What Women Don’t Know About Pregnancy & Labor Hurts Them

"I didn’t really know what to ask.”

I take a prenatal yoga class. I’m not crunchy by any means, I just dig the stretching. If there’s anything the first time around taught me, it’s that it is good to stay limber for labor. And, as I quickly learned, prenatal yoga has an added side-benefit: The people who teach it and the people who take it come out with the most hilarious — and downright frightening — stuff about pregnancy, labor and delivery.

Unexpected revelations

At my first session I overheard one student tell another, “Yeah, I was driving to work and I, like, puked all over the steering wheel. So I had to stop at the hospital. They told me I have kidney stones or something. I thought I was just really morning sick.” Tip to new moms to be: Morning sickness doesn’t come with searing flank pain that sends you to the toilet in agony, or something.

Our teacher is also a doula. One of the girls in the class had hired her as her doula, so when her time came we all asked how she made out. “Oh, I don’t know,” the teacher/doula remarked. “She asked for an epidural and after that she just told me I could go ahead and leave because, you know, she had the drugs. So what was I there for?”

The last I checked doulas aren’t designed to be drug providers, they are meant to provide emotional support to a laboring woman regardless of how her labor process unfolds.

Despite it being two days later, the teacher/doula still hadn’t received an update from her client. This didn’t seem to phase her, though. “I’m going to try and call her today,” she remarked, almost off-handedly. Then it got awkward. “You just don’t know how your body will handle the pain,” she went on. “I was in labor for 36 hours with no medication. But not everyone can handle that. And once you get the epidural, you know, your labor could stall completely and you’ll wind up with a …C-section.”

I inwardly groaned while the rest of the women, mostly first-timers, grew bug-eyed in fear. Raising my hand I commented, “Actually, that isn’t always the case. I was in labor for 29 hours when my midwife advised me that my body was fighting the contractions and I should get an epidural. I had my son via a vaginal delivery 9 hours later.”

You know how yoga is supposed to be non-judgemental? Yeah, teacher/doula didn’t get that memo either. “But, that isn’t always how it happens,” she snapped. “Everybody is different.”

“Yes, everybody is different,” I agreed with a smile.

For instance, if I felt consistent pain in my upper-right abdomen I’d voice concern to my medical provider about possible gallstones, a not-uncommon ramification of pregnancy. Yet, when one girl in class followed a mention of her constant pain with the comment, “But that’s normal, right? It’s like, my uterus up there,” yoga teacher said she ought to get some Reiki to “shift” the pain. The two, like, left it at that.

Another woman struggling with round ligament pain severe enough that she couldn’t hold a simple pose was advised that she had “tight hips” and to lean into the stretch more accurately. I’m pretty sure she almost puked on her mat.

I’d say that all of these women need better relationships with their healthcare providers. Obviously they have issues relating to their pregnancies that deserve more accurate attention than that of a doula who thinks that once the epidural needle comes out, she’s off the clock. But, the reality is that they probably wouldn’t fare much better with their doctors or midwives, because most of the time they don’t even know what questions to ask.

Modern sex education teaches women how to prevent pregnancy

“I kept telling the doctor,” I overheard one girl tell another, “I don’t know what I’m doing. My mom is an hour and a half away. My mother-in-law is an hour away. I’m doing this myself. I’ve never been pregnant before. I don’t know what’s going on!”

For the record these are college-educated women with well-established careers. Most of them are in their early thirties, married with mortgages. Yet, when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth they are clueless to the point of feeling helpless. What’s worse, they’re making themselves totally dependent on a system that doesn’t want to give them the time of day beyond billable hours. And they aren’t alone.

American women are grossly uneducated and under-educated when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. This is primarily the fault of educational institutions that, under political pressure, gear sex education curricula as far away from the actual process of reproduction as humanly possible. For these women, sex ed was little more than instructions on how to put a condom on a banana and where to locate the closest Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. They remain ignorant of pregnancy and childbirth because they were taught to be ignorant of such things by the same institutions that told them they could and should be anything — scientists, lawyers, doctors — but mothers.

A 2014 study conducted by Yale University revealed that a gross majority of American women are “in the dark about their own reproductive health.” 20% of respondents were unaware of the impact of advanced maternal age on the ability to conceive. 25% had no clue that obesity, smoking, STDs or irregular menses had an impact on fertility. A “significant number” of participants held gross misconceptions about female biology, with some believing women continue to produce new eggs throughout their lifetime.

The study revealed that most women seek out information from their women’s healthcare providers. Ob-Gyn doctors earn on average $277,000 per year by spending roughly 15 minutes with each patient. If a good number of women are uncomfortable talking about sex in general, how can they possibly ask the right questions of someone with whom they spend a quarter-hour a year? What’s more, given women’s sheer ignorance regarding their own reproductive health, how would they even know the right questions to ask?

“So what did the Doctor say when you told her you were clueless,” the other girl in my yoga class asked her nervous friend.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Actually, she was really weird. She said I should make an appointment with a midwife if I wanted more of an explanation of how everything worked. Like she didn’t want to take the time to talk to me.”

Disenchanted, the girl finally did decide to meet with a midwife who spent more time with her than the doctor. “She was nice,” the girl admitted, “but I don’t know —I still feel clueless. I guess it’s my fault. I didn’t really know what to ask.”