"The Most Important Thing...

...is to have a healthy mama and baby."

Oh, how many times I've heard that. It seems like it's most commonly said to women who have gone through a traumatic birth experience and/or have regrets about their birth experience. And it does. not. help.

I absolutely agree that, in emergency situations, the top priority is to ensure the health of mother and child. But how often is that the case? How often are medical interventions in birth really necessary? How common are these true emergency situations?

Not as common as the medical community would have you think. I'll go into statistics on all that after I've done more research and such, in later posts, but suffice it to say that birth is over-medicalized, and expectant mamas are treated as ticking time bombs that could explode at any time, when that is most definitely not the case in the majority of situations.

So, to my main point: in emergencies, the health of mother and child are absolutely more important than her "birth experience." But when it is unnecessary interventions that have led to those emergencies, it is perfectly reasonable for the mother to feel upset, and the last thing she needs to hear is someone belittling her feelings by telling her she should "just be grateful to have a healthy baby." It is a woman's right to have/try for the birth experience she wants, and when she's pushed into interventions that aren't needed and are against her wishes (or that she doesn't understand the risks of) and they lead to a birth that is the opposite of what she wants, then we have a serious problem.

A mother will remember her child's birth forever, and she deserves the best possible chance to have the birth she wants, to have her wishes respected, and to be able to mourn if things don't go according to plan. So don't tell her she's "lucky" she and baby came through it okay. Don't tell her that that's the "most important thing." She already knows that. If she's unhappy with the way things went, because she feels that it didn't need to go the way it did, let her say it. Let her feel it. Don't tell her that her feelings aren't important because the outcome was good. The experience wasn't, and the experience will never be forgotten.

Listen to her, support her, and help her to cope. But never, never, NEVER tell her that her personal feelings don't matter. Because that's what the phrase, "the most important thing  is to have a healthy mama and baby," screams to a mother who is mourning the birth experience she wanted and didn't have, for whatever reason, and may never have, now.