November 02, 2003

Reflections on another European tour

Another tour of the UK and Europe is coming to an end. It has been a journey through several contrasting worlds of maternity care, from the re-awakening of midwives in Northern Ireland (and their commendable efforts to establish free standing Community Midwifery Units), the incredible subjugation of women giving birth in Spain, the cosy fiefdom of the private obstetricians in Guernsey, the idiosyncratic mix of Italian birth practices to the very predictable British birth scene.

I have been honoured to meet many midwives who are trying to make a difference for women and their own colleagues. There have been opportunities to catch up with old friends such as Michel Odent and Marsden Wagner and to meet Susanna Houd, whom I feel I have known for years even though we had never met until last week.

Once more I am impressed by the world wide movement towards humanising birth and feel proud to be part of that effort. These past few days in Florence have given me a chance to step back from the actual work and let my mind roam free around the global scene and what it will take to make cultural change a reality.

It was a comment made by Sylvia (from Argentina) at the Water birth Conference in Carrera (that I was able to roughly translate from the Italian) that really sparked my imagination. She pointed out that epidurals, far from freeing women from the pain of labour, actually did the opposite, rendering them completely submissive to the medical model. The picture of a woman strapped down and restrained by an epidural sprang into my mind and it occurred to me that this was a form of ritualised rape, and one that should be completely abhorrent to the modern woman. That so many women have been seduced into embracing epidurals by the hype around labour pain and the slick advertising of the anaesthetists speaks volumes to me. We need a whole new way of looking at birth, and some major shifts on women’s thinking.

This will be my next major project. Already the ideas are fermenting in my mind ......

Posted by andrea at November 02, 2003 01:03 PM

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