What Is An Antenatal Class

For now, however, you are stuck in a room with these people, learning about labour. (Once you have learned it you will know it forever, setting you apart in yet another way from your baby free friends.) The mothers-to-be you will already have sized up.

What Is An Antenatal Class

Opinions differ over precisely when pregnant women are at their foxiest, but let's assume that two of them are highly fanciable and another three aren't bad at all (II~e names of the others you will fail to remember throughout the eight weeks of the coarse.) Sadly, none of them will notice you. They are already pregnant and their need for a man has lapsed. Also, their actual man is sitting next to them. To look round for a replacement the baby was born would be indiscreet. Let them see that junior has inherited Dad's huge flappy ears and weak chin before they start wondering who it'll be next time. (You can see that it's but a short route to that sorry bedsit in the wind battered seaside town.)

So let us leave the mothers-to-be for now. Let us turn our attention instead to the men. At your first antenatal class everybody will introduce themselves - with forenames only, as though they were at an AA meeting. 'I am Marcus ...' [huge pause to pluck up courage] '... and I am going to be a father.' In fact, you might as well be at an AA meeting for all the chance you have of getting a drink. (Similarly, at the end of the session, absolutely nobody will say, "So who fancies a quick half at the pub on the corner?' Eyebrows would be raised, tuts would be tufted. This is female territory, and you have to be on your best behaviour.) 

Take a quick look around the room. Not all men are easy to categorize, but this lot will be.

• Mr Enthusiastic. He is listening to every word and taking lots of notes. He and his wife Jane (or possibly Rebecca) stare lovingly into each other's eyes every eight minutes to show everyone how much they are still in love. On Thursday afternoons he and a girl from Marketing have angry sex in a nearby Holiday Inn.
• Mr Busy. He makes it clear that he has just come from an important meeting, and hints that he has another one immediately afterwards, This is just habit, as he and his wife are actually intending to go home and ring for a curry. He comes straight from work, burping surreptitiously from time to time, and occasionally asks aggressive and wrong-headed questions of the antenatal class teacher, just to prove to the other men that he is too important to pay attention properly. He refuses to switch off his mobile phone, and then when he takes a call, pretends it's from New York. He will be sick with fear during the birth, and then rush off at the earliest opportunity to an important meeting.
• Mr Youthful. He and his wife Mrs Youthful are the youngest people in the room and very conscious of the fact. Mrs Youthful listens carefully and tries not to cry. Mr Youthful, who is also trying not to cry, looks at his feet and says very little. He will eat two thirds of the chocolate HobNobs. 
• Mr Old. He has been through all this before. She may be his second wife, or even his third. He is happy to share the benefit of his considerable experience with anyone who asks. No one asks, so he shares it anyway. His new wife looks on admiringly. The antenatal class teacher waits patiently for him to stop talking. Then less patiently. The one thing Mr Old doesn't say is that he hasn't been allowed to see his first two children, by law, since 1986. 
• Mr Cool. Unlike most of the other men there, Mr Cool has worked out how to play this thing, but then he is Mr Cool. Listening carefully, nodding sagely, occasionally offering intelligent comments, Mr Cool appears to have embraced his fate head on. But what he is really thinking is that he is better dressed than all these other men, and very much cooler. Whether or not he and his partner go home and shout and argue into the small hours like everyone else, you'll never find out. 
• Mr Not There At All. He turns up once, at around week three, then disappears permanently. All the other men hate his guts. The mother of his child tells the group that he has gone on an extended and important business trip. In fact he is at home with his wife. 

To find out more, you can check out What Is An Antenatal Class.

Cesarean vs Natural Birth Baby

In hospitals they would lie a woman on a bed as though there was someone wrong with her. In a natural childbirth, she would be more likely to give birth squatting or kneeling or hanging by her fingertips from the lampshade, if that's what made her comfortable. Odent pioneered water births, of which more later. And he avoided medical intervention unless it was absolutely necessary. His ideas were simple, obvious and profoundly controversial.
 

