Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Dutch birth model

If your childbearing years aren’t over yet and you’re interested in trying labor the natural way, you might want to visit the Netherlands and take notes from the 92 percent of women there who apparently manage to have their babies without the assistance of an epidural. There was an interesting story on NPR Thursday about the state of maternity care – and of health care in general – in the Netherlands (where the infant mortality rate is also about 25 percent lower than in the U.S.). Go here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92641635 for a quick read or listen.

4 comments:

cannamoma said...

I had an all natural childbirth with my little girl. 24 hours of labors and no drugs whatsoever. best choice i ever made.

Annie Addington said...

Wow. Congratulations on that full-day-long drug free labor. I managed to get Will and Owen here naturally too, but their speedy labors (4 and a half hours for Will and 6 or 7 hours of true labor -- plus plenty of false labor preceding it -- for Owen) made that a comparatively easy task.

Unknown said...

Have you ever noticed that those of us who gave birth without meds talk about how great it was and people who chose to use them talk about how awful it was? Just an observation... LOL

shannon said...

I also had two natural births, thanks to the idea being posed and illuminated in my Lamaze classes. It was amazing and recovery was easy; I was walking down the halls pushing the bassinet an hour after delivery.
It's so good for us to tell our success stories and get the word out there that it is not only possible but such a positive experience for mom and baby. I do hear many "good" epidural stories which lead into the epidural being awesome with horror stories of pain before it. . . .
I wish more people would take Lamaze (and Bradley, right?) classes to just explore the idea.
Thanks for the link, Annie.