One of the Facebook pages I follow contacted me to contribute an article on why nurses seem to be so misinformed about natural childbirth after I commented on their post of the same subject. The following is what I came up with:
My favorite semester of nursing school was my maternal-child class. I spent a couple of days on a post-partum unit, a couple in the NICU, and was scheduled to do two days in Labor & Delivery. In both days there, I saw zero vaginal deliveries. None. Zip. Nada. My instructor scheduled me for a third day on the unit so I could observe vaginal deliveries. I saw two: one with an epidural, one natural. The woman with the epidural had a quick delivery, but I just remember watching the epidural placement and thinking how painful it looked and how awful it would be to have that tube just sticking out your back.
The second delivery was much longer. She had been laboring for so long, she was completely exhausted. She was wearing an oxygen mask, and was in bed on the monitors. She looked miserable. The nurse and midwife were coaching pushing, counting to 10 three times during each contraction. The father wept when his baby was born, and we took the baby straight to the warmer. I remember thinking how cool it was that my classmate and I got to do the newborn exam all by ourselves, since the nurse was busy helping the midwife control bleeding. As far as I could tell the mother was starting to hemorrhage. Personally, this is one of my biggest regrets. I stood between that woman and her child. If I could go back now, I would take that baby and put him right back on his mama’s chest and encourage her to feed, which would help with the bleeding. In fact, if I could go back there would be a lot of things I would different.
When I found out we were pregnant with our first child, I embarked on a journey of enlightenment. As a nurse, I thought I was pretty educated about pregnancy and childbirth. I had no idea what I didn’t know. I knew nothing of birth hormones, of how our bodies are MADE to birth babies, how empowering birth can be when the mother is educated, informed, and in control. I had to ask myself, “Why didn’t I know any of this?”. After much thought, I’ve realized a few things about my education.
First, nursing education is based upon and centered on the medical ideology of birth. Nurses work closely with doctors, and therefore must know what to expect and how to treat clients under medical care. Our school only had so much time to teach us the massive amounts of information necessary for hospital births, including what to do in basically any medical emergency, as well as pre and post-natal care. Education on natural birth processes could easily be deemed not as important because most women don’t birth that way in a hospital setting, where a nurse would be working. What nurses are taught, what I was taught, is consistent with what nurses “need” to know.
Basically, it goes back to the mindset of birth in America. Birth is treated as a medical problem with medical treatments. And as long as it is viewed such, nursing education will be based on that medical model. Only as we continue to educate the public and change the general opinion of how birth “has to be” will we change the way nurses are educated. In the mean time, we can affect change by being a voice in local hospitals, loving educating nursing and other healthcare providers, and spreading the news that women deserve the right to birth without fear.
