20 weeks +

We had our appointment with our midwife today. It was supposed to be Monday, but the remnants of Tropical Storm Fay presented a weather problem to meet with her. We were going to reschedule for this coming Monday, but we'll be evacuating on Sunday due to Gustav. So today was it. The baby's heartbeat is good, the position of my uterus is right (height at about belly-button level), my blood pressure is good, I have no swelling, there are no problems with my urine, and my weight is about 131 lbs. In other words, everything is as it should be.


My Grandma passed away on Tuesday. In light of all the suffering she was going through, with new problems seeming to crop up every day, (and in light of the storm currently heading directly toward my grandparents' house) I believe her passing was an act of mercy by God. If I've ever experienced a living example of redemptive suffering, it was through her. I will miss her terribly, of course, but I know in hope that she is numbered among the saints, part of the Church Triumphant (as they used to say). And part of the beauty of being Catholic is that I know she is present every time Mass is celebrated. In the Liturgy we gather together with Christ - in the Word and especially in the Eucharist - and with all the angels and saints as we praise God together. I am saddened knowing she won't be able to hold my children, knowing how very excited she was about becoming a Great-Grandma, but I am consoled knowing that she will now be able to watch them grow - much better than she could have here.


Grandpa, Grandma, and I at our wedding rehearsal dinner

Giving Birth Naturally

I found this great website called Giving Birth Naturally. I thought that the articles listed under "Birth" on the left sidebar were really informative. I encourage anyone who is unsure about natural childbirth to take a look. It clears up some myths about birth - even about pain necessarily being part of the process.

The Bradley Method

For the last three months or so of this pregnancy, Josh and I will attend classes once a week on the Bradley method of natural childbirth. When I mention this to people, many have not heard of it before or say that they took Lamaze classes or some kind of prenatal classes at the hospital. What I like about Bradley is how comprehensive it is. From their website, they put it this way:

Bradley® classes cover it all: nutrition, exercise, being more comfortable during pregnancy, the coach's role, introductory information about labor and birth, advanced techniques for labor and birth, complications, cesarean sections, postpartum care, breastfeeding (we do recommend La Leche League meetings) and caring for your new baby. Our classes cover a few topics that are rarely discussed in other classes like: how to reduce the need for an episiotomy and the likelihood of a tear, how to avoid needing a cesarean, how to make the best of it if a cesarean is necessary, and what the coach should do if the baby is accidentally born in the car.

Sounds great to me! And the coach = Josh, if you were wondering. I told him I could call him "coach" if he wants.

Something else I've read about the Bradley method that makes a lot of sense to me: no one would ever enter a marathon without training for at least three months; why would any woman who really wants to have a natural birth - a labor-intensive activity - not train for just as long? Of course!

Since we're at 19 weeks, we won't be starting the classes right away, so I don't have any personal experience to add right now - except to say that I'm excited to get started. If you'd like more info, please refer to their website. I recommend reading the sections called "Why take Bradley classes?" and "Why 12 classes?"

What Women Aren't Told about Childbirth

I just read this article online, and I hope you will read it, too. Many of you may find the information shocking; I've heard it all before and I'm still shocked when I hear about the things that go on in hospitals surrounding childbirth. Anyway, I recommend that all women - even if you won't be bearing any more children and especially if you will - become more informed about childbirth in this country. The more we know, the better choices we can make (and the more informed we can help others to be). [Everything in italics is my emphasis.]

Here are some highlights from the article:

The survey Listening to Mothers II (LM 2) was released in 2006 and reports on U.S. women's childbearing experiences.... "The predominant picture that emerges from our data," the report states, "is of large segments of this population experiencing clearly inappropriate care." The majority of women ended up attached to IVs, catheters and fetal monitors. They had their membranes artificially ruptured and were given epidurals. Most of these women had little understanding of the side effects of these interventions, including cesarean and medical inductions. The report also shows that though women understood that they had the right to refuse medical interventions, few did, and many received interventions, such as episiotomies, without their consent.

Informed consent is one of the very basic principles of health care ethics. (A side note on episiotomies: while tearing may occur during birth, natural tears are likely to be smaller and heal faster than a cut in the perineum made by a doctor/nurse. Except in rare situations, there is no evidence that having an episiotomy is helpful in any way. See here for more info.)

A large percentage of women -- 76 percent of all women in the LM 2 survey -- wind up getting an epidural for pain during labor. Many doctors consider epidurals to be the standard of care for treating the pain of labor.

Despite the fact that half of the interviewed women felt that birth should not be interfered with unless medically necessary, the vast majority received medical interventions. Many women reported experiencing pressure to have their labors induced, to accept an epidural and even to have a cesarean. A full 73 percent who had an episiotomy were not given a choice in this decision.

The World Health Organization recommends that the rate of cesarean births for any country not exceed 10 percent to 15 percent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the U.S. rate at over twice that: 30.2 percent, and the LM 2 survey suggests this number is on the rise. The United States is also one of the only wealthy countries where the maternal death rate is climbing.... Among developed countries, the World Health Organization reports, 29 have better infant mortality rates than the United States, including Slovenia and Cuba, and 41 have better maternal mortality rates.

Obstetricians are surgeons with an expertise in female reproductive pathology. They often provide routine gynecological care, but when it comes to childbirth, their training has primarily prepared them to actively manage a high-risk birth or to intervene medically and surgically when something goes wrong during a birth. Though they may have attended hundreds or even thousands of births, few obstetricians have much experience with unmedicated births.... Indeed, their professional association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), last year went so far as to issue a wholesale condemnation of out-of-hospital birth.

