A few years ago, someone told me a story of an Irish woman who was in her eighties. This woman was a committed Catholic who attended Mass daily, and yet had voted Yes to introducing abortion in Ireland in 2018. The reason for her vote? The fact that she experienced birth trauma decades previously, during one of her labours. The person who told me this story was openly flabbergasted that someone could vote to introduce wide-ranging abortion purely because she had experienced birth trauma. For me, however, the link was a lot clearer, even obvious. To understand why, you first have to understand how scarring birth trauma can be, and this is perhaps best explained by considering what an amazing experience a positive birth story can be.

I’ve been through four labours. My first labour was somewhat traumatic, my third was super dramatic and also took place during Covid-19 so had all those complications surrounding it, and my second and fourth were absolutely amazing experiences. 

It’s hard to understand how something so painful (and yes it’s excruciating, though TENS machines, entonox and epidurals are where it’s at is all I’m saying) can be an amazing experience, but there can be something almost transcendent about a labour and delivery that goes well. One friend told me that once she gave birth she wanted to climb up on to the roof of Holles Street and triumphantly display her baby, Lion King style, to all of Dublin. Another friend told me that she had heard ahead of time that once she’d given birth she’d want to talk about her delivery to anyone who’d listen for hours at a time. I can totally identify: generally, I’m the last person to want to do stuff like climb onto roofs and shout about how awesome I am, and yet my second and fourth labours made me feel incredibly powerful and badass and I’ll talk about them forever if you give me half a chance.

Set against this high, the great damage that can be done by a traumatic labour is perhaps easier to understand. Rather than feeling strong and powerful, you feel helpless, ignored, and mistreated. You’re so scared – scared for yourself, scared for your baby, perhaps scared for your partner and how they’re feeling and reacting and coping. You don’t understand what’s going on – sometimes because it’s an emergency, but often because staff are busy and don’t take the time to explain what’s happening. And then when it’s all over, and you have a baby and you’re overwhelmed with joy but also with confusion over what happened, and you tentatively explore whether you can process your labour experience, chances are that all you’d be told is that you and baby are both alive and well and that’s all that matters.

Thankfully, we are coming to a better understanding of what birth trauma looks like. We are beginning to understand the importance of mental health during the perinatal period, and organisations such as the Association for the Improvement of Maternity Services are drawing attention to the importance of consent during pregnancy and labour. However, it is deeply unfortunate that organisations responding to these issues are all radically pro-choice. I have seen real examples of women who were straightforwardly pro-life until they have a traumatic birth experience. As they process the experience, they find a new tribe of people and organisations who validate their experience, listen to them, and advocate for them. Throughout the whole process, the woman inevitably becomes pro-choice.

This journey from pro-life to pro-choice via a traumatic birth experience probably has to be experienced to be fully understood, but it has its roots in the fact that women’s experiences matter, how, and not just whether, babies are safely delivered matter, and autonomy and consent matter. A woman who is processing birth trauma may encounter and examine these concepts for the very first time, and if the environment in which she is encountering them naturally applies the same concepts to support a pro-choice worldview, it’s not a huge stretch to see why the woman in question would also find herself leaning pro-choice as a result.

All this means that there is a strategic pro-life reason to plug ourselves in to the conversation surrounding maternity services in Ireland. We can’t leave this arena to pro-choice people alone, because women and their babies deserve quality care, but also because refusing to show up in this area feeds a narrative that links pro-life concern for unborn babies with a lack of concern for pregnant women. No one is saying, of course, that there is no need for interventions during labour in order to protect one or both of the woman and the baby. However, this straw man is sometimes deployed by pro-life people when these issues are raised, which is immensely frustrating.

We need to do better. Losing people to the pro-choice side because of a lack of understanding of the importance of quality maternity services is such an easy thing to fix. The pro-life movement should play its part.

Muireann