Hillevi 1961 “Nowadays you can give birth standing up or do anything you like. But in those days they would have laughed you out for even suggesting anything like that, you would have been giving birth out in the street. You had to lie there and stay on your back. Even if you wanted to change position or get up and walk for a while to relieve the pain cause it would have been common sense to move about to help with the pain. Flat on your back… very uncomfortable that was. The whole hospital staff had a very authoritarian attitude. You felt more like a thing than an individual with her own mind. They just told you what to do. My role with my husband was totally different to that I had with the hospital staff. I would have beenb craving for sympathy and understanding from him whereas with the midwives I put on a very brave face. I don’t think I would have wanted him there in the birth but obviously it wasn’t even an option back then.” Jane 1971 “.. For the last two hours maybe, I was in this labour room and it was really primitive, just a wooden table and me and the midwife.. and she had the windows open and it was June and there were hundreds of trees outside, beautiful blue skies and I was lying there.. and it wasn’t at all high-tech, there was no equipment, nothing like that.. so it felt good. Then, four and a half years later I was pregnant with my daughter and by now had a nice home so I went to the doctor and I said I want to have my baby at home and he said ‘You can’t possibly do that!!’… And they kept running tests, doing these horrible intrusive tests and it wasn’t very pleasant actually.. And I guess that’s what the 70s experience of giving birth was like, quite alienating; it was medical, a medical procedure, whereas in the older hospital you were there to give birth with a group of women..” Lilja 1952 “It used to be a well-known fact that midwives were very bad-tempered. I had been told beforehand not to complain about anything minor. There was some pain-relief available, some kind of gas. But I’ve always been a bit old-fashioned in that way. I’ve thought that you have to endure something to achieve something. And the feeling afterwards, when your baby is born, is so wonderful that I think you could suffer a lot more pain just for that feeling. With my third one I did hear stories that someone had given birth sitting up but it just felt distant and unheard of, you wouldn’t have thought of doing that yourself. You went for the traditional and did what you were told..” Lisa 1986 “.. and then I got this really sort of hard midwife who came in afterwards and stuck my feet up on the stirrups and got really sort of down to it. It was a complete shock, like being thrown into a bath of cold water all of a sudden. I just couldn’t believe it, how medieval is that, it just doesn’t make sense does it really to be lying on your back to have a baby. I mean, it’s just gravity isn’t it. You should be up so that they plop down, not lying back so they plop up.. You would have been better off, I would have been better off just going behind a bush and dropping it.. and then going back to the fields afterwards.” Melanie 1978 “I don’t think there is any doubt that it works out cheaper to have care at home.. if you’re in hospital you are far more likely to end up with intervention, you are far more likely to end up with a ceasarian section, and how much does that cost, how many staff do you have to pay to do that? ..Then this midwife came in a third time and said well, if you’re not having pethedine then you must have valium, and I said I’m not having valium, I’m not having any of it. Looking back the birth was great, it was just everything afterwards that was awful, just awful.. so next time no question, I wanted a home birth. The midwife just sat in the corner and talked gently of inconsequential things and left me to get on with it so that was really good, really enjoyed that birth. Although there is always a point where you say I’m never going to do this again.. because you forget what it’s like in between. Since I qualified as a midwife and been working with home births, I’ve had only one woman in six years deliver on her back, and that was her choice. If you leave women to choose they will not choose that position.” Pirjo 1988 “They said they wouldn’t bring any drugs or pain-relief to the room where the pool was so obviously I changed my mind about the waterbirth. That would have meant a totally natural birth then. And the staff did not seem enthusiastic about the whole waterbirth thing so in the end I chose against it. With my first one there wasn’t any talk of any alternatives. You pretty much were told what to do and how. It was very traditional, lying back on the bed and that was it. The only thing new then was that fathers were allowed in.” Pirkko 1955 “It definitely was natural childbirthing in those days, pain and agony… There was no prenatal guidance, they didn’t prepare you in any way to what was ahead. Even in the check-ups you were given no information. They should have told you a bit more of what was going on and what was to be expected, especially about the contractions. The other thing that’s changed a lot is that nowadays pregnancy is a positive thing, something you want to show.. I don’t know what it was then, a kind of shame or something that you still had to kind of try and hide it even when you were married.”