.  From that book, and from the hospital based classes, I was the perfect maternity patient, willing and able to surrender my body and my baby to the wisdom and experience of the childbirth professionals at the local hospital. After all, they did this every day, all day and this was my first baby!  And they had my welfare at the forefront of all their care right?

My first birth was very typical, and yet not at all what I had expected. I excitedly entered the hospital a healthy 30-year-old woman expecting to deliver my baby the way my mother and grandmother had delivered theirs, and I left a post-surgical patient in more pain than I had ever experienced in my life, detached from my baby and my husband, and wondering how it had all gone so wrong.  In 2009 I wrote:

What I learned was that because I had not educated myself well about the birth process and how normal birth should work and because in retrospect the hospital classes really prepared me more to be a compliant patient than a birthing woman, when I got into tough situations, I had to defer the decision making process to others. Because I didn’t really know my choices, I didn’t have any. I also learned that informed consent was very subjective. 


That experience made me start questioning everything in my life. It was those questions that made me switch from Democrat to Republican to just conservative in the early 1990s.



It has been a mini-mission of mine since then to try to share what I learned over the years (and six more births) with other women in the hopes of them getting the best and safest birth experience possible. I joined ICAN, I went to birthing seminars, I read books and films and even went to a few conferences. I became a trained doula and attended my friends’ home births.  For a time, I was a birth junkie.

My friends are older now and not having any babies. I think the last birth I went to as a doula was around 2001 or so, but I was always open to discussing birth with younger women. Over the last couple of years it has become clear to me that young women are still as ignorant about childbearing as I had been AND they are still just as naive about the modern medical practice of giving birth.

Not long ago at a family dinner the topic of inducing labor came up and both Mr. Pete and I shuddered at the thought.  My son’s girlfriend then innocently asked, “What’s so wrong about being induced?”  Clearly she was not aware that induction was not without some serious risks.   She’s not alone.  The talk among my young preggo friends on face book has shown me that induction is NOT considered a big deal and something to be avoided if the nonstress test and biophysical profiles looks okay.

Ditto the epidural. In fact most of the rhetoric on FB seems to about what a marvelous invention those are.  But they too can cause problems. 

Surprisingly, even Cesareans are not seen as risky. This stunned me.  What is it about the modern 21-st Century person that they don’t see slicing open the abdomen as having some inherent risks? And it’s not just lay young women of childbearing age who naively believe this.  Some medical professionals see it that way too.  I recently had a discussion with a young male nurse anesthetist who seemed quite shocked at the idea of Cesarean birth being LESS SAVE than vaginal birth in regard to mortality and morbidity.

Higher m and m rate??? First I’ve heard that. Do you have literature to support that?

How is that possible?  NO clue. but I think it is quite telling that this young man opined,
 I would take today’s obgyn service over that of 10 or even 20 years ago due to advancements in technology and literature research.

Why does he think that?  It’s not even true.  Amnesty USA’s report, Deadly Delivery noted:

So I had my own epiphany moment – Young women aren’t learning about birth at home any more and they certainly don’t seem to be covering it in high school, and apparently even medical professionals working with birthing moms are somehow clueless about the actual procedures they perform daily that carry risks for mother and baby.

I don’t want that for my daughters, and I do not want it for my grandchildren. With that in mind I am going to come up with my own high school curriculum for my daughter that includes:

• The anatomy and physiology of pregnancy and childbirth.
• Information about natural childbirth.
• A realistic view of medical interventions.
• Breastfeeding
• And a look a the psychological and spiritual aspects of childbirth and how that all relates to the Theology of the Body.