Introducing Indy.

Her full name is Elanor Cady Indiana Snoad, but she’s getting called Indy, and can choose her own nomenclature when she’s ready.

She arrived (finally!) on Friday afternoon after a natural birth, and we’ve had a great couple of days at home getting to know her.

Why didn’t someone tell me that this would actually be fun?!! Rewarding and joyous I expected, but fun? And it is.

I’m not sure how much bigger Ms M can get… but I’m liking those Pilates muscles.

Attention conservation notice: a bit of a rant about childbirth and the US medical system. Apologies – it’s on my mind a bit at the moment.

One of the first things they tell you when you find out you’re pregnant (I’m using the US-standard “she and I are pregnant” nomenclature) is, after some voodoo involving a round logarithm style decoder ring, your due date. Ours was June 6. It has passed us by without even a slight flutter, and we’re now lounging around at D+4 wondering what’s going to happen and when the squidge will feel like make her grand appearance.

There’s just one problem – due dates are basically meaningless, at least as point data. Yep, what with a “normal” pregnancy being 37-42 weeks long picking a set date really doesn’t help much, except as a mental note-card “oh, we should have sorted out our health insurance before then,” and to assist a whole medical industry in convincing mothers that they need interventions if they run “overdue”. I’m being quite strident here I realize, and I know that there are many many reasons for interventions and to worry about babies born after 42 weeks, but this who issue has been building in me for some time as we’ve seen various aspects of the US childbirth system.

In so many places, particularly in the US, we have an entire industry that treats childbirth as some medical abberation where a woman who doesn’t want pitocin, and epidural or a cesarian is somehow abnormal. Forgive the rant, but it sits there alongside the fact that there’s comparatively no research on such things as post-partum pain from cesarians etc. All part of the male medico-research conspiracy that really does try to downplay even basic issues about women’s lives and health. I wouldn’t mind knowing how many researchers are tacking the problem of persistent disabling period pain (and I acknowledge my own inconsistency here about medicalising “natural” problems)? The best the Mayo clinic can come up with is take some advil and stop having periods. My favourite headline on a similar issue is from the 1998 New York Times Research Suggests PMS might not be a Psychiatric Disorder. Really, how nice of you to come to this conclusion.

My favourite recently encountered exemplar for all this is “fetal heartrate monitoring”. It turns out that “intermittent fetal monitoring” (checking occasionally to make sure the baby is doing well) is actually safer than the more common “continuous monitoring” – primarily because the latter more often leads to other kinds of interventions, while there’s no diagnostic benefit (1) (2) (3).

So why does it still continue? Short answer: it’s easier for the hospital, reduces potential liabilty, and generates more revenue. All good reasons I suppose, but ones that make me go grrrrr…

Oh… and about painkillers in the UK, Australia and lots of other more civilized places Nitrous Oxide is regularly used for mild pain relief during childbirth, but here in the US every midwife/doctor/nurse we’ve mentioned it to has said something along the lines of “No way. You’re kidding? You mean there’s another option? It’s an epi or nothing with us.” Well, almost.

And I continue to go grrrrr….

Mind you, this could, right now, just be a reaction to the stress of waiting and the fear of the unknown :-)

But welcome to this weird world of the US health care system. Of course we could go on….

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