Letters: Childbirth with and without ‘fads’

These letters appear in the 30th January 2016 edition of The Independent

(TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)

What a nonsensical article from Hannah Fearn (“Hypnobirthing, placenta pills and the paranoid world of birth fads”, 28 January). Full of negativity: “childbirth is a dangerous time”; “most traumatic physical experience”.

The NHS encourages pregnant women to attend classes to prepare them for childbirth, knowing that an informed, relaxed woman is more likely to have a better birth experience.

I’m pleased to hear the NHS is thinking again about home births. Most women are far more relaxed in familiar and non-medical surroundings, quite safe in the knowledge that medical back-up is there if needed.

Giving birth is for most of us the most wonderful experience, but if sadly it goes wrong we are lucky these days to have excellent medical care available (in our society at least). The best of both worlds; so stop scare-mongering please.

Anne Haywood

Staveley, Cumbria

OK, I’m with Hannah Fearn on placenta pills, but how on earth can she describe doulas as a “modern fad”? Women have had other women with them in childbirth for as long as we have been human beings. Paid doulas may well be a new thing, but we live in a highly commercialised society, where women live far from their mothers, sisters, aunts and old village ladies, so a development like this is natural. There is plenty of evidence that doulas can make a difference to the outcome.

It’s also not true to say that non-medically trained people can’t “know better”. Often doctors only see childbirth when something has gone wrong, whereas a doula who has seen hundreds of normal births will have a repertoire of ideas and suggestions.

I used self-hypnosis when my younger son was born 23 years ago, so again this cannot be a very recent fad. I found it helpful but not able to remove all pain. However I’m sure it helped me to get “in the zone”, that place where 40 per cent of mothers get to when they don’t need pain relief in labour.

By all means, cry out against fads in labour. Pubic shaving, enemas and episiotomies have all been fads which have caused discomfort or worse to mothers and have been imposed on them by medical professionals. But don’t inveigh against actions which actually allow women to take control of their own labour.

Camilla Herrmann

Hoxne, Suffolk

I’m six months pregnant and I think Hannah Fearn’s article is great. I know three women who wanted natural births and ended up with emergency caesarean.

For years women died in childbirth, so although a “good” birth, ideally without intervention, is appealing, no one should be a hostage to that ideal. Ultimately it needs a safe delivery without unbearable pain.

Name and address not supplied

Hannah Fearn is to be applauded for her healthy scepticism of current pregnancy fashions. However, considering the UK has one of the highest levels of death in labour of all developed nations, I would question the assumption that these trends are in themselves responsible for the ebbing of women’s trust in the NHS.

Emily Lambert

London SE18

Penny Joseph states that “women have successfully given birth for thousands of years” (letter, 29 January). She neglects to state that women have also died while giving birth for thousands of years.

“Mother” Nature is utterly callous and brutal. Provided those individuals who are well adapted and evolutionarily “fit” survive long enough to pass on their genes, nature couldn’t care less about the less “fit” individuals who fall by the wayside. Odd-shaped pelvis? Placenta blocking the birth canal? Nature isn’t bothered, as it doesn’t want those tendencies passed on anyway.

I notice that people who bang on about the natural wonders of childbirth rarely transfer that attitude to appendicitis or toothache (both part of nature).

Helen Clutton

Dorchester, Dorset

How abusive priests were exposed

Much as I admire the team at the Boston Globe who exposed sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and whose investigations are now dramatised in the film Spotlight, I must take issue with Globe journalist Walter Robinson, who told David Usborne: “We were still the first paper to break the code on this whole mess” (“Brought to light”, 28 January).

The Globe’s first story was run in 1993, according to Robinson. In the mid-1980s, the extraordinarily brave reporter Jason Berry and equally courageous Richard Baudouin, editor of The Times of Acadiana, in Lafayette, Louisiana, began reporting on paedophilia by Catholic priests and the Church’s cover-up, calling for the local bishop to be replaced. Local Catholic business people and priests tried to put the paper out of business by organising an advertising boycott. Fortunately they failed.

Meanwhile, the National Catholic Reporter was also reporting on the abuse scandal from 1985 onwards, when other papers across the US ignored what was being said by victims. The Reporter spotted patterns – abuse by priests, cover-ups and denial – and kept digging.

The Globe is a much bigger operation, with bigger resources, and could shout louder. But the smaller organisations, on the case nearly 10 years earlier, deserve as much credit for running with this while they were put under unrelenting pressure. So do the nuns in Louisiana who first blew the whistle when they realised the bishop kept shifting an abusive priest from parish to parish.

Catherine Pepinster

Editor, ‘The Tablet’ London W6

Benign legacy of empire

Whatever judgements may be made about the British empire (letters, 25, 26, 27 January), its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations provides some redress for the past and has attracted countries that were not former colonies, and suspended others that fell short of its high ideals.

Its influence may have faded in a changing world, but it is still valued by its members, and it would be tragic if this benign legacy of empire were to be undermined by intemperate rhetoric and a new self-righteous intolerance.

John Eekelaar

Oxford

As a descendant of Guyanese slaves I find it incomprehensible that there is still no UK memorial to the victims of the African slave trade.

As the Holocaust memorial is applauded by Parliament, could it be that a similar memorial for African slaves would be too close for comfort to those whose families’ entrenched wealth may well stem from that bloody source?

Amanda Baker

Edinburgh

Why can’t the fools just vote for us?

Peter Johnson (letter, 28 January) has got it spot on! Labour has “almost no chance” of winning the next election because of our “undemocratic electoral system”. Except that this is the very same system under which Labour won three consecutive victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005.

Or it’s the fault of the “Tory press” which “brainwashes” the electorate. I think Mr Johnson might be surprised to find the proportion of Independent readers who voted for the Tories in 2015. If only we were all as clever as Mr Johnson and could see through this “continual drip-feed” of anti-Labour comments!

And lastly, Jeremy Corbyn will deserve the votes of “most decent people”, that is people who think exactly the same as him and Mr Johnson.

In two short paragraphs, Mr Johnson manages to show that particular combination of arrogance, smugness and contempt for fellow citizens who hold different beliefs that so characterises his section of the left.

Andrew Kinder

Kingston, Devon

Do single-sex schools boost girls’ results?

Since when has The Independent permitted overt sexism from its journalists? In her piece on single-sex education (29 January), Alice Jones describes how I “mansplained” my views on the benefits of girls and boys being educated together. I wonder what the reaction would have been if a female headteacher’s views had been dismissed in this way.

She goes on to refer to research from SchoolDash to assert that “it is now fairly indisputable that girls educated at all-girls schools do better academically”. If she had read to the end of the research piece, she would have found the following: “These results don’t necessarily mean that single-sex schooling has a positive impact.” There are “any number of other unmeasured variables”.

Richard Cairns, Head Master

Brighton College

To infinity and beyond

Although I have never played Go, I am sure it is an immensely complicated and sophisticated game. I dispute, however, that it has an “infinitely greater number of potential moves” (report, 28 January), as the board is finite.

Alex Lewis

Lemsford, Hertfordshire