Birth Story

Prince William, set to marry on Friday, was born in the private Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital in London on June 21, 1982, more than a week before his due date.

He was the first male of the British royal family to be born in a hospital. Prince Charles also broke with tradition by attending the birth.

Prince William and his parents leave the hospital

Prince Charles and his first wife, Princess Diana, William's mother, arrived at the hospital very early on the morning of the day William was born.

George Pinker MD, the royal gynecologist, attended Diana. She had also been coached by Betty Parsons, a nurse and natural-birth advocate who had helped Queen Elizabeth with a couple of her births.

Many accounts present the birth as "natural" and drug-free, while at least one insider book holds that the princess had an epidural during her 16-hour labor.

William was born at 9:03 p.m., and weighed 7 lb. 2 oz. A 41-gun salute was fired off in his honor. Princess Diana was back home the next day.

Prince Charles, always restrained, was clearly thrilled. He wrote friends, "I can't tell you how excited and proud I am," adding that he found the newborn William "surprisingly appetising."

Talk about your scheduled C-section. A Machesney Park, Ill., couple went out of their way last weekend to have their twins born in two different years.

Ashley Fansler, 23, and Brendan Lewis, 24, welcomed daughter Madisen Carin Lewis at 11:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Aiden Everette Lewis was born a minute later, at 12 a.m. on New Year's Day.

The twins were born by Cesarean section at Rockford Memorial Hospital in Rockford, Ill.

The couple and their doctors purposefully timed the scheduled C-section so the babies could have separate birthdays. Fansler's due date was Jan. 28 but doctors reportedly were concerned about complications.

"We decided to do it that way [bridging the new year] and everything worked out,” Lewis told Matt Williams of the Rockford Register Star. “They said they would do it if there was no complications or anything. Everything was safety first.”

Check out footage of the parents and the newborns here:

"I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK! : )"

That's what Laura Eckert, a Shueyville, Ia., photographer, wrote today on the Facebook page for her New Creation birth photography business.

Facebook had disabled the page last month because it displayed photos taken during and just after childbirth. Earlier today, though, officials of the social media website apologized to Eckert and restored her company's page.

Eckert, 33, told the Associated Press she was shocked when Facebook notified her before Christmas that they had removed inappropriate photos from her page. Eckert said she had cropped all the photos on the New Creation page so they would meet Facebook's guidelines.

When she tried to log on to find out which photos were gone, Eckert discovered the account had been disabled.

A number of Eckert's supporters put together another Facebook page called "Restore Laura Eckert's account."

The photographer emailed Facebook repeatedly, asking for an explanation and reinstatement, but  the company did not respond until KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids aired a story about the dispute, she said.

"It's funny it happened after the media got involved," Eckert said. "I sent many polite e-mails asking for information over the course of the last few weeks and got no response. None."

Eckert said she believed the pictures that brought her page down were from a water birth last spring.

Facebook objected to some of the photos when she first posted them because they contained nudity, Eckert said. She then removed some photos and edited others to eliminate any sight of nipples or genitalia, with Facebook's standards in mind.

But then last month, all three of her Facebook pages, including the New Creation one, were gone.

"We make an occasional mistake. This is an example," said Facebook spokesman Simon Axten.

Eckert said she intends to continue to post birth photos on her Facebook page.

"I see the miraculousness of it," she told the AP. "Maybe that clouds my judgment a little bit."

Little Peter Gabriel Imson, born 18 seconds after midnight on Jan. 1 at Guam Memorial Hospital in Tamuning, Guam, has staked his claim to be the first baby born in the United States in 2011.

Guam, the largest of the Mariana Is., is a U.S. territory in Micronesia, in the western Pacific Ocean, and is officially the first place in the United States a new day touches — in this case, the first day of a new year.

Imson weighed in at six pounds 13 ounces. His mom is Cathy Narciso of Dededo, a nurse at the hospital. Peter is her first baby.

Following one topic, childbirth, for an entire year has given me an unusual perspective on what is happening on that front, both here in the United States and also globally.

If you ask me, the newly apparent muscle of the holistic birth community was the most important “birth story” of 2010. One sign of this was the passage of the so-called Midwifery Modernization Act in New York, which eliminated a requirement that midwives obtain a written practice agreement from a physician or hospital to practice in New York State.

Also, as we just discovered from a new report from the Centers for Disease Control, released last week, birth by Cesarean section reached a new high, 32.9 percent of births in 2009, up from 32.3 in 2008. The steadily rising rate — up every year since 1996, when the rate was 20.7 — has been a major story all year.

That CDC report also showed the birth rate for U.S. teen-agers hit its lowest level last year since records began to be kept seventy years ago — 39.1 births per 1,000 teens, down from 41.5 per 1,000 in 2008. The record low held true for all racial and ethnic groups.

A couple of other big birth stories of 2010, sadly, revolved around the fact that too many mothers are still dying in childbirth.

