t-8: Free birth!

Technically, I missed a countdown post yesterday, but since I'm up at 5am and it's not fully light yet, we'll just count this as yesterday.

Regular readers will know that I've been scanning in old photos. Here's one of my previous cat.



She died about two and a half years ago, when she was roughly six years old. She had mouth cancer. Probably too much Redman. I kept telling her to cut back.

Anyway, we got this cat because we thought she was a boy. We wanted a boy cat. This kitty had the cutest little fluffy kitten testicles - so neither we nor the crazy German cat shelter woman who gave us this cat suspected that she was anything other than male.

We'd neutered our previous cat a bit too young and stunted his growth, so we held off giving this cat the snip until he started displaying signs of sexual maturity. This didn't happen and it didn't happen. We were quite poor and the cat was quite healthy, so we never took her to the vet.

Then "he" came on heat at about 18 months. We felt pretty stupid. Kitty was pregnant. We pretended it was planned.

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Just like in human pregnancies, people like to offer advice during cat pregnancies, too. Everyone kept telling me that the cat would sneak off and have her kittens and I wouldn't know about it until I noticed she was missing. And then that I should leave the kittens alone and that she wouldn't want me around.

I knew this was the conventional wisdom.

But one night, I was playing Tetris while the Vol-in-Law was off doing his weekend warrior stuff (he was in the Territorial Army at the time) and she kept pestering me. Well, I was pretty annoyed with her pestering because I was doing really, really well at the Tetris. I was on a roll. I was set to break my old record by a mile. All the little pieces were falling into place. I was in the zone.

But the cat wouldn't stop. And I looked up from the screen to find that there was a kitten head emerging from her rear. I paused the Tetris. I didn't really know what to do. But as a smoker, I was sure that my next step involved a cigarette. So, I went downstairs to grab a smoke (I didn't smoke in the house)

She followed me.

Turns out she wanted a birth attendant. So I sat with her and reassured her and helped her break the amniotic sack and encouraged her to lick her first little kitten into breathing. (She was hopeless as a kitty mother.) And then I sat with her for the next one and the Vol-in-Law came home and we both were with her for the third kitten. And she let us watch the whole thing and help her.

And then, it was after midnight, and it seemed to be over. I called VolMom - as it was her birthday - to wish her happy returns of the day and to inform her that she had predicted correctly and the kittens were born on her birthday and then we went to bed. There was another kitten, unbeknownst to me, but he was dead when I found him in the morning.

We kept one of the kittens - here's Other Cat on her 7th birthday:



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Although my cat did not choose an unassisted delivery, I mention all this because I've just been reading about the Free Birth movement in The Guardian. Women who choose to labor and give birth completely alone (see the Unassisted Childbirth website). Some of the people who give birth on their own do so because they're afraid of being pushed into interventions they don't want. Some do so because they're probably just freaky.

To me, giving birth is as personal as having sex," says Sarah, 24, from Essex. "You don't want someone else sitting there watching you." Sarah chose to "freebirth" her first child, now two, at home.

Helloooo, you didn't pregnant all on your own did you? There probably was somebody else in the room, I reckon.

I'm pretty private and I don't really like other people touching me. I've never enjoyed back rubs from friends, for example. And there may well be times during labor that I want some private time and I need to make sure I ask for it. I also am very clear that I don't want midwives yelling at me telling me what to do (I'm quite contrarian - so screaming Push! at me might just slow things down). But birthing alone sounds unnecessarily dangerous - and I'm not sure whether to blame slightly addled headed free-birthers or the medical establishment who can't deal with women who need a bit more space. Apparently some of this is a reaction to the obstetrical insistence on doing things their way...

Although it is never going to be a majority movement, the issue of the over-medicalisation of birth is pushing freebirth on to the mainstream agenda in the US. A slogan war has broken out, with natural birth websites selling T-shirts which read "Pizza boys deliver. Women birth", while the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists gave out bumper stickers at a meeting last year, bearing the opposite message: "Home delivery is for pizza" (From The Guardian)

Well, we're planning a home birth - and depending on length and how hungry folks are - we may opt for home delivery, too.

8 days til baby Cletus and a large veggie and prosciutto pizza

UPDATE: A friend of mine posts on Alabama caving to the medical lobby and disallowing midwifery- it's stuff like this that pushes women of a certain disposition into unassisted childbirth.