The level of media ignorance about physiological childbirth is reaching properly shocking proportions.
Whether magazine, tv or radio, the messages that get pumped out are universally negative and usually misleading. In fact misinformation and misconception about birth is so deep, wide and worrying, it's to the point of hysterical - akin to flat-earth think or something of that nature. It feels so tub-thumping, so defensive, so wilfully incurious that common consensus on the subject seems to be all that's 'acceptable'.
Birth IS dangerous, so we must all feel that way.
Birth IS painful, so we must never suggest otherwise.
Birth IS unpredictable, so it's unethical to mislead women to think differently.
Suggest something else - how things might and could be - and you are shut down. Told you're making everyone feel bad. Whether it's flawed research suggesting we all got it wrong, and forcing labour can actually prevent problems..or that Harry Kane and his wife are nothing but great big show offs...this stuff is either a curious social phenomenon, or something more sinister. A strategy in need of strengthening.
The strangest thing is the way that reasoned, evidence-based balancing of the info - ie BIOLOGY - has begun to be seen as extreme.
On Radio London this week, when I tried to explain that many mothers want to manage labour naturally because there are health benefits, there was just a kind of blank response - no curiosity or further questions. Almost as if I might be making it up.
It's a kind of gaslighting situation and counter arguments from mothers themselves or midwives/doulas/activists saying how it might or could be are silenced and censored.
Think about it - Harry Kane's comments about his wife provoked one single response - outrage. That was it. Not one question anywhere, NOT ONE, as to what he might have witnessed, what his wife might have felt..the possiblities implied by what he was saying.
Just huge scale offence and a pc high ground taken. And along with it, paralysis and ever greater levels of disempowerment.
Don't believe the hype ladies. Find out what you need and feel what's possible for yourselves.