I went to my second childbirth class last night. This will be an interested ten weeks for me. The class isn't terribly exciting or wonderful, but it is fun to be around all those other mommies for a few hours each week. I wish we were just meeting up outside the classes, instead of having to listen to AgendaGirl for the whole two hours.

She bothers me, this AgendaGirl. She believes very strongly in natural childbirth, and believes that her experience will be the measurement for all experiences. She had what sound like relatively easy births- not terribly painful, fairly quick labors. She believes very strongly in the Bradley method. And she's not very good at facilitating meetings.

So she started the meeting yesterday with a few videos. The first video was this ridiculous movie shot in the sixties of a few births. The goal of the filmmakers was to show women how medical interventions made birth a painless and uneventful procedure. There was blood. There were needles. There was strapping of legs and arms to tables. There were forceps. It wasn't pretty. The bradley point of the video was to illustrate just how horrific and medieval medical births are. The instructor sat to the side of the TV sarcastically mouthing the words along with the narrator. People in the class squirmed and winced. It was pretty awful. When the video was over AgendaGirl stood up and said- while the video is a little old, for the most part the medications used and the procedures used are the same. What she didn't mention is that a lot of the timbre of medical births and the attitude is very different now.

I'm not an expert on births. Far from it. But I've attended enough births to know that a family can have a perfectly wonderful birth even with the use of forceps and epidurals and episiotomies. They aren't the horror scene depicted in that Navy video from 1962. Families still attend and the baby still comes out healthy and happy and everyone is fine. That's the point of a lot of these procedures in the first place.

So, once the scare tactics video was shown, AgendaGirl put on her second favorite video- the one that starts with scenes of chicks and lambs being born. Then you get about four different births of women delivering at home or at birthing centers. Siblings are running around the rooms happy and excited. Husbands are omnipresent and one even helps guide the baby out. There is soft and obnoxious folk music playing in the background. Mothers are sighing passively with their contractions. It's a lovely video, even though I ended up a little confused about the unneccessary use of sideburns on the husbands. Once that was over AgendaGirl told us about how much her little daughter loves that particular video and watches it all the time and isn't it wonderful that Bradley teaches such wonderful things.

I don't have time to talk about the other irritating crap that went on last night. I am struggling to keep my mouth shut when AgendaGirl gives out false or very biased health information. It almost sounds like an infomercial, where a person with very little true medical background has co-opted medical information to fit into their biased perspective. Very frustrating. But I am not there to change the world, I am there to share this experience with my husband and to meet other families. We'll get over it!