I was recently thinking to myself “gosh, it seems like the media spoke of plastic baby bottles being bad and within a matter of months, BPAs were banned in baby bottles in Canada”. Although I’ve known about BPAs since long before the media blitz and had already gotten rid of many in my home, it astounded me how quickly it came about.
I almost felt somewhat defeated that so much has been done to bring awareness to safe birth practices and we continue to do harm in what is such a special and vulnerable time in a woman’s (and baby’s) life. So what gives? How come we can get rid of BPAs and not affect real change in maternity care? We could literally save our country millions upon millions by implementing some really needed changes in maternity care. (I’ll list which ones in an upcoming blog post.)
So why does it take so long to change things?
I decided to research some social change theories and see what I came up with. Turns out many of the social change theories are concerned with the behaviour of people trying to meet their needs. So basically if people don’t see a problem, they’re not going to rally to fix it. The big problem here is that most people come away from birth with a healthy baby, or mostly healthy. The fact that Mom and baby could be healthier is never known by most people. Enter ignorance.
As they say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But what if it is broken, and people just don’t know it’s broken? What if the way it looks broken is what people think ‘fixed’ looks like? And how many people do we need who know it’s “broken” to actually ‘fix’ it?
At the root of social change are individuals, who together form social movements. So, in order to understand social change, one must also understand what motivates the behaviour of individuals. “The purpose of all human behaviour is to meet needs” (Hultman, 1979, 4).
The way a person behaves is conditioned by her/his beliefs. Beliefs are a product of a person’s experiences, which includes the lessons s/he is taught about how to perceive the world. From experience, a person forms their beliefs about the world, how it works, what is right and wrong, good and bad (Hultman, 1979, 9).
It seems to me that we have been raised to trust in our medical professionals and let them do what they think is necessary. So, if this is our belief system, then no social change will ever come! I commonly here pregnant clients say things like “if I’m allowed”, “if they’ll let me”, “I had to do x”. “However, because beliefs are based on fragmentary knowledge, they may not correctly reflect the way the world truly is, in all its complexity. When an individual places so much confidence in her beliefs that she forgets the degree to which they have been abstracted from reality, she succumbs to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Daly and Cobb, 1989, 25). This translates to national cesarean rates of over 25-30%, induction rates in excess of 30% and unnaturally high pre-term rates in industrialized nations, because our reality is skewed.
We live in a society that encourages status quo. We know most humans prefer to avoid a lot of change. But thankfully there are some individuals who manage to behave differently. These are the people who create social changes. In his book Order Out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine explains that at the bifurcation point, i.e. in the moment of change, the system is highly sensitive to what’s going on. There is a “delicate interplay between chance and necessity,” and it’s at this time that ANYTHING can happen.
During a bifurcation point however, we will not like what we see.
This a time when one person can literally change the world. According to Strasser and Randall (1981) it’s the charismatic leaders who have provided the ‘mainspring’ for change throughout history”, and if you think back to all the great moments in history, there is a central player (charismatic leader) in almost every instance.
So what next? When will society work to improve our current maternity system? Well, I guess it will come when enough people’s minds are awoken to our ‘brokenness’.
Until then, many doulas and childbirth educators work tirelessly to help people understand what’s really going on and what’s good/bad. We work to provide evidence-based information so that people can make the decisions that are right for them. Yep, it’s not always super popular because sometimes we’re telling them things they don’t want to hear. They are comfortable in their ignorance. And that’s ok too. It’s also not always what care providers want people to learn, because it often makes their job more complicated. (I’ll give a big shout out here to all the doctors and midwives who respect their client’s choices even when it’s not what they want them to choose.)
Education and awareness will take time. But if you want to learn more about what could be best for you and your baby, talk to a doula or childbirth educator today. It’s gonna take many more millions of you to learn before real change takes place, so we’d better start today.
The Options Expert
Birth Doula, Postpartum Doula, Childbirth Educator, Doula Trainer
