The Trauma of a “Perfect Birth”
A “good” birth used to refer to a safe delivery. But impossible expectations, obsessions with control and a birth culture gone awry have left many parents feeling like theirs wasn't "good enough".
A quick note: This piece discusses birth, and while we don’t go into too much detail I want to acknowledge that it can be a big and tough subject. All the experiences shared here refer to deliveries that were largely medically uncomplicated. But if this is a topic can can feel overwhelming to you, maybe skip this one.
For my grandmother a “good birth” was one you survived. For my mum, it was any delivery that left you unscathed enough that eventually stopped pissing yourself when you sneezed. By the time I fell pregnant a good birth was something you could curate yourself. A life spent as a type-A overachiever had taught me that excellence could be assured through planning, study and hyper vigilance.
My mum experienced pregnancy as a passenger in her own body. She was dictated to and directed by male doctors who were confident they knew what was best. I don’t think it was until I had my child that anyone really asked how she felt about her births or showed an interest in what she celebrated and what still made her wince. When she describes my birth it feels more like a medical procedure than a natural act. I was a foreign body being removed. But mine would be different. And so I set out to design a perfect birth.
For months I immersed myself in courses, podcasts, personal essays and other birth content. My social feeds changed alongside my body, offering an endless stream of beautiful, thin, rich, glossy women birthing their babies like poems. They sobbed, sang and glowed. Some genuinely might have been having an orgasm. Mum had an extraction, I prepared for a ceremony. I’d be strong, powerful and serene. Welcoming my child with a gentle smile and calibrated parasympathetic nervous system.
By all measures, I had a good birth. My body largely did what the birth educators said. There were minimal interventions, I was on my feet within a few hours and home the next day. Most importantly, my daughter was healthy. I barely even pissed myself.
But in the weeks afterwards, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. All that birth prep had helped me know what to expect, but it also set expectations. Yes, my birth was “good”. But was it good enough? It didn't play out like it did online or involve any of that near-orgasmic ecstasy. And deep down, in a part of myself where I lock away my worst feelings, I felt a little let down.
Celeste is a sustainable fashion director and designer who gave birth to her son Noah earlier this year. Like me, she approached birth with a level of preparation usually reserved for a masters degree. “I did a hypnobirthing course that gave this idea of what a perfect birth should be. And got the sense I should be able to prepare to get exactly that,” she explains.
Yet despite drinking all the teas, eating all the dates and doing all the yoga, her birth didn’t go as expected. “I ended up having an emergency caesarean after 60 hours of labour…There were people who said, don’t worry about having a birth plan because none of it will go to plan. The baby will be born however they’re going to be born. I blocked that out, I didn't want a bar of it because I wanted to have a natural, drug-free birth. Turns out I wanted all the drugs and needed every single one of them.”
Thankfully Celeste and Noah made it through. But the experience left her deeply shaken. Although surprisingly, it wasn’t the physical stress that lingered. Rather, she found that the inability to have the birth she had prepared for left her feeling “despondent and upset”.
That stress was compounded by feelings of judgement from the community who had previously supported her. “I was part of a group meditation circle leading up to pregnancy with other mums also preparing for a home birth. We were really aligned with the perfect births we wanted. There were strong anti-hospital vibes, and a couple of women were going to free birth.”
To her shock, that circle fractured when she didn’t meet their expectations. “I went to the next circle after having Noah and a lot of the girls didn’t want anything to do with me because I had a caesarean. I wasn’t in the club anymore of what this perfect birth looks like. It was very weird and very highschool.”
When Kaity gave birth to her daughter six years ago, she had the kind of delivery Celeste and I had expected. “The birth of my daughter was so hard and so intense and so excruciating and mind-blowing it pushed me to another realm,” she remembers. “That’s what made it so life changing.”
She isn’t being euphemistic. The encounter inspired her to leave her career in music and become a doula. “It was such a profound experience for me it completely changed the way I saw the world. And I was really expecting this for my second birth too.” But despite her son’s birth being faster and less painful she says, “I found myself hung up on things that [I felt] would have made the perfect birth.”
In the years since having her daughter, Kaity had immersed herself in the physical and emotional aspects of birth and supported many parents through their own life-changing labours. That exposure informed her own vision for how a perfect birth should go. “I really had it in my head that I wanted to experience the foetal ejection reflex. But when it came to his birth I wasn’t able to do this and I pushed him out really fast. I felt really guilty about not allowing him to come down all the way himself.”
“I was also hugely disappointed that my midwife ended up catching him. I had a home birth and was on my hands and knees in the birth tub. She immediately took him out of the water…I would have liked to have done this myself. I feel those two things took away from this ideal birth I had orchestrated in my mind.”
