If all births are medicalised then what function does a midwife have?
Judith Woods meets Michel Odent, the controversial obstetrician who argues in his new book Do We Need Midwives? that increased medicalisation means women are losing the ability to give birth
Could there be a common experience that divides women more than childbirth? No two labours are ever the same, yet each one is such a momentous event that decades later mothers - grandmothers – relish the telling and retelling of their stories. After all, we are the experts.
I confess then, that when I go to meet Michel Odent, the controversial London-based French obstetrician, author, pioneer and agent provocateur, I am rather looking forward to dusting down my own Hieronymus Bosch-hellish anecdotes of extreme birthing, NHS-style.
The 84-year-old has just written a book entitled: Do We Need Midwives?, out this week, in which he avers that increased medicalisation means women are losing the ability to give birth, to the potential detriment of humankind.
Odent has made it his life’s work to test and push boundaries. His years in charge of a maternity unit in Paris and his subsequent establishment of the Primal Health Research Centre in London saw him introduce ground-breaking ideas that are now received wisdoms.
It was he who promoted the idea of water births and low tech birthing suites, skin-to-skin contact after birth and the instigation of breastfeeding within the first hour.
When he speaks, medics listen, even if the general public don’t always like what he has to say. In recent years he made headlines for suggesting fathers ought not to be present at births (among other things, they disturb the focus and emotional equilibrium the mother needs) and that women should not be given standardized drugs whose long-term effects, he says, are unknown.
First fathers, then drugs, now midwives - what other essential element of most modern mothers’ birthing experience would he do away with next?
“Take it from me, Michel, we do need midwives. Lots more of them!” I begin. “I should know; my first nightmarish induction was so shocking and brutal and swift, without a midwife to be seen, that I developed post traumatic stress and - “
Odent smilingly waves his hand at me to stop. Nonplussed - if anyone ought to be fascinated by the minutiae of my childbirth traumas it surely ought to be an obstetrician - I take this as a cue not to shut up but to change tack.
Well, Michel, second time round, I asked the hospital to assure me that there would be a midwife available when I went into labour and they said it was a guarantee they couldn’t give, so I asked for an elective Caesarian but then - .”
A charismatic, distinguished man, with a French accent as rich as ripe Camembert, he looks politely uninterested and murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like agreement. This seems odd for a man who says we are jeopardizing the species with too much perinatal intervention.
Giving his new book such a provocative title is, I begin to suspect, a ploy to ruffle feathers and draw in an audience not usually interested in obstetric policy. His contention, it emerges, is not that we should do away with midwives altogether - rather, that we need them more than ever. In particular, to become “protectors of the evolutionary process”, shielding women from doctors who try to intervene in births, and ensuring they have the space and peace to give birth naturally.
“When I ask ‘do we need midwives?’ it is a real question,’ he stresses. “If all births are medicalised then what function does a midwife have? What sort of a midwife will we need?”