Birth tales and stories

TV Scope: Every mother has a birth story - my favourite isn't even about me. The woman in the next bed had given birth the previous evening. The following morning her well-fed looking consultant, who had missed the entire event, blustered into the ward and without too much conversation semi-roared, "So how's the tail?" Now everyone is in favour of the simplification of medical jargon but vet-speak in a maternity hospital?

RadioScope

Bernice Harrison

That's the thing about birth stories. Nobody really gets much mileage out of a sweetness and light experience, which might explain why the first episode of a new four-part series, Birth Stories, RTÉ 1, made for such captivating listening. The producer, Jacqui Corcoran, interjects with a few questions but leaves her interviewees to tell their own stories.

Linda Murphy's story was a contrast between giving birth to twins in an Irish hospital and giving birth five years before at home in America with the help of a midwife. With the twins she wanted as little medical intervention as possible - much to the confusion and frustration, she felt, of the doctors and nurses.

When she asked why she was being encouraged to take oxytocin, a synthetic hormone that would speed up labour, she was told that as the shifts were changing at five, it would be better the whole birth business was over by then. Ah, but better for who?

When she delivered the twins, she was jabbed with a syringe into her thigh. It contained a drug to speed up the delivery of the placenta. On her first birth she had delivered the placenta 45 minutes after the birth but in the highly managed birth scenario she found no inclination to let nature take its course. "No one asked my permission," she says.

Another interviewee, Nuala Jackson, recalled giving birth in a Dublin maternity hospital 30 years ago and it was an experience characterised by her own ignorance, and the regimented and depersonalised hierarchical medical structure. "For the first time in nine months my gynaecologist decided to become sociable," she said. No one told her what was happening and she tried for hours to get someone to believe that she was in labour.

In both women's stories, the medical profession came out in a less than glorious light and it will be interesting to see if a birth story singing the praises of the medics or even the hospital birthing system emerges in the course of the short series.

Birth Story, RTÉ 1, 7.45p.m., Wednesday