MYTH 1: Birth trauma is just women’s unrealistic expectations of birth not being met.

FACT: What most women want from birth is a healthy baby and a birth experience where their needs and human dignity are respected. They expect to be spoken to politely, be asked permission before vaginal exams are performed, drugs are given or their baby is taken away. They expect that anaesthesia will work during surgery, which doesn’t seem too big an expectation, does it? This myth is closely related to –

MYTH 2: You’re just disappointed that you didn’t get a lovely natural birth.

FACT: Yes, it can be disappointing to not bring your child into the world in a way which is safest for them and you. But women are prepared to do whatever it takes to birth their baby and if that means surgery, so be it. What women are not happy about is being treated like cattle on a conveyor belt, or experiencing unnecessary interventions which led to that surgery because of staff bullying, rigidly applied protocols or convenience. The birth and the baby are separate entities.

MYTH 3: Only women who’ve been raped or abused as children experience birth as traumatic.

FACT: This one lets careproviders blame women for being traumatised which is utterly unacceptable. For some women, a birthrape may indeed follow other experiences of sexual trauma but the fact is that traumatic birth is traumatic in, and of, itself in a discrete package. To deny this assumes that it is normal for women to be humiliated, terrified and have no control over their birthing experience and that we are at fault if we find this traumatic.

MYTH 4: Just concentrate on your healthy baby, and get over it, can also be: You’ll forget all about it as soon as you see your baby.

FACT: If you are raped, being given a present at the end of it doesn’t wipe out the rape. It may give you very ambivalent feelings about the gift but it doesn’t somehow cure you of the trauma and to suggest that women are so facile and stupid is offensive indeed. What this usually means is that the person speaking is uncomfortable with the pain they see visible in the woman and wish she would stop making them feel that way.

MYTH 5: A “good” birth will cure you after a “bad” birth.

FACT: Does loving, consensual sex make up for rape? It may help restore some faith in humanity and in your own body, but nothing wipes away pain and fear except work on the issue.

MYTH 6: Hospitals never do anything that’s not necessary so you must have needed the intervention.

FACT: If hospitals only performed necessary interventions then we would have much lower rates of all of them. Inducing women for example, because they are perceived to be 10 days past 40 weeks when term is actually 38-42 weeks, is obviously poor practice and leads to the cascade of interventions resulting in drugs, surgical births, damaged and premature babies as well as shellshocked, traumatised women.

MYTH 7: A healthy baby is the only outcome of birth which matters.

FACT: And how is that healthy baby (and healthy is a loose term covering as it does anything other than death, apparently) to be cared for by a woman with a great gash in her belly? Or a vagina cut to ribbons so she can’t walk? Or no milk coming from her breasts because the drugs and trauma have temporarily slowed production? How is that baby to be parented in 6 months time when the mother has constant flashbacks from PTSD or deep depression of PND? Don’t babies deserve healthy mothers as well?

MYTH 8: But women consent to having those things done, so why complain about it afterwards?

FACT: For a start, a lot can happen in a hospital without consent of any kind, informed or otherwise. Assuming that you can say no at all is naïve in our hospital system. And many women give their consent for interventions which they have no idea will eventually lead to them developing PTSD and being suicidal. Would you really choose that outcome if you knew about it? How many surgeons are honest with their clients about what induction really leads to? For surgeons, surgery is obviously not a poor outcome; for women it often is.