(For being trained as medical doctors, it's scary what Ob/Gyns DON'T understand or know how to do, according to the reading I've done.)

Childbirth educators often talk about the "cascade" of medical interventions: the likelihood that once you receive one intervention, like Pitocin, you are more likely to receive another intervention, like an epidural. Many women never question these interventions, though they frequently are linked to babies being born by cesarean section. "In an unmedicated labor," Doyle says, "the body releases its own oxytocin, which stimulates contractions. The brain responds to the pain of these contractions by releasing endorphins. When synthesized oxytocin [aka Pitocin] is administered through an IV, contractions can come on quite suddenly, and these contractions are often longer, more intense and more consistent than the body's natural endorphins can keep up with."

And really scary:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never approved Pitocin for the use of augmenting labor...

For most women, the fact that hospitals have virtually cornered the market on childbirth and maternity care means that birth itself can assume the form of a medical problem rather than a normal human process. And, since most mothers are giving birth in a hospital room surrounded by highly trained doctors and sophisticated medical instruments, a low-risk, unmedicated labor can rapidly convert into a complex surgical case.

With all the pro-choice rhetoric in this country, it seems obvious to me that women should be given more information so that they are able to make the right choice, especially when it comes to giving birth!

On the Child as a Gift, and Mary

I've been posting so sporadically because Josh and I are finishing up our last class in our masters program, and since it's a summer class, it's more intensive. We're currently taking Mariology - which is the study of Mary - and recently had to complete either a research paper or a book report for the class. I chose to read a book by Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and Hans Urs von Balthasar called Mary: The Church at the Source.

I mention this because I came across a passage in Balthasar's section of the book that I wanted to share with you:

For their part, parents who believe in God know without reflection that by themselves they can never be the adequate principle of the production of a human being. They give God the glory and thank him for the gift of their child, just as the child thanks them and, together with them, God, for himself. In a sound anthropology, then, the two things are inseparable aspects of a single whole. A sound anthropology does not sunder the parents’ fruitfulness into a purely physiological half and a separate spiritual-ethical half; the two aspects belong together in man, because man is inseparably body, soul, and spirit. Nor does it seek to sift out human causality from divine causality. It would be highly inexact to say that the parents produced ‘only the body’ of the child while God added the soul (if it were that simple, animals would have greater procreative power than man). Nor does it make any sense to separate the ‘spiritual soul’ (deriving from the parents) from the ‘person’, which comes from God. Man is one, and the parents and the Creator cooperate in bringing him forth in an unfathomably mysterious way.

I suppose I had always thought of a simple division of labor, it you will, in which the parents provide the matter (the body) and God provides the form (the soul) of the new human person. In thinking about Balthasar’s words, however, I realized what a large role any given set of parents really have in the procreation of children. It really is mysterious how a being that once did not exist suddenly does exist and how human persons are given such great responsibility to bring into existence (with God) new beings. Just ponder that for a moment...

Then I thought about what this statement has to do with Mary, and I realized what a large role Mary really had in the Incarnation (when God became Man in Jesus Christ). She cooperated with God in such a way that she contributed, in a certain mysterious sense, to who Christ is – in his body and in his soul. She of course did not give Christ his divinity, but if we remember that Christ remains both God and Man for all eternity, just imagine how pivotal the role of Mary is. She is properly called Theotokos, the Mother of God (and has been called such at least since the year 431). Furthermore, if she is the Mother of Christ, and the Church is the Body of Christ, as Paul writes in his letters, Mary is also the Mother of the Church - our Mother. There's so much to think about here!

Balthasar continues in the next paragraph:

One owes thanks for what one has received as a gift. Now, in the bringing forth of a human being there is – objectively, at least – an intention to give. Morally healthy and responsible parents do not procreate and bear a child primarily for themselves, which would be a form of egotism, but abandon themselves into the great movement of life, which gives itself away to further generations and consents when the newly begotten child becomes independent, “leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife”, and becomes a giver of the gift in his own right. What is begotten is one who can beget: such is God’s deepest intention in creating.

My first thoughts in reading this passage were about how we explain why God created human persons in the first place: because he loves us. Having a better understanding of time and God’s timelessness than I did as a child, I thought I understood such logic. However, I think Balthasar makes a deeper point. We can all understand, as human beings, the idea of loving a child before he or she is even conceived. We can see that the child is a gift, not something that can just be apprehended at will. When I thought about that, I understood the idea of God creating us because he loves us. We do not have to exist for God to love us; he can love us before we exist, just as a couple awaiting the gift of a child already loves the child before he or she exists.

When Josh and I were, not too long ago, pondering our future and where children and our education fit, the best advice we received came from a former professor of mine at the University of Dallas. He wrote to me in an email, "I would not put off having children. In the larger scheme of things, this is the most important thing you can do, with huge eternal consequences." Wow. That statement really hit us. Of course participating in the creation of new human beings is vastly more important than any degrees we can ever earn! We'll still try to pursue Ph.D. work, but if it doesn't work out, it won't be the end of the world by far. Perhaps it just means God is calling us to another way of life.

And when we thought about life that way, we definitely loved this child before he/she existed. In fact, as God does with each of us, we loved this child into existence.


*Source: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 127-128.