Minibabble: Blessed relief – two stories of birth

Posted on December 3, 2025December 5, 2025 by suki

The Babblery

The Babblery

Minibabble: Blessed relief - two stories of birth

00:00 / 15:24

Interviewing a doula about natural childbirth was an intensely personal experience for Babblery host Suki Wessling. She’d planned on natural birth—twice. But the American system of birth isn’t set up to allow births to take their own unusual paths. While doula Anne Wallen talks about what could have happened, we explore what did happen, first in a birth led by an obstetrician, then with a midwife.

“ I hesitate to tell my birth stories to women thinking of having children when they ask. I’m likely to say, The great thing about birth is at the end, you get a baby out of it!” ~ Suki Wessling

“ No OB wakes up in the morning and says, I want to ruin someone’s birth today. Like, whose birth can I wreck today? Like, that’s just not how they got into this job, right?” ~ Anne Wallen

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I hesitate to tell my birth stories to women thinking of having children. When they ask, I am likely to say, “The great thing about birth is that at the end, you get a baby out of it.”

But I have known women who can tell their birth stories without fear of scaring young women. Listen to doula Anne Wallen:

Hi, I’m Anne Wallen and I am the director of Maternity Wise International. I am the mom of six and the grandmom of two, and I’ve been finding myself in maternal care roles for the past 30 plus years. I’ve watched women just breathe through their baby’s delivery. They didn’t push, they just breathed and their body did it for them. And when you’re able to just gently allow your body to do its thing, you don’t tear, you don’t have pelvic floor injuries as often, your body will do it slowly and gently.

I went into my interview with Anne pretty sure that I had a good handle on issues of women’s bodily autonomy in our laws and culture. But as Anne spoke, I felt like I was looking at one of those optical illusion posters where first, it’s just a jumble of blobs, but if you squint just right, you see a person.

As I heard Anne’s words, I squinted and saw my first birth experience.

No OB wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to ruin someone’s birth today. Like, whose birth can I wreck today?’ That’s just not how they got into this job, right?

Podcast release notifications

EPISODE RELEASE: Trusting Our Survival Mechanisms

Nov 19

When I first talked to doula educator Anne Wallen, I mentioned the phrase “women’s bodily autonomy” and she responded with a twinkle in her eye: “Do you really want me to go there?” I did. Listen in to this fascinating conversation about the American way of birth.

Read full story

Listen to a mini-version of this episode focusing on the joy and beauty of natural childbirth: “The Way of the Doula”

The first one

I was raised on my mother’s birth stories, which included medical malpractice that ended in the stillbirth of twins. But those birth stories happened in the 60s, and I went into my own first pregnancy certain that our local system of birth had a good option. The bad option was the Catholic hospital, which was part of a healthcare system that had declared that they would literally let a woman die rather than removing fetal tissue from her body. So that wasn’t an option.

The “good” option was a birth center run by another large health system. We toured it, and although it looked very “medical,” that didn’t scare me. Raised by a historian mother who told hair-raising stories about birth in early-modern Germany, I was fine with my OB having all the tools at her disposal. I hadn’t taken into account the way that care in a medical setting quickly can turn to management.

When you’re talking about care, care is where you’re allowing the body to do its thing and you’re supporting, right? Management is where we say, ‘Oh, it’s not doing the thing we think it should be doing right now, or at the strength or at the frequency that we want it to be doing. Well, we have medicine for that, we have a procedure for that.’ And so when you start to enter in these interventions, this management, that starts to create additional issues with the biological process. Anytime you’re interfering in a biological process, you’re gonna have dysfunction.

And therein lay the essential problem that I wasn’t educated to see: When doctors have both lawyers and tools, they are more likely to use the tools to intervene in a process designed to happen without them.

Oftentimes, because obstetricians have the highest number of potential lawsuits and everything else, they are taught to be really fearful of birth. They’re taught to manage problems before they happen and all of these thing are probably—they’re unintentionally causing issues.

Medical birth rule #1: Follow the rules

Any midwife can tell you that each birth is unique; babies come in the manner and speed that they decide. But medical births have rules. Early Friday morning, my water broke with a pop and a rush that woke me. I woke my husband and we went to the birth center. They examined me and agreed that my water had broken but that I wasn’t having contractions yet. They gave me a sheet of rules that determined when I should come back.

We went home, and later, we kept the dinner date at my parents’ house a 15-minute drive from ours. Why not? I was feeling tiny contractions, but I could easily talk through them. The next day I consulted the rule sheet and finally called them later in the day when my contractions hadn’t gotten any stronger. They advised me to come in.

Now, if you’re a woman who has chosen birth with an OB in a hospital setting, you are primed to follow rules. As Anne points out, we trust our doctors and especially when this is a completely new situation for us, it’s hard to question their deep knowledge.

In a hospital setting, a lot of times they’re just so used to doing things their way, their routine, that they forget that they still need informed consent along the way. And patients don’t know that they can take their consent back. So just because you’ve given implied consent doesn’t mean you’re stuck in doing exactly whatever they say or whatever they want. It happens all the time that people are given medications that they didn’t know they were given. Procedures are done on them that they didn’t know were done on them.

So I went to the birth center fully prepared to continue with the “plan” that I’d written up for my OB, but my plan, it turned out, was never meant to happen.

Medical birth rule #2: births progress in a certain way

My birth wasn’t going as planned, so my “plan” suddenly no longer applied. Unlike a midwife who probably would have talked me through the options, the doctor declared that it was time for contraction-inducing Pitocin. Because my water had broken already, they needed to hurry things along because of risks to the baby.

