Canadian Mom’s Plea for Postpartum Healthcare Hits Home for Mothers Across the Internet

Illustration - Shutterstock

After the delivery of a baby, a new mom tends to experience a varied range of emotional and physical changes. To regain her strength from the afterpains and postpartum depression, she requires care, the right nutrition, and good rest.

Sadly, in most countries, the needs of a newborn are well taken care of while the new mommy is given “much less priority” compared to the baby. Highlighting this important issue, one mom in Canada took to Facebook to post her disappointment.

In January 2018, Anneliese Lawton, from Canada, who manages the Facebook page “Grown Up Glamour,” gave birth to her second son. With the arrival of a newborn baby, her family’s attention fell primarily on the little bundle of joy, and Lawton couldn’t help feeling neglected.

To lament about how moms are failing to receive the care they need and how their struggles are being overlooked, she penned a heartfelt message on Facebook, and the relatable post immediately went viral.

“After my boys were born, there were appointments,” Lawton recalled. “To check their latch. To check their weight. To check their hearing. To check the color of their skin for signs of jaundice.”

“I'd say, when it comes to our healthcare system, they were well taken care of.”

“Then there was me,” she wrote.

While her babies had to go through endless appointments to ensure they were doing fine, she was “engorged, bleeding, and stitched up,” and being sent home with just “some painkillers and stool softeners” as a clueless first-time mom.

Once home, she was immediately “thrown into motherhood with the expectation my instincts would kick in.”

She struggled to adjust to life with a baby. Just imagine having to wake up in the middle of the night to handle colic and breastfeeding.

Caring for a baby 24/7 can lead to burnout, so Lawton, like many other moms, would slip into postpartum depression without her husband knowing it.

On top of that, the new moms have to deal with issues like sudden hair loss, skin discoloration, changes in body weight, breasts, genitalia, abdomen, and urinary patterns, as well as a change in bowel habits, a report in Parenting.FirstCry.com explains.

Anneliese continued, “No one poked me. No one prodded. No one checked my stitches, my healing, or my sanity until eight weeks postpartum,“ she wrote. ”Our world forgets about mothers.”

Lawton urged society to place more emphasis on the well-being of mothers as “our babies need us. To be healthy. To know that we are worthy.”

She also explained that “To know that Motherhood, while natural, can sometimes feel like the least natural role in our life.”

While she concluded, “Mothers deserve attention.”

“We need someone to not only ask if we’re okay but to check time and time again, just to be sure.”

Lawton’s powerful words have managed to strike a chord among many other mothers. Her “thought-provoking post” has racked up more than 72,000 reactions and over 8,400 comments.

“Totally can relate. Your life just gets turned upside down and you’re expected to deal with it and know how to deal with it,” one user wrote.

Another remarked, “Almost 40 years ago I felt the same. Now I am a grandma and my daughter in law is from Taiwan where traditionally the new mother and baby are cared for intently for the first month. My daughter in law felt the system here was cruel and uncaring to women during this vulnerable time.”

Meanwhile, netizens from Holland and Germany shared that in their country, they hire a kind of nurse or midwife, who comes to their homes to care for the baby, the mother, and the whole family.

“Most of the time they stay for about a week up to two weeks depending on how much help the family needs,” one woman from Holland wrote.

Another commented, “We had this in Germany where I gave birth to both of my children. I am so thankful I did not have my kids in the US or Canada because of this.”

Hopefully, Lawton’s post will inspire the need for a change in the healthcare system, and eventually, we hope that mothers will be given the best of care after childbirth.