I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.
...thousands of women could be saved each year if they had access to skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth, and access to emergency obstetric care. Most of the interventions they need are simple, affordable, and highly effective.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.
In all of life, I've never heard of a C-section where a scalpel goes too deep and actually slices into the baby's forehead. Or even touches the baby's forehead.
I guess the headline is that you mustn't tough it out assuming it's 'normal' to feel incredible pain when you're preggo or post-partum, or be afraid to try a new specialist or a new kind of specialist if you have pain that isn't getting any better.
Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.
We need to do more to raise awareness of perinatal mental health illness and address the stigma that still surrounds it in our society.
One in five women experience a mental health condition during pregnancy, or in the year after giving birth. It can affect any woman. And it can be devastating.
There is no way out of the experience except through it, because it is not really your experience at all but the baby's. Your body is the child's instrument of birth.
