‘I’ve just had a baby!’ blurted out comedian Lily Phillips – not to be confused with OnlyFans’ Lily Phillips – during her first comedy set after giving birth.
ITV’s The Stand Up Sketch Show regular Lily was supposed to be making her usual smutty jokes about her dog’s vagina. She was definitely not supposed to be doing a show about babies or motherhood at all. But she couldn’t contain herself.
It wasn’t ‘baby bubble’ happiness Lily couldn’t help but share: there were no birds, flowers and bees bursting out of the comedian’s orifices like some Disney goddess.
No: her life had changed, and she was in hell. She’d been in hell ever since the excruciating three-day labour began in hospital, where she was dehumanised, infantalised, and ignored until it was almost too late.
‘I needed everyone to know what had just happened to me, because it was everything,’ Lily tells Metro ahead of her Edinburgh Fringe show Crying, all about the trauma of hatching a baby (it’s funny, too).
‘I want to get to the bit people don’t talk about,’ she says, with a surprising sternness that cuts through her sweet exterior, which she admits often catches audiences off guard. (No one expected her to say the word c***, ha!)
‘We paint this picture that [welcoming a baby] is magical, beautiful and life-changing, and it is those things. But we’re afraid to go really into the horrible side of it, because it looks like we don’t love our child and that we regret it,’ Lily says.
‘Those two things can exist at the same time, and one of them doesn’t make the other untrue.’
So this is Lily’s story. Without all those flowery caveats.
Lily was the first of her National Childbirth Trust (NCT) group to give birth, amid pings of girlboss memes: ‘You’ve got this!’ and ‘You’re a goddess!’ and ‘You’re so strong!’
‘Women are amazing that they achieve birth, but [this messaging] also gives you the idea that you can curate your own birth,’ Lily says. ‘Forced positivity can make you then feel like a failure if you don’t have this perfect birth experience.’
Then there’s pain relief. If you don’t have an epidural, apparently you’re a badass?
‘Because of all that f***ing nonsense in my head, I waited three days before I had an epidural. So I was in labor for three f***ing days,’ she says.
The hospital was reluctant to hand out pain relief, too.
‘Where you’re supposed to have the baby they don’t offer you the thing that would help the well documented pain of childbirth,’ Lily points out.
‘Then you’re like… “No, I really, really want one.” They’re like, “Okay, well, you have to go up two floors in the hospital while you’re naked and howling like a dog.”‘
Lily kept on telling doctors she thought her baby was stuck, as the pain was so intense, and it kept getting worse. She wasn’t dilated and was three centimeters for three days.
‘Obviously, I’d never had a baby before, but I was just trying to tell them what I was feeling, and they just kept saying, “No, it’s fine. The heart rate’s fine,”‘ Lily remembers.
To sum it up: ‘Birth is just hours and hours of unimaginable pain, where every now and then someone comes along and fists you.’
Lily’s doctor kept talking about a natural birth. She was going to have a glorious, natural birth. