Doctor Or Midwife: Fill & Download for Free

There’s a lot of stuff going on during a labour and birth that OB’s don’t mention. With some doctors I’ve seen an approach that seems to be becoming more common, where some heartless doctors discount the mother’s input and fall back on their book learning and experience while viewing the labouring woman as a vessel to be emptied of its contents. Please note that I said some doctors. Some, not all.I know what you’re asking but I can’t give you a solid and interesting answer without generalizing and that’s something I’m unwilling to do.I can tell you that there is one facet of labour and birth that never fails to shock me, but that’s more so related to the parents. I’ve heard so many parents make huge deals out of the fact that their baby was born with the cord around their necks and while it’s absolutely valid that nuchal cord loops can cause complications in some cases, those cases are thankfully very rare. A good doctor or midwife can tell by the baby’s heartbeat whether or not there’s an urgent or complicated cord issue coming down the pipe, but as far as the cord being around the baby’s neck being an automatically critical issue, it’s not. I’ve managed nuchal cords in probably 75% of the births I’ve attended, and very few of them are emergencies.At the time of the baby’s actual birth, the doctor or midwife simply slides a finger down the back of the baby’s neck to feel for nuchal cord. If there is cord present then the doctor or midwife simply hooks the cord with that finger and slides it over the baby’s head and somersaults the baby out. At no time is the baby damaged or at risk for oxygen deprivation and, chances are, he or she simply won’t tell the parents. It freaks parents out and they make a bigger deal out of it than they need to.

Oh, dear God, yes. During pregnancy, you see your doctor or midwife every month, when they palpate your belly and listen to the baby’s heartbeat and so forth. Not so embarrassing, that. BUT. Then you get to the stage where you have “internal examinations”, where the dr/midwife checks your cervix. If there are any medical students or trainees, they get to come in and watch (you can say no if you want to) and they might get to stick their hand up your twat too!And once you go to deliver the baby, you might as well just be fully naked in front of the whole world. The good news is that everyone there has seen a thousand bodies just like yours and, if your husband/boyfriend is there, he’s seen you too. When my sister was in labor with her first one, she was hot, so she just shucked her hospital gown and walked around her labor room starkers. She’s a doctor and she knew it was just a body to the nurses, but our mother was embarrassed for her.For me personally, I grew up in the theatre, where you so often do not have time for such niceties as modesty—quick costume changes in small spaces right off-stage? Oh, well! So having a baby wasn’t too bad for me in that respect.

Often, they didn’t. The mother would be on the table, the staff would be washing the baby, the doctor would be looking for the afterbirth, and “Hey, here comes another one!” My neighbor, whose twins were born around 1970, had this experience, which was not at all uncommon.However, it was also possible, if the woman was gaining a lot of weight, that the doctor or midwife would palpate her abdomen and verify multiple body parts, or detect multiple heartbeats with a stethoscope. This happened to a woman my parents knew when I was a child. She was pregnant with triplets, which were diagnosed this way mid-pregnancy, sometime in the mid-sixties.