Cesarean vs Natural Birth Baby

For a lot of obstetricians have no time for this at all. They believe that childbirth has been civilized by technological advance. No longer do women die in childbirth - or at least, very rarely (in England and Wales in 1907, 3,520 women died in childbirth, or as a direct consequence of being pregnant. In 1997 the figure was 38. That's 0.059 for every 1,000 births. They are more likely to be killed in a road accident on the way to the hospital).

Drugs take away the pain. And if they want, women can subcontract the whole process to the surgeons by having an elective Caesarean. An increasing number of middle-class women, it says in the newspapers, are 'too posh to push'. Maybe they have to be back at their desks in two weeks and so don't have time for all this pregnancy stuff. Or maybe it all seems too much like hard work. 

Far easier to have the little blighter sliced out and turned over straightaway to the first of eleven Bosnian au pairs who will be caring for it 23 hours and 40 minutes a day until it's packed off to school in seven years. According to one eminent obstetrician, these women 'know the risks. But the way I see it, they are like people who choose to travel by car rather than train - despite knowing the train is safer.' 

In the US, Caesareans are actually promoted as a lifestyle choice. One hospital ad encourages mothers-to-be to 'keep yourself honeymoon fresh with a Caesarean'. As it happens, women having Caesareans are four times more likely to suffer serious complications than women giving birth vaginally, and nearly twice as likely to have problems conceiving again. No one really knows the long-term risks involved in delivery by forceps (every bit as nasty as it sounds) or ventouse (the giant sink plunger of your worst nightmares).

But according to Department of Health figures, more than half of all births in NHS hospitals now involve forceps, ventouse or Caesarean section.
 
Not that natural childbirth rejects medical intervention altogether - of course not. If an emergency Caesarean is needed, an emergency Caesarean it will be. One of the man-eating midwives at the hospital's antenatal class sneeringly called this 'the best of both worlds', which is true - and a strong endorsement for natural childbirth, I would have thought. Why not have the best of both worlds, if it's available and free?
 
These, then, are the opposing ideologies. Their battleground is the antenatal class. Woollen wombs and flip charts are the main weaponry, and the poor embattled parents-to-be are the first wave of troops to be mown down in the crossfire. You have to wonder what sort of people would willingly let themselves in for this misery. Then you look in the mirror. 

In some NCT classes, I have heard, everyone becomes terribly good friends, and are at each other's births and invite each other to dinner parties and become godparents to each other's children and play sad wife-swapping games and divorce horribly and drink themselves to death in sorry bedsits in wind-battered seaside towns. 

And it's true, there is a camaraderie of sorts. You are all there together, a slight nervousness unsuccessfully masking your deep-seated fear, and exactly half of you have had to cancel something more interesting to come to this. You couldn't fail to get on. Whether the bonds last beyond the end of the classes is less certain. Like holiday friendships, they may or may not the flight home. To find out more, you can check out Cesarean vs Natural Birth Baby.

NCT Antenatal Classes Review

Until they had a woman plugged in to half a dozen machines going bleep, they felt their job was only half done. Natural childbirth, they made it clear, was for pools and wimps who couldn't back it in the real world. A dozen couples sat in a circle, scarcely daring to breathe, hoping the midwives wouldn't pick on them.

NCT Antenatal Classes Review

This was childbirth as if the Kray twins had been running it. As far as these midwives were concerned, bringing a defenseless baby into the world was just a part of their job. Terrorizing parents was the fun bit.
 
What a contrast to the antenatal classes organized by the National Childbirth Trust. These were in someone's house and involved sundry cups of herbal tea and chocolate biscuits. We had to take off our shoes and sit on bean bags. Where was the giant spliff? Did Jimi Hendrix have a new album out? A mere twelve of us were at this one, which wiped out Tuesday evenings for only eight weeks. This week, dilation of the cervix.
 
Next week, Braxton-Hicks contractions. It was a grueling course, chocolate HobNobs notwithstanding. But by the end of it we knew more about childbirth than we bad thought possible, and far more than many of us had wanted to know. Our host and teacher was a tiny self-effacing woman called Val, who had no particular qualifications as far as we knew, other than having had loads of kids. We could hear them running around in the kitchen and upstairs and in and out of the house (either that or she had a hell of a problem with rats). Val's was the voice of experience. She had been there. She knew what it was like.
 