All three of us approached birth believing that with enough preparation, we could bend bodies and environments to our will. And force the universe to deliver the perfect memories we craved. Our expectations betrayed us and put us in a position where no outcome could really have been perfect enough. But even those who felt satisfied with their births at the time aren’t immune to this conditioning. The strange spectre of a perfect birth is so insidious it can follow you around long after you settle into your new reality. Eroding your happy recollections to leave you wondering if it was all really as good as you thought.
Haylee, a writer and publisher of Howl magazine, was initially grateful for her birth. She went into it feeling prepared, having also done a hypnobirthing class with her partner, taking part in shared midwife care and hiring a postpartum doula. Her labour had bumps–she underwent continuous foetal monitoring and experienced a mild haemorrhage–but overall she felt safe and supported. “It was ultimately positive with no major complications…I was able to unpack with my doula, process and feel good about it.”
Although, as time passed, that acceptance started to curdle. “In the years since, I feel like the increased awareness of interventions and commentary on the ‘ideal’ birth have retrospectively coloured my experience,” she says. “Things that didn’t bother me at the time I now sometimes feel I’m meant to have a problem with because it’s not inline with the sort of embodied, natural, physiological birthing narrative.” While she has no plans for a second child she admits, “Sometimes I feel like I’m meant to want a redo of pregnancy.”
Haylee is quick to acknowledge that to expect a perfect birth is a huge privilege. Many people who I spoke to for this piece, on and off the record, felt ashamed of their disappointment. They worried that feeling anything less than totally grateful marked them as spoiled or suggested their priorities were out of whack. But I don’t think that’s true.
“Birth has become this glorified, outward facing way for us to prove how good we are at being mothers,” adds Celeste. “And I think that has been backed up by social media, podcasts and even birth stories. It’s all just become fixated on this perfect birth that doesn’t exist, but we crave it because I think a lot of people are terrified of giving birth because we’re so far removed from what that process is.”
When you’re pregnant you find yourself reading, watching and eating a lot of stuff your old self would be appalled by. You don’t do it because the baby is feeding on your brain. You do it because you’re scared.
A lot of us are looking for a script. Because the idea that on some random day in the future your body will rip itself apart and you’ll be saddled with the greatest responsibility of your life is nuts. But preparation has a way of sanitising birth. It makes it feel less like a primal marathon and more like an event to schedule. It says not only can we avoid chaos, we can control it. It can be a ceremony, an orgasm, a serene and painless transition. It can be safe.
Nothing can control birth. Preparation can help you feel more secure, and may improve birth outcomes, but it can’t promise the experience you want. Looking back, I understand it’s impossible to prepare a perfect birth. But ironically, an imperfect one helped prepare me for the rest of my new life.
When I was pregnant, there seemed to be so many decisions to make: Give birth at home or in hospital? With pain relief or not? Induce or wait it out? But really, there was only one–spend the rest of your life at war with chaos, or give in to it. Accept the messy house, the changed body, the unknowable creature that you love but who also dropped a full bowl of noodles onto your freshly washed hair while you were bending down to pick something up. Because you will never be free from chaos. But you can be free from the expectation to control it. And maybe, not always, but sometimes, you may even enjoy it.
Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom! I wanted to thank everyone who shared their experiences for this article. Whether you were quoted or not I promise your perspective helped with the piece.
I’m always really interested in your stories and love to hear from you. Leave a comment, or catch me on Instagram (or Threads?) Also, if you enjoyed this article, give it a share.
Thank you, Wendy, for putting in to words (and so well too) feelings I’ve had swirling around since the birth of my eldest in 2018 and then my second at the start of this year. I think the idea of a ‘perfect birth’ and ‘perfect postpartum’ seems to be a particularly Western, social media influenced one - not only can you now feel bad about not having a perfect birth, you can now feel like you missed out on a blissful postpartum because you didn’t food prep nourishing ‘warming’ foods and state your boundaries clearly. There’s a lot that feels uncomfortable co-opting ‘traditional cultures’ for commercial gain in birth and postpartum - I’m not articulate enough to put it in to words that make sense (shout out to my seven month old who doesn’t sleep at night), other than ‘the vibes are off’. It’s just SO MUCH unnecessary pressure! I read birthing anatomy textbooks for my first birth - why?! I’m not a medical professional but I was so adamant that I was going to be well prepared and have a great birth. I laugh about it now but I really fell down that rabbit hole first time round.
Great piece Wendy! Even as someone who hasn't had a child, I already obsess over what my birth should look like. Perhaps this has to do with being told from a young age that I will need to have a caesarean to safely deliver a child due to my spinal issues. I always have felt guilt around this, or felt like this type of birth wasn't ideal. So thank you for reminding me that a safe and healthy mother and baby is the best kind of birth.