In March, Amnesty International called out the American childbirth establishment on a rising rate of maternal mortality in a report called “Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.” The human-rights advocacy organization pointed out that while the United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, “maternal mortality ratios have increased from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006.”

Many other groups joined in that call for changes to improve birth safety in this country.

Meanwhile, in the developing world, the United Nations’ Millennium Goal 5, which aims to bring down rates of maternal mortality by three-quarters in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, is the subject of much scrutiny, with a major push in some places creating bright spots in what appears to be a generally gloomy picture with just five years to go.

Pregnant Graffiti by Petteri Sulonen / Wikimedia Commons

Jesus' nativity, the son of God born of a virgin mother, is one of the great mysteries of Christianity.

The story we can grasp more easily is of his humble beginnings in a manger. Most people who were hoping for the Messiah expected him to be born in power and sumptuousness, but Jesus' birth attendants were the animals whose home he shared in his first days.

One lesson for all of us in Jesus' birth is that we cannot judge the value of any human life, as weighed against another.

Every human being enters the world from the body of his mother in a moment of supreme vulnerability. Regardless of the circumstances, for mother and baby alike, it is one of the most fundamental human experiences any of us will ever have.

Every birth is a new beginning, for the child, for her family, and for the world, in a way. Every birth should be joyful, peaceful, transcendent.

Have a happy Christmas!

"Adoration of the Shepherds" by Mikael Toppelius / Wikimedia Commons

I always enjoy The Bloggess, a/k/a Jenny Lawson, and I surely do wish I could do those things she does with pictures.

With her permission, I offer a Christmas cookie from one of Lawson's recent posts, "Lesson 7: Your Birth Plan. Good Luck With That." As is so often true of The Bloggess, collateral damage aside, she has hit the nail on the head. Plus, it's seasonal:

The person making your actual birth plan decisions is your baby. Related: babies don’t give a shit about your plans. Making a plan for the birth of a child is like making a plan for decorating your Christmas tree in the middle of a house fire. Until you’re actually in the heat of battle, you have no idea whether you’re going to want drugs or whether you’ll have to have a c-section or whether you’ll be stuck in traffic and the baby will be delivered by a cab driver who will burn off the umbilical cord with his cigar. And that’s fine. Hell, the Virgin Mary had her baby in a damn barn and he turned out okay.

In the end, none of that matters. Whether you welcome your baby in a hut or in a hospital or in the orphanage where you adopt her, the same basic rule applies: If you’re lucky enough to end up with a baby, you win.

The end.

This English couple seems relaxed about their very public birth.

The Washington Post is carrying a remarkable birth story today by Ian Shapira, called "A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's sorrow."

Shapira has shaped the story using the Facebook postings of Shana Greatman Swers, a 35-year-old Gaithersburg, Md., consultant who died just weeks after the birth of her son, Isaac Lawrence Swers, on Sept. 23 of this year.

Within days of Isaac's birth, Swers was diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare, grave heart disease associated with childbirth.

In a "Story Lab" blog post, and in a live Q&A chat, Shapira describes how he came to write about a colleague of his wife's, a woman who, he writes, not only died from "unusual pregnancy complications," but also "had been remarkably public about her ordeal" in her Facebook postings, some of them sent from her iPhone at the hospital.

Shapira determined to tell Swers' story through selected postings from her Facebook page, beginning with her proud announcement of her pregnancy on March 10, and continuing until her death.

What emerges is a picture of a first-time mom reveling in impending motherhood, then reacting with concern and frustration at the unexpected medical problems, responding to friends' good wishes and offers of food and other help.

At one point, her husband, Jeffrey, asked friends to "post a memory or funny story that lets her know why she is special to you," and began himself with the story of their first Fourth of July together.

It seems impossible to believe, reading the posts, that Swers' condition would not improve, that the last post in the story, from Nov. 3, would be her husband's anguished cry: "I love you wifey wife, I love you, I love you, a million times over I love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Shapira's story, and the Facebook page itself, are compelling artifacts of our times.

"There is not a corner in Britain where this formidable disease has not made many mourners,”  John Mackintosh, an Edinburgh, Scotland "man-midwife" wrote of puerperal or "childbed" fever in the 1820s.

This bacterial disease of the upper genital tract typically began within the first three days after childbirth with abdominal pain, fever and respiratory difficulty, and very often ended with the new mother's death.

Medical writers had been remarking on childbed fever at least since Hippocrates, but in the early modern era, it began to attract attention for a number of reasons. For one, it began to appear in epidemics, with very high mortality rates. For another, accounts of outbreaks were written about and published. And at least some of the new, scientific man-midwives themselves were spreading the disease by going straight from autopsies to the birth chambers of homes and especially of hospitals, without cleaning up at all in between.

There were terrible epidemics of puerperal fever in the German city of Leipzig  in 1652 and 1665, at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, France, in 1745 and 1746, and at the British Lying-In Hospital in London, England, in 1760. It is possible that these were the first ever epidemics of childbed fever.