We respected what she had to say. Also, for the class she had knitted several female body parts, which the men liked to play with. It was the nearest some of us would come to sex for a very long time.

The NCT is a registered charity which was founded in 1957 to help parents and parents-to-be, and now helps around 300,000 of them a year, through antenatal classes, helplines, social events and a suitably well-stocked website. Its information, it says, is based on objective research evidence, and it would disavow any allegations of bias in favor of natural childbirth. Its aim is purely to give people the facts. Even so, you won't usually find NCT antenatal teachers suggesting you have a Caesarean just for the fun of it. Val was an unabashed fan of natural childbirth.
 
This is an unusually appealing ideology, or religion, or whatever you want to call it. As parents-to-be, we had passed the first months of the pregnancy in a haze of suppressed terror. Now, we were ripe for ideological reprogramming. All we craved was a little certainty. A skilful antenatal class teacher could supply this, as well as gallons of nettle tea. Val was just what we needed. Her unusually hairy armpits positively reeked of common sense.

The theory and practice of natural childbirth are based around the belief that, for most women, childbirth is a safe and simple process that doctors and their machines have overcomplicated. It was pioneered in the 1970s by the French obstetrician Michel Odent, when what he called 'industrialized obstetrics' had become the norm. Forget forceps and drugs, said Odent. Forget bleeping machines in cruelly overlit, soulless delivery rooms. At his own birth centre outside Paris, Odent would encourage mothers to give birth in darkened rooms, maybe with a few candies burning, with tapes of their favorite music playing, possibly even whalesong if the local record shops hadn't run out. To find out more, you can check out NCT Antenatal Classes Review.

Antenatal Classes Are They Necessary

As you will have noticed by now, the physical changes in pregnancy are extraordinary and far reaching.

AFTER THREE MONTHS 

Baby: fully-formed body, eyes moving, muscles growing, has fingers and toes.
Mother: gaining weight, morning sickness gradually disappearing, heart working hard, tired all the time, crying at bad films.
Father: bloated, paranoid, drinking too much, telling everyone he knows that he is going to take all his money out of the bank in used notes and fly to Bolivia.
 

Antenatal Classes Are They Necessary

AFTER SIX MONTHS  

Baby: can hear everything that is going on, muscles have developed but body is still thin, lungs now growing.
Mother: eating for two, appalling indigestion, either wants sex all the time or not at all, feeling the baby move, may be suffering from cramp, still crying at bad films.
Father: increasingly bald, knee joints swelling, staring at girls on public transport, concentration destroyed, liver now the size and constituency of a breezeblock.
 
AFTER EIGHT AND A HALF MONTHS 

Baby: weighs six or seven pounds and is just over a foot long, lying in two pints of amniotic fluid, fat and healthy, raring to go.
Mother: huge, exhausted, tearful, furious, unable to find comfortable position to sleep or sit or do anything, blames it all on you, talking on phone to friends and relatives all the time and going quiet when you come in the room.
Father: has taken all his money out of bank in used notes in preparation for flight to Bolivia but left it on public transport while drunkenly staring at girls. Resigned to fate.

To alleviate the stress, or make it much, much worse, you might as-well go to some antenatal classes.

It's not known whether prehistoric man went to antenatal classes. Certainly the Ancient Greeks opted out, while the Ancient Romans were able to plead a prior engagement. Throughout the long majestic sweep of British history men have somehow managed to avoid anything remotely resembling an antenatal class - until the last 20 years, that is, when suddenly antenatal classes have come to occupy every Tuesday evening, or Wednesday evening, or any other evening on which you usually do something more interesting.

And we play along with it because we feel we have to; because, let's face it, we are the first generation of men in the long majestic sweep of British history for whom it is compulsory to attend the birth (in 1970 about 21 per cent of fathers attended the birth. In 1980 it was 42 per cent. Now, according to the National Childbirth Trust, it is 96 per cent). So we might as well find out what's going to happen, whether we want to or not.
 
