Do not fear big babies.

Someone told me today that attempting a natural birth with a large baby is unsafe. That has to be the biggest line of misinformed horseshit I've encountered in at least a couple days. Yet I don't actually fault this woman. She was just told by the doctors at Ye Olde Butcher Shop (the Army hospital) that she's having a "large" baby. She took that to mean ten pounds. That's kind of a leap, of course, because "large" can mean anything. I know people who think their 7 pounders were "large" (To me, that's tiny!). The mainstream medical profession classifies anything above about 9 pounds even as a case of "macrosomia" (quite directly: "large body". To which I say, take your false pathology and shove it somewhere large.) Most midwives I know don't really consider anything abnormally large until we start talking 10 pounds or more, and that's about where I fall in on this line of thought. Yet the thing is that even in those cases where the baby is big by anyone's standard, in all but the very rarest of cases, the mom who grew that baby, can birth that baby. Mother Nature isn't stupid, and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution can't be wrong.

As I said before, this "macrosomia" label that the mainstream medical practitioners love to slap on people is false pathology, and exists only to scare women into thinking something is wrong when it's not. Why would it be wrong to have a big baby? If you grew it, your pelvic rim is big enough to accommodate it. There is nothing pathological about it. You grow what you can birth, and you birth what you grew. Our genes equip us with the ability to do that. The only people who may have to worry about a true case of cephalo-pelvic disproportion (aka, a too big baby) are diabetics. Thak was a c-section baby for this very reason. His mom was diabetic. The vast majority of people are not diabetic, though, and for those of us who aren't (and even for the vast majority who are), we grow what we can birth, nearly invariably. Don't let some doctor scare you into thinking otherwise.

The other thing that occurs to me is how I'd like to slap some of these doctors. First of all, their ultrasound measuring techniques are very unreliable. I know dozens of people who were told they were having a 12 pound baby, and induced early, only to have a 5 pound premie who spent a month in the NICU recovering from its untimely birth. In fact, I don't know one person who's been told they're having some massive baby, and actually had one over 7.5 pounds. Ultrasound measuring techniques are highly inaccurate. Palpation by an experienced practitioner is very accurate. Both times, my midwives have predicted my babies' weights correctly via external paplation, right down to the ounce. The other thing is, WHY are these fear mongering doctors telling these women how big they think their babies are? What good would that information be to them? In both cases, as I said, my midwives guessed my babies' weights correctly, but they didn't tell me either time. It would only have scared me, and that would have done far more harm than a large baby on its own ever could. They knew that, and they also knew that I would have no problem delivering the babies I grew, so they didn't tell me anything that would have caused harm to my thought process going into the birth.

It is not unsafe to have a natural birth with a large baby. I labored completely alone, unassisted, with Orren, all the way to the very end when I had my awesome midwife help me through the very final stage, and I can assure you, every minute of that labor was about as safe as life gets. (Really, how safe is life in general? Think about it.) The fact that Orren was 9 pounds and 9 ounces did not make it a difficult labor, nor did it make it unsafe, nor did it harm me in the least. It was the perfect birth, totally normal, outstandingly human, not one single intervention, nearly no stress, and hardly any of what I would consider pain. That's with a baby most people would consider huge. Obviously it wasn't unsafe to have a more natural birth than most people can imagine with him.

It IS, however, very unsafe to labor in a fearful way. If you are fearful, you won't be relaxed enough to dilate right. Your muscles may be too tense to allow the baby to get into a good position. You could end up with interventions which carry their own set of risks. Fear is the biggest threat to a successful birth. If you're scared of having a large baby, you may give yourself problems that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

The key is to realize that you were made for what you get, and what you look like on the outside has nothing to do with it. People are shocked that I have such large babies and am so "tiny", but on the inside, I'm not tiny at all, and I am strong. So is everyone else who can grow big healthy babies. If you can grow it, you can bring it out into the world. That is true in all but the rarest of cases. I am not a believer in organized religion, but most people are. If so many can believe in such an abstract concept as an all powerful deity, who governs our every move to some extent, why is it such a stretch to believe in yourself? Don't be scared of large babies. Just enjoy the ride, and know that at the end, you'll have one hell of a story to tell.