If  you already have a baby, do you ever think about the first day you knew you were pregnant? Assuming yours was a planned pregnancy, do you remember that first day of utter wonder and excitement when you first found out? And when you speak to other women, who you find out are pregnant, do you ever consider what effect your words might have on them? If you’re newly pregnant (or, come to that, staggering around with an enormous bump) do you ever find you have a strangely strong reaction to odd comments people make to you here and there, in the street, on buses perhaps, or when you bump into someone (literally!) in the supermarket?

One woman, who’d worked on pregnancy books in her publishing job, was knocked for six when she attended her first antenatal appointment. All her humour and sheer joy at being pregnant seemed to be misinterpreted as irresponsibility and she left the hospital wondering why she’d been so cheerful on the way in. Michael White, whose first experience of becoming a father had been pretty stressful, at least felt he was hearing some useful things during his partner’s second pregnancy… But it made him start doubting the wisdom of an extremely medicalised birth (for the sake of it). “I attended the NCT classes,” he explains, “and that’s when doubts began to creep in, especially as I’d learned of all the medical hardware, paraphernalia and drugs that were deemed essential nowadays for giving birth. I began to realise that the medical profession was perhaps, after all, just as horrified as I at having the responsibility for the birth.” When he and his partner, Pauline, decided to plan a homebirth they had plenty of negativity to counteract. Pauline remembers it well… “The reactions of the medical profession to my request for a home birth could take me through several paragraphs. Suffice to say, it made everyone very twitchy. Tactics used to dissuade me ranged from coercion to disbelief (“There’s no such thing as a home birth in this country”) and from the usual threats (“What if something should go wrong?”) to the sudden discovery of a problem with my antibodies which meant the baby should be checked by a paediatrician at birth!... none of which, of course, were valid. Afterwards, they both wrote to me, saying: “…we felt so sad for the vast majority of mothers (and fathers) who are denied the joy of such a precious and unique experience in our so-called civilised society. It is widely accepted that about 90% of women are able to give birth normally, without complications, so why don’t we keep the costly expertise and machinery for those who really need it?”

That was a good few years ago and things have moved forward dramatically since then. Experienced midwives around the country, who might previously have happily followed unnecessarily interventionist protocols (which evidence has since found are unhelpful) are rediscovering the beauty and smoothness of normal births which involve the use of little or even no machinery. Heads of midwifery, whose whole focus is on updating those very protocols and making them truly evidence-based are having to introduce quite radical changes – particularly since they’re repeatedly being reminded of the advantages of a non-medicalised, non-interventionist approach at conferences. New midwives are spending time studying the normal physiology of birth, instead of focusing mainly on pathology as they did in the very recent past. Normal, noisy, messy, but empowering and exhilarating births are again being witnessed in hospitals and midwifery-led birthing units around the country. And some midwives are also rediscovering the joy of attending a labouring and birthing woman in the privacy of her own home.

This historic shift back to an old, but forgotten wisdom, is taking place despite the enormously negative influence of popular culture and the media. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how birth is usually portrayed in soaps, magazines and films. The teenage mum in the recent film Juno had her legs up in the lithotomy position (even though there’d been no mention of any medical problems) – in a seeming defiance of gravity – and the heroine of Knocked Up was asked to lie down on her back when fetal heart decelerations where suddenly announced. If the loud beeping of the electronic fetal monitor had not scared the unborn baby into submission and sheer panic, then the fact of squashing her mum’s vena cava might have done the trick instead, because of course it’s highly likely it would have compromised the fetal oxygen supply. (At a time when most of us now know all about the benefits of active, upright birth – when these benefits are easily proven in physiological terms – why is it repeatedly being suggested in films that we need to act like a patient who is sick and desperate, like the proverbial stranded beetle?) High drama in childbirth was also portrayed in The Young Victoria...  The fact of it being a film which persuaded us of young Vickie’s wisdom and feisty but humble common sense did nothing to promote a belief in the value of unmedicated birth… remembering, of course, that it was Queen Victoria herself who set us all on the road to unnecessary intervention with her daring use of the new ‘chloroform’, which seemed to promise so much to women.

Just over 150 years later, quite a few of us are realising that putting up with the pain of labour and birth usually actually means experiencing less pain overall. But how much suffering have women had to endure to reach this point of greater understanding? And why has it taken us almost a hundred years to realise that birth is not, after all, the pathological, problematic process which that awful doctor, Joseph DeLee, believed it was? In case you haven’t heard of him, he was the persuasive American speaker who in 1920 recommended that forceps and episiotomy should be routine for every birth, that ether should be administered as soon as the fetus entered the birth canal and that ergot or a similar drug should be used to speed up delivery of the placenta. He was the one whose influence led to these practices becoming routine in most American hospitals. I suppose we have modern science, a few dedicated campaigners and a belief in the need for evidence-based practice to thank for our new age of enlightenment.

We now know that babies born by forceps are more at risk of being autistic or of committing suicide by violent mechanical means to the head (when they’re grown up). We know, as a result of numerous research studies, that tears heal up more effectively than episiotomies – and of course common sense tells us that while a tear is only a possibility, an episiotomy brings with it very definite consequences – stitches, with all that they mean in the immediate postnatal period, potential scarring of a delicate area of tissue, and occasional long-term sexual problems, not to mention a feeling of violation. We know that anaesthesia or analgesia administered late in labour is likely to slow down a birth (which explains why so many women are refused epidurals after all). And some of us even know the advantages of having a third stage (involving the birth of the placenta) without a drug – syntometrine – whose likely side effect is nausea. At last we’ve come to understand that instead of a cascade of interventions – either planned or inevitable – we can believe in a cascade of hormones. Some of us have realised that when treated with respect and intelligence our body functions beautifully during labour and gets on very efficiently with the job of birthing the baby it’s spent the last few months growing – without any outside help, thank you very much.

If you personally haven’t yet come to this understanding yourself, at least give your own or other women’s bodies a chance. Don’t destroy another woman’s magic with a few flippant and uncaring comments about your own previous experience. (OK, OK! I know you’re not like that…) And if you’re pregnant and have even a shadow of doubt, don’t let other people fuel that doubt and destroy the beauty of hope you’re holding within you. Let your body do its work and your mind may well be astonished by the result.

Sylvie Donna’s first book – Preparing for a Healthy Birth– was written to inspire and inform pregnant women hoping for a normal, healthy birth. It describes ten key steps to confidence and success and each point is illustrated with birth stories or comments – from women, men, children and professionals. The second edition, which will be called Preparing for a Healthy Birth will be out in a few weeks’ time and can be bought from Fresh Heart Publishing (www.freshheartpublishing.co.uk) – or any good bookshop near you!