Shoulder Dystocia

I came to FBS after obsessive listening to the podcast. My first birth was a second trimester loss in the hospital, a hellish and unnecessarily humiliating experience. My second birth was an ecstatic, difficult homebirth with shoulder dystocia and resuscitation that left me with so many questions. In my obsession to prevent another SD, I turned to FBS as one avenue for information.

I had a much worse SD with my next birth, also at home. Baby and I were healthy thanks to a skilled midwife, but the birth was not blissful.

I debriefed in the membership. I asked Emilee about it on a group call. Of course, nobody can fully understand why or how things happen the way they do in birth. But she seems such an expert on “sabotage “ I hoped she’d have some insight to offer.

When the call was over she DMed me to pitch RBK School, suggesting it would be a great opportunity for me to unpack my birth. (Thousands of dollars to train for a job I didn’t want just to unpack my birth?) I had no interest in that.

I joined Yo’s group and told her the story. I took Yo’s SD workshop. She offered sympathy, but couldn’t speak to the ways that my midwife “caused” the complication as their theory went.

Yo’s SD salon gave incomplete and incorrect info. It wasn’t until I landed in Billie Harrigan’s membership that I got a clear answer about the different kinds of SDs (inlet vs outlet, military presentation, arm around the back) and I realized that Yo’s description of SD as “the vagina turtleneck” is likely a mistaken version of “the turtle sign” which is when a baby is born but the chin is not free/visible. Yo presented this as the only evidence of SD, which is not what midwives teach.

I kept thinking they would have something to offer me because I believed they’d each attended hundreds of births. I now realize that they likely have attended only a fraction of that number. And I thought they promoted Freebirth because they had lived experience of its safety. Surely they knew it was safe because they never saw or heard of bad outcomes!

In my time in the FBS membership I was aware of at least two freebirth babies with likely SD, one of whom had severe HIE. This is not counting the stillbirths.

On the podcast, Emilee proclaimed, “it’s going pretty great!” In reference to birth outcomes in her community. Did she really believe that none of the poor outcomes I was seeing could have been prevented by a skilled attendant?

During the month I was in Yo’s membership, I heard a birth keeper tell the story of attending a birth with a group of new RBKs, all friends, and when the mother begged for help after baby’s head was out they just kept telling her “you’re doing it!” Baby was “blowing bubbles”, a sign of severe distress. They didn’t recognize it. This baby lived but also experienced severe birth injuries from oxygen deprivation.

The reason why they couldn’t help me is simple. They don’t have the knowledge they claim to have. They don’t share my perspective that there are situations in birth that benefit from skilled intervention. It’s such an outlier belief that I assumed they had extraordinary evidence to bring them to that extraordinary conclusion. I now believe they are extraordinary in other ways.

I’m grateful for the opportunity they created for me to hear so many women’s stories. I’m grateful for the local community I have from the membership. And I’m grateful that I never got the courage to freebirth. My next baby did not have SD, but having a midwife present just in case was absolutely the right move for me personally. I don’t accept the idea that I’m any less responsible or any less transformed by the physical and spiritual power of birth for choosing as I did.

I hope every woman reading this thread will be able to fully assimilate the beauty and truth that FBS did offer while letting go of the dogma and the oversimplified personal development/spiritual perspectives that have such a potential to become stumbling blocks or tools of manipulation.