Regular medical birth is the same process globally, especially in the West, like the U.S. However, some other locations have alternative but closely related delivery methods like the midwife-attended hospital birth in Switzerland. I had a first-hand experience of the Swiss midwife-attended hospital birth when I had my first child.
It wasn’t anything like the normal hospital births in U.S. hospitals. Instead, I was encouraged by the midwives to listen to my body and move around as my labor approached. They brought oils and showed my husband how to ease off my pain through massages as I labored in a 700-litre bathtub with sea salt and dried rose petals. They also brought me lots of foods and drinks and performed acupuncture on me – anything to make labor easy for me, and it worked.
And then a slight problem occurred. My labor slowed, and the doctor had to come in to find out the reason. An ultrasound revealed the baby was stuck with its head tilted sideways in the birth canal. To remedy this, the midwife had me sleep 20 minutes each on both sides until the baby straightened out.
Then my water broke, and I got into hard labor. 17 hours into hard labor, I asked for an epidural as it seemed pretty necessary at that point. When I was dilated to ten centimeters, the midwife quietly but swiftly and professionally set about my delivery and helped me deliver a healthy baby girl into the world as my doctor stood and watched.
After a short while pushing, my baby girl was born, and the midwife placed that gooey bundle of arms and legs directly on my chest. It was such a marvel for my husband and me to see her tiny little fingers, mane of dark hair and her miniature tongue quivering inside her tiny mouth. We were enthralled and immersed in the beauty of our newborn for about 10 minutes, after which I suddenly realized I didn’t know the sex of our baby.
The midwife asked me to check, and after pulling up the umbilical cord, I realized it was a girl. My husband had the honor of cutting the umbilical cord, and the midwife weighed our baby and instructed my husband on how to bathe her. Our child was eventually checked into the delivery room. My daughter never left my side for the next five days as we slept together in our hospital room. We finally went home after a relaxing time at the hospital.
Moving permanently to Switzerland is not our intention, but we definitely wouldn’t mind having the rest of our kids the Swiss way.
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POSTED IN: TALK. TAGGED: ALTERNATIVE HEALTH REMEDIES, GIVING BIRTH, HAVING A BABY, SWITZERLAND