One of the reasons I left the UK was because I could no longer deal with the NHS propaganda that made women feel like they were either failures as women or just weren’t particularly interested in breaking
a sweat during the birthing process. The former touches a nerve in even the most non-maternal woman and the latter conjures up images of a woman who hands her baby to a wet nurse as soon as it emerges from the bloody wound.
Not particularly into the whole maternal, mother nature thing (which, one has to admit, is not so much mother nature as total fad these days), I knew I would have a c-section ā€“ it’s unnatural to try and get
something that big out of such a small exit. Whether the gynae was looking after his schedule or my continence is irrelevant. When he told me the head of my foetus was too large to exit ‘naturally’, I was relieved to have the medical back-up for my instinctual beliefs ā€“ after all who said a small slice across the lower abdomen to extract a living being isn’t natural.
There are revelations that follow. I do, however, have to pre-empt them with a disclaimer: I still believe in the advances of medical science enough to believe that a c-section is the only way and I would never go back and change a thing.
