Baby steps

When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted cost of having your first baby. Each course is different — it depends on the teacher — but it’s safe to assume you’ll be encouraged to give birth without any medical interventions, and then to breastfeed like mad.

The thing is, though, neither of those things is really up to you. Promoting them would be fine if the audience weren’t so vulnerable, but mothers are on a hair trigger to feel guilty — that’s why anyone who recommended that we go to NCT also recommended that we pay no attention to most of what we’d hear there. It’s not that the NCT gives false information or that the teachers aren’t well trained, it’s just that the emphasis is skewed towards the earth-mother way.

The type of people who are attracted to the job are often a little deluded about childbirth. As a senior obstetrician puts it, ‘If you want a very good discussion about politics, you can go to your local Communist party headquarters where they’ll be very well-informed, but they’ll be coming at politics from a particular angle.