So let’s say her gestational period is 42, 43 weeks, which some people, that is their natural length of gestation. That’s how long they take to bake a baby, right? Well, they’re never gonna get to 43 weeks if they have a hospital birth. And they probably won’t get to that if they have a home birth because you risk out and the midwife can’t keep you home.

Who was I to question this? My kind OB (and I still believe she was kind) wanted to make sure I had the healthiest baby possible. So instead of the mobile, relaxed labor I’d wanted (the lovely jacuzzi was never an option because my water had already broken), I was confined to bed with an IV and monitors.

Medical birth rule #3: more information is better

In our interview, Anne pointed to monitoring as one of the ways that hospital births often go awry. Midwives don’t like monitors. Because they view birth as a natural process, not an illness or an injury, they’d rather wait to see if the body is able to do its work unhindered.

But in a hospital, I had no real option of saying no to the IV, no to the Pitocin, no to the monitors.

So then you go in, you do an induction, maybe your body says, ‘No, we’re not ready. You could gimme all the Pitocin you want. You could break my water. You could do all these things, but we’re not ready here.’ And then you have what’s considered a failed induction, because baby won’t tolerate it. Mom’s body’s not tolerating it, not performing to the way that we’re expecting it to in a hospital setting.

Pitocin is dreadful, and it’s one reason I don’t want to tell younger women my birth story. Having subsequently given birth without it, I can tell you that giving birth in a typical situation doesn’t actually have to be painful in the sense that we usually think of pain. Anne describes it as “orgasmic,” which is a much more accurate description.

But Pitocin is pure pain. Pitocin bring waves of crushing pain that tries to push out a baby before your body is ready. And every time one of those crushingly painful contractions happens, the monitor says scary things about the fetal heart rate, which raises alarms embedded in the doctor’s training, both medical and legal. At one point during that long, long night, the doctor looked at me and said to the nurse, “She wants meds.” And thus anything natural was banished from my birth experience.

Medical birth rule #4: The doctor knows more than the body

I love the part of the interview where Anne talks about singing our survival mechanisms.

Women in a coma have given birth and they’re not consciously pushing. There’s something called a fetal ejection reflex, and the body will do it. When I’m training, I singsong it: I’m always like, here’s another survival mechanism! There’s so many of them. For example, you walk into a hospital situation if you’re feeling negative vibes from the doctor, or if you’re feeling pressured or if you’re feeling at all like you’re not safe, your body reads all of that and your body says the environment outside of where baby is right now is not a safe place to bring the baby and so we’re gonna just shut this process down until we feel safe.

You do see that in animals as well. A mama kitten having her babies, and then there’s some kind of threat that comes along that mama will stop having her babies. She’ll pick up the ones she’s given birth to bring them to a safe place. And once she’s got everybody in the new nest, she continues to have the rest of the babies. And so this is a survival mechanism that we love to appreciate.

Her description of how the human body reacts just like a cat’s hit home for me. My family gently nurtured the births of countless mama cats in our home when I was growing up (back then in the Midwest, no one spayed their cats). What happened to me at the point when I entered that birth center is exactly what Anne describes. My body simply said, “no” while my doctor said “yes.” According to my husband, after she attached the suction cup to my son’s head, she had to place her foot against the edge of the bed in order to rip him from my body.

Perhaps you think I’m being unfair in using the word “rip.” But that’s literally what she did. That baby was in no way ready to come out and my body wasn’t ready to let him out, but my OB was very ready to go home.

I had a client who told me that her doctor actually scolded her and told her—and this was a female doctor, too—if you don’t prioritize your baby’s safety, you’re being selfish. And so you get from the gentle manipulative coercion to the outright bullying, and in any other circumstance that would never be tolerated, right?

In the end, I got a lovely baby. He wouldn’t eat for two days, and I couldn’t walk for six weeks. When I went to my first appointment with the midwife I’d use for my second birth, she was appalled looking at my chart.

“I would have sent you for a c-section,” she said.

The second one

At the beginning of the third trimester, my midwife said I needed just that: a c-section. My baby was twisted into a position impossible for natural birth—just the sort of situation that modern medicine is built for. In the early-modern Germany of my mother’s studies, I would simply have died in labor.

But because my second one loved nothing more than to test boundaries, he decided to turn around at the last minute. At my pre-op appointment, the surgeon said he wasn’t needed and sent me home to have a “natural” birth.

I was devastated. That first experience had so primed me to believe that my body couldn’t do birth, I almost felt like calling the surgeon and begging him to reconsider.

We’ve been taught to be fearful of birth, but that backfires. And sometimes it’s that self-fulfilling prophecy where it didn’t have to go poorly, but because you’re expecting it to go poorly because putting yourself and your body in a situation where you’re expecting it to go poorly, it does. And so then you end up needing help. Whereas if you just believed in yourself and your ability and stayed in a place where you’re safe, it might just unfold very easily.

What she said

Once again my water broke early and once again the birth center sent me home, but the midwife wasn’t concerned—she just told me to relax and look forward to meeting the new baby. Two days later in late evening, my contractions started. At 2:30 am I woke my husband, telling him, “This baby is coming NOW.” We barely made it to the hospital. My midwife called out as she was putting on her gloves, “Don’t push! Breathe, don’t push!”

One of the requirements for these functions to work is the ability to be vulnerable and the ability to feel safe. It’s kind of like orgasm. In fact, it’s very, very much like orgasm because the same chemicals are at play. And if you’re in a room with strangers with bright lights shining down on you and it’s an unfamiliar space, you might not feel comfortable having an orgasm.

I didn’t have to push. There was nothing like pain. That baby sliding out of me, the midwife just ready to catch him, feeling my body knowing what to do—it was simply a feeling of blessed relief.