Paul Malpas

Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them.  There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body.  After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.

To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so.  But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system.  But this should not be the case.  Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances.  Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.

Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance.  A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics.  Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter.  Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants.  Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.

On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong.  Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation.  The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong.  Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good.  Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year.  If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..

You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark.  To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out.  To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.

I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence,  My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth.  I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.

So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine.  She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago.  Let us hope that they have now got their act together.

This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in.  Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics.  An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.

Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily.  Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed.  Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital.  An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second.  It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course.  My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”.  The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one.   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon.  I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine.  I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become.  Alleluia!

As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen.  The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.