Antenatal classes come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, as do antental class teachers. For prospective parents the problem is ignorance, a terrible void that needs filling now, or sooner if possible. Those who teach antenatal classes present themselves and their knowledge as the solution. They may have been through the experience themselves, or they may have presided over it many times, but one thing always applies: they will think they know what's best for you. It's a rare antenatal class teacher who approaches the task without at least a soupcon of evangelical fervour. 

You want the answers, and you will get them. What you may not realize is that if you went to a different class you would probably get completely different answers. If you go to too many antenatal classes, as I fear I did, you end up with so many mutually contradictory answers you don't know what's what.

The issues at stake are how you want to have this baby, and how everyone else wants you to have this baby. Antenatal classes run by hospitals tend to promote a highly medicalised approach to childbirth, because, after all, that's what they have to offer. At the hospital we went to, hatchet-faced midwives who had trained in women's prisons advertised the joys of the epidural and the simple pleasures of the emergency Caesarean. To find out more, you can check out Antenatal Classes Are They Necessary.
 

Pregnancy In Czech Republic

Whether it's twins or not, whether it's good news or not, after the first ultrasound scan some fathers-to-be fall into a bit of a decline. This Post-Ultrasound Depression, or PUD, as doctors don't call it, is surprisingly common. It is characterized by a sudden realization that your life is going to change utterly, and not necessarily in ways that you had planned. The general whooping and hollering that characterize life as a single man will soon be replaced by early nights and a detailed knowledge of estate cars. These are cliches, I know. They are also true. And this is usually when it all sinks in.
 

Pregnancy In Czech Republic

My working title for this post was 'Drinking For Two' - a phrase I myself used a lot at about this stage in the first pregnancy. Not that alcohol is the solution to everybody's problems. Some men turn to drugs, others work too hard, and one man heard of who was having an affair with his secretary, sacked her, ended the affair, hired a new secretary and started an affair with her, all in the space of a fortnight. In many ways this could be defined as your first real midlife crisis - unless you've had one before, in which case it's your second.

What might help is a holiday, or some other equally pointless expenditure. Which is where the second main scan, at between 16 and 20 weeks, comes in. This is the dating scan, which will give you Junior's ETA. Dating is, of course, approximate - so approximate, in fact, that the due date is virtually the only day in the next seven months on which you can be certain the baby won't be born. Even so, it has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind. Now you know how much time you have left. If you are planning a holiday or fun of any description, this is the official cut-off point. (Incidentally, airlines won't allow pregnant women to sully their planes after the twenty-fifth week, in case they embarrass all the fat men in business class and give birth in the corridor.) So how about a nice little trip to, say ... Prague?

FATHER L (LESTER): Our son was born in the Czech Republic where we lived in the late nineties. It would be fair to say that the health service had not kept pace with other institutions in embracing the changes brought about by the Velvet Revolution of 1989. This was no bad thing in some respects. Medical treatment was still freely available to all, even us foreigners. But it also meant there was a lack of sentimentality about the style of treatment you received. And there was the distinct feeling that while all women were equal, some were more equal than others when it came to being pregnant. Add this to the Czech propensity for calling a spade a spade and a forceps a forceps, while laughing in the face of pain, and you have a recipe for a memorable pregnancy.

A few months down the pregnancy road Lilith had her latest check-up with the kindly but blunt doctor, whose idea of prenatal care was a regime of cold baths, long mountain hikes and eight pints of beer a day. Lilith returned distraught, having been rigorously informed that her blood test showed that she had a more than 80 per cent likelihood of carrying a Down' s syndrome baby. We had to decide whether to have an amniocentesis.
 
At the time, central Prague had two maternity hospitals. Friends had babies in both and recommended neither. We went to the nearest, a large late-nineteenth-century pile of terrifying aspect. There Lilith was whisked into a room for the amniocentesis, which I was allowed to witness. But I was not let into the ward where Lilith was put to recover as it was full of girls who had just had abortions. Just what Lilith needed when she was facing the same experience should the test results prove unfavorable.
 

These results took three weeks to arrive. There was no way they could be processed more quickly, we were told. We would just have to be patient. Unfortunately by this time we knew the sex of our child. Czech is an inflected language and during the scan before the amniocentesis the doctor had referred to our child using the masculine gender. This made the waiting worse. Our son had become suddenly real at the very moment when we were facing the prospect of losing him. The three weeks were a nightmare. Lilith, bravely optimistic, insisted on our arguing about names while I glumly gazed into beer glasses depressing and embarrassing anyone unfortunate enough to come near me. Thankfully at the end of interminable wait the news was good. At last we could look forward to the birth of our son. To find out more, you can check out Pregnancy In Czech Republic.

Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy

GUY: We had a nasty scare with our first daughter. The problems arose from doctors saying things off the cuff without realizing how new parents latch onto them. So at her first scan the doctor said, "Oh yes, her bladder seems rather full, it's possible her kidneys aren't functioning. You'd-better come back for another scan." So you spend two weeks thinking, Oh God, the kidneys aren't functioning. We went back for the second scan, and this time the doctor wrote on his notes, 'possible IUGR'. Only Gina knew what this was, as she was a professional researcher and had therefore looked into all this thoroughly. She was aware that this stood for 'inter-uterine growth retardation'. So we spent the next two weeks thinking, Oh no! Now we're giving birth to a midget. A midget with dodgy kidneys, more to the point. But she was fine, of course.
 

Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy

FATHER K (KARL): We had a nightmare one. The scanner looked at the screen and confidently announced that the foetus had a cyst on it, estimated at 18 centimetres. So we had a fantastic weekend worrying ourselves about that. Then we went back and found that she had misread something and it was 1.8 centimetres, and that actually it had since disappeared - it was a piece of fluff on the screen or something. So we were well chuffed about that. We'd spent the whole weekend thinking about surgical interventions. A weekend in hell.

The medical profession, for all their good intentions, may not be much help. The more they try to reassure you, the more terrified you will become. First-time parents who have fallen into scanning hell truly know the meaning of the word fear. And yet the probabilities involved are usually tiny. 1 in 200 - how much is that? Nothing. Even 1 in 3 means it's less likely to happen than not. But in scanning hell, a tiny chance of something happening always seems to be magnified into a raging certainty. The truth is that most pregnancies are uneventful and completely successful.
 
Even if the probabilities begin to grow, chances are you will have a beautiful and healthy little baby (or at least, as beautiful as your genes will allow it to be). Take, as an example, Down's syndrome. The probabilities rise with the age of the mother, from 1 in 2,000 for a 20-year-old mother to a terrifying 1 in 12 for a 49-year-old.
 
But how many 49-year-olds are having babies? Very few. It's at the very edge of the fertility graph, and yet eleven out of twelve babies conceived by a 49-year-old woman won't have Down's syndrome. I think those are pretty good odds. With screening now almost universal, abnormalities have become rarer than you might think, only around five in every 10,000 births these days are Down's babies. The spina bifida rate is even lower.
 
Far more likely than an abnormality are twins. These will definitely show up on the first scan. Instead of one beating heart, two. Instead of two waggly legs, four. Instead of one willy, one. So it's a boy and a girl then. About 15 births in every 1,000 are multiple births, and the rate is rising - in 1975 it was about 10 in 1,000. Partly this is because of IVF treatments, which commonly plant three little embryos in the womb - and sometimes all three develop. 

A third of all multiple births are triplets or above, although quirts and sextuplets are much rarer than they used to be - the fertility treatments that produced them regularly in the 1960s and 1970s are out of fashion now. Twins mean twice the expense, appalling parental exhaustion and, almost certainly, no more children, because if it has happened once, it may happen again. Watch the face of the man who has just been told by the ultrasound operator that it's twins. The flash of delight across his face registers the huge pride he feels in his own exceptional potency. After 0.0014 of a second this is replaced by gloom and terror, which may mark him permanently. It's not great for the mother, either. Giving birth to the little loves is bad enough. Then there's the breastfeeding, which is apparently like something out of Dante's Inferno. To find out more, you can check out Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy.