Have you accessed a hospital for care during pregnancy and birth? Why?

As soon as you're pregnant  we want to take lots of blood and do lots of tests, many of which are unsubstantiated. We will also blackmail you into a so-called dating scan which is notoriously inaccurate and begin to poohpooh your faith in your body by telling you that just because you *know* when you ovulated or conceived, we know better.

We will also make a big fuss out of anything we possibly can at this point with a general policy of removing your faith in yourself and putting you into a panic so you accept any help we *ahem* "offer" because we preface most things with some form of "you don't want your baby to die, do you?" We are quite likely to tell you that there an anomalies in the ultrasound and possibly kid you that you will have placenta previa even though in the early stages of a pregnancy we can't really tell that at all.

As your pregnancy progresses, we will call it "uneventful" if nothing of any interest to us occurs. We're not interested in how you bond, any dreams you may have or any clear instinctive signals you're receiving because our machines are much more important. So we don't care if you tell us something is wrong because how could you know? But if we perceive something to be "wrong" by our standards we will pretty much hound you to *do something* about it even if you know in yourself that everything's fine.

We'll start annoying you about having the Glucose Tolerance Test done at some point despite it being notoriously inaccurate and you having no history or evidence of any issues with this. Once you have the test, if it's borderline we are more likely to grade you "highrisk" than ask you if you ate a banana before it. We will also palpate your belly and make wild guesses about a breech baby and tell you that caesarean is the only way to go omitting to mention Optimal Foetal Positioning all the while.

We will offer you classes in understanding hospital birth which will clearly delineate for you all the drugs you can "choose", how you *might* be a lucky mum who can breastfeed for a few months and what will happen to you after your caesarean. We will frown upon you having any evidence-based knowledge and using it to frighten the other *ahem* patients with it in class.

No questions about *why* induction is necessary will be allowed. We know best, after all. You will also have been hearing all through your time at the hospital about all the things we will and won't *allow* you to do but we probably omitted to mention just yet that we want you to be induced if you dare gestate any longer than 40 weeks.

So your belly is large and lovely by now and it's the end of your 3rd trimester. We have probably told you that you need more ultrasounds by now despite the evidence that they are harmful to babies and unnecessary in the process. We might be wanting to clear up the placenta previa (Wow it spontaneously moved!) or the breech issue (Gosh, look at that, the baby moved head down!) or we might want to completely bullshit you and tell you the cord is around it's neck or (no shit I've heard this) that we can see meconium in the liquor. Yes, not just technicians but magicians!

About the 38 week mark we will begin to tell you how if you don't go into labour soon we will *have* to induce you. You might feel a little perplexed by this since you and the baby are demonstrably healthy despite the number of ultrasounds forced up on you both but you begin to feel the fear anyway.

At your 40 week appt you are offered an innocuous sounding procedure called a "stretch and sweep" despite being perfectly healthy, having a lovely healthy baby, and the risk of infection every time yet another person sticks their hand in your poor vagina. You might chug along a bit more in your pregnancy with people on the street asking you why you're daring to be so thoughtless and risk your baby's life by not allowing the hospital to do their thing.

At your 41 week appt, you're told by the midwife or surgeon you've never met before, that you're putting yourself ahead of the health of your (still perfectly healthy) baby and made to feel selfish and uncaring. You *ahem* "agree" to be induced. Much like a woman with a knife to her throat *agrees* to be raped.

 You go home and spend a few days assaulting your partner for sex that neither of you want, eating curry that burns your arse off the next morning, nipple twiddling till you can pick up Radio Australia and nothing works. You shamefacedly submit to the induction despite clear evidence that your uterus is slowly contracting and your cervix is gently opening. Everyone is lovely to you now that you're being compliant so as soon as the artificial contractions pick up we will *ahem* "offer" you some pethidine. We will do this periodically rather than sitting with you and praising/encouraging your coping skills.

We will also *ahem* "offer" to strap on monitors that are proven clearly to not enhance outcomes but rather tend to lead to caesarean. After you are exhausted and we have criticised your crappy cervix enough for refusing to open to our timetable we will up the ante by *ahem* "offering" you an epidural which if we opened a journal or 3 we would know leads to cementing poorly aligned babies (did I mention that you've been on your back for about 8 hours by now?) and straight to caesarean. We omit to tell you this. Don't want to scare the poor hysterical uterus, err, patient.

After your epidural has been inserted (maybe a few times before it's right) we will leave you alone and tell you to rest in a room with bright lights, a squeaky door, nowhere for your partner to sit comfortably, strapped up to monitors and, if you're really lucky, with your baby's heart beat magnified through the monitor so you feel like you're underwater anxiously listening to the sea. The monitors will probably not work properly and we will have to tell you off a few times for not being sufficiently still to allow them to work even if they're faulty and it's nothing to do with you.

Periodically another stranger will come in and thrust their hand into your vagina, record the data, and tell you some number or other. At a certain point, if you're very lucky we might notice that you're fully dilated so then we will possibly turn down your drug relief while keeping the syntocinon on full bore and make you push your baby out lying down through your compressed pelvis. Of course it's not very likely that you will reach this stage because we know that your body isn't designed to give birth but we are designed to deliver, so more likely another stranger will come in and tell you in mock-sad tones that you're defective and need to be surgically amputated of this baby.

We might tell you a few complications like you'll never have another vaginal birth now (total crap) you might lose your uterus in the surgery (not unlikely) and you might die. This seems like no biggie right at the moment because you're probably wishing you could just die. We will also impress upon you the urgency of all this as your baby is going to die if we don't cut you RIGHT NOW and then we'll have a leisurely stroll down to the theatre while you shake and cry, your partner goes into catatonic shock and we all just chat like we're on the bus going home.

In the OR it's really clear who's important lovey, and it's not you or the baby. It's us! We're the complete strangers all looking at your naked body while we are dressed from head to foot and clattering scary looking instruments around. If you're really lucky once they've amputated your very surprised baby you'll get a a glimpse of it's arse over the shower curtain but most likely it will be whisked past you (you have no medical qualifications so you don't get to touch that baby, dearie) stuck under cold lights on a metal surface to hopefully breathe to our timetable despite us having chopped it's lifesupport system off in midcycle.

We will now take care of your baby by putting it in a plastic box and wheeling it away leaving your partner to decide between you crucified on the table or the screaming, terrified, distressed baby in the nurturing plastic box. We will stitch you up, chatting about the footy or our holidays, and tell you how fortunate it was that we were there to take care of you. You will be a stunned mullet through this as we don't tell you before your operation that your baby doesn't belong to you now. It's a finders keepers policy. We found that baby hanging around in your belly so we get to keep it.

Some hours later, hopefully under 24 but not necessarily, another complete stranger will hand you a bundle with a baby in it. Hopefully it's yours but they are much of a muchness and unless there are clear signs of ethnicity we won't be too bothered whether or not it's the one we amputated from you. Someone, or several different someones, will probably pop in and offer you bad advice about breastfeeding and tell you that you'd better give the baby formula because it's x number of hours since the "birth" and the baby will die if you don't.

Now we realise that you might be feeling a little upset by missing out on one of those fabled Natural Births but we know that it's just because you're a silly romantic woman who doesn't know what's good for her. We have produced a Healthy Baby for you which oddly enough had Apgars of 8 and 10 even though it was massively distressed. (And remember, nothing was compulsory, you could have said no at any point but you didn't. You are entirely responsible for all this.) Well it wasn't all that distressed but we need to use whatever tools we can to help you decide what's best for us...oh, we mean you.

At some point we will "allow" you to leave although not without performing any number of tests on our baby, oops, *your* baby. Hopefully we will have completely removed any sense of competency from you so you happily submit to the Maternal and Child Health Nurse when she tells you that you need to switch to formula right now "or your baby will die" (is there a theme here???). You will also be really happy to see us in your next pregnancy and immediately allow us to schedule another amputation so that you don't mucky up our timetabling and time and motion needs by insisting on bloody well labouring! You girls are so thoughtless!

We hope to see you again soon!


PS If *you* get PND you're obviously defective and it's nothing to do with us. And it certainly isn't PTSD!

And the moral of the story is? Stay home. Stay safe. Homebirth.