1/14 Thread: Birth Trauma & Covid Restrictions. Be warned, I’m annoyed & can’t be brief. I have 2 points. 1. Our maternity system hasn't been serving us properly. Even pre-pandemic. It is exposing people to increased risk of easily preventable trauma. #WhoseNeedsAreBeingMet
2/14 2. We need to talk about the current restrictions. People shouldn’t labour alone. Ever. And in the context of a hospital system that was often traumatising pre-pandemic, it is essential that people have support in hospital with them.
3/14 I’ve had two babies. One before Covid and one right at the peak of the first wave. I had the first one in hospital. I left hospital injured and traumatised by what happened and how I was treated.
4/14 I planned to have my 2nd baby in hospital. But I was aware an institutional setting, like a hospital, & an emergency, like a pandemic, are the perfect storm for rights being infringed upon. So I sought alternative care & I found it in the beautiful community midwives.
5/14 And I had a wonderful experience. My birth went great. Mostly because of the support and reassurance of my midwife.
6/14 But even if it hadn’t gone great, the care and respect I received through a system that provides you with a familiar midwife, who I had grown to know and trust, who had time to spend with me, would have been protective. People giving birth in hospital deserve that too.
7/14 Our midwives deserve a system that lets them do what they can do.
8/14 Birth trauma is awful. You are trying to recover from a traumatic event, sleep deprived, in a vastly different body, hormones haywire, in a new role as parent. We need to give people the best chance possible to emerge from birth feeling strong, self-assured and powerful.
9/14 Confident new mothers benefit our entire community. They are shaping their children and our society. We cannot continue to ferry people through a system that is routinely leaving them traumatised.
10/14 Go to a new baby group and you’ll meet many shocked people telling you intimate stories of being shamed, or ignored, or dismissed. They talk about how they were TREATED during labour, or during delivery or when trying to breast feed. And that was before covid.
11/14 Those groups are online now, & people are labouring alone, their partners on video chat. Why are we doing this? There are 60,000 odd births every year in Ireland. We’re exposing all these people to an increased risk of emerging, from an already broken system, traumatised.
12/14 Trauma isn’t something you turn off. It can linger for years. It can disappear only to resurface years later. Preventable trauma is not something we should be exposing people to an increased risk of.
13/14 First: the current restrictions need to go. Safe alternatives MUST be found. Second: we have to talk about our maternity system and get going implementing our National Maternity Strategy. Nothing will be done until we demand it.
14/14 I don’t know how to demand it, but now that I know that birth can be supported in a respectful, safe way I want it for everyone. It starts with Covid restrictions and it can’t stop there. #BetterBirth #BetterMatternityCare
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