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Birth experiences often fail to meet mothers' expectations

trevor.kenney — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:18:22 +0000

What expectant mothers envision for their birth experiences often isn't what they realize, according to a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge study.

The result is a drastic rise in Caesarean section rates that has alternative health-care providers, feminist advocates for women's health and mainstream medical providers all expressing serious concerns about the medicalization of childbirth.

In a paper titled "Best Laid Plans? Women's Choices, Expectations and Experiences in Childbirth," ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge sociology researcher Dr. Claudia Malacrida and co-author, doctoral candidate Tiffany Boulton of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Leeds, UK, found that, contrary to the belief that modern birthing experiences are consumer driven because women have the capacity to plan for, make decisions about and choose a particular type of birth experience, a woman's capacity to 'drive the machine' of birth is severely limited.

"In women's prenatal education, in their conversations with their friends and in the books and online media pregnant women read, there is a consistent sense that, if women simply prepare and inform themselves appropriately, they will be in a position to make the right choices when giving birth," says Malacrida.

"We may think that natural birth advocates have little in common with medical practitioners when it comes to discussing women's birth choices. However, each perspective assumes women can and will make appropriate birth choices. Our study found that in practice, such choice is often illusory."

Dr. Claudia Malacrida finds that as much as women prepare and educate themselves before the birth process, they still lack control of the experience once it begins.

Malacrida and Boulton interviewed 22 recent mothers as part of a larger project examining the culture of birthing in southern Alberta.

Every woman they interviewed was well informed about the birthing process, had attended prenatal classes, sought out information online and read popular books or magazines about what to expect in the birthing room.

From these interviews, it was clear that all the mothers expected to make birthing choices based on the knowledge they had acquired.

"In our interviews, virtually all of the mothers described hoping to achieve 'as natural a birth as possible', which for most meant a vaginal birth with no intervention," says Malacrida. "A lot of the medical and lay discussion seems to assume that the rise in C-section rates, for example, rests with women who are 'too posh to push'. On the contrary, much medical and popular writing positions natural birth as the ideal, responsible choice. Thus, women are given a strong message that natural is best for mom, and especially best for baby."

Many women prepared birth plans, hired doulas and attended classes on non-traditional birthing methods, all in seeking a sense of control over the birthing process and to limit medical intervention.

"Once in the hospital, however, women described a cascade of intervention that began with induction or epidurals and spiraled outward," says Malacrida.

In the end, Malacrida and Boulton contend that although the majority of women plan to have as natural a birth as possible, their lived experiences differ significantly from their birth plans.

Further, the implication that women have choices in the birth experience, rather than empowering expectant mothers as effective and active consumers, creates a situation where they are instead culpable for the increasing medicalization of childbirth.

"Because women are so pressured to work towards this idealized natural birth, when their hospital experiences do not work out as planned, they often blame themselves," says Malacrida. "Women in our study expressed distress about failing as mothers, and not living up to their expectations, or the expectations of family and friends. The magic of birth seemed to elude them. Instead, they felt like they had let themselves and their babies down."

The paper was recently published in Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine.

This story first appeared in the June 2013 edition of the Legend. For a look at the full issue in a flipbook format, follow this link.

Building a real-time digital reliquary

trevor.kenney — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:00:58 +0000

Written in Old English by an anonymous poet, The Dream of the Rood is recognized as one of the oldest poems in the English language and among the most beautiful religious works. What many don't know is that much of the poem is carved in runes (ancient symbols) on a 17-ft high stone cross in a Scottish church.

The 8th century Ruthwell Cross is historically linked to two other crosses: the 11th century Brussels Cross, made of oak and thought in the Middle Ages to contain a relic of the "True Cross" from Christ's crucifixion, and the 8th century Bewcastle Cross in England, which is carved of stone. All three bear elements that are thematically related to The Dream of the Rood poem.

In the past, Anglo-Saxon historians were required to travel to Belgium and Great Britain to study these artifacts in all three dimensions. Despite the gains of modern digital photography, the crosses are difficult to capture photographically because of their condition and inconvenient locations. Additionally, even a very high-resolution image cannot capture subtle details, like the techniques used to carve the cross.

"It's not 100 per cent clear whether or not the poem was carved when the Ruthwell Cross was carved," explains U of L English professor Dr. Daniel O'Donnell. Being able to examine the crosses in all three dimensions is the only way for researchers to assess this and many other questions.

To improve access to the objects, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge team is co-ordinating an international effort to create a high-tech alternative. O'Donnell, a medieval literature specialist, is collaborating with U of L professors James Graham (New Media) and Dr. Wendy Osborn (Mathematics and Computing Sciences), computer programmer and U of L graduate Joel Rigby, and researchers from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Leeds and the Università degli studi di Torino, to create an online environment that will allow researchers to view and interact with the crosses virtually, in real-time and in three dimensions.

"After examining the multitude of available new media technologies used by humanities researchers and wanting to create an innovative online system that would significantly improve the standard of interactivity, visual accuracy and authenticity-of-experience, we settled on developing a proprietary digital information retrieval system that would work in combination with a collection of next-generation video game technologies," Graham explains. "We felt that the third dimension was the next logical direction for hypermedia-based research to go, as it allows users to see and intuitively interact with virtual representations of objects they wish to know more about."

To render the crosses in 3-D, high-tech laser scanners will be used to capture every detail of the historic artifacts. The digital scan files will then be converted from the 3-D x,y,z data into a highly efficient texture files – called normal maps – that will then be applied to the surface of the 3-D cross models.

The Visionary Cross research group is also completing an innovative system that will allow researchers to interface directly with external online databases while navigating within the 3-D game environment. Students and researchers examining the relics within the virtual game environment will be able to directly access specific online database information – and even add to that database – simply by clicking on the relevant location on the 3-D virtual object.

Not surprisingly, the project will need heavy-duty technological infrastructure. That's why Osborn, who is the director of the Southern Alberta Digital Library and an expert in data management, is examining the best ways to store the data involved to make its retrieval efficient.

"We're still working on proof-of-concept, so we don't have huge amounts of data yet, but when we go online and people start to add their own data, it could be terabytes of data that come into this," she explains.

To put this in perspective: 1 terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes (GB), and your personal computer probably has about between 1-5 GB of memory. In addition to the massive volume of information, the project will also involve many different kinds of data, which also presents a tremendous challenge, Osborn says.

The Visionary Cross Project is being funded by a two-year, $23,000 grant that Graham, O'Donnell and Osborn received from the U of L Community of Research Excellence Development Opportunities (CREDO) program. The researchers have also applied to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for funding for the next stages of the project.

While the Visionary Cross Project may seem like a radical diversion from most humanities research, O'Donnell explains that humanities researchers have relied on computers since the middle of the 20th century for things like statistical analysis and library cataloguing. But humanities researchers haven't just been the benefactors of technology – they've also created it.

"For example, an awful lot of what allows XML to work essentially comes out of work done in humanities computing," O'Donnell says.

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Birth experiences often fail to meet mothers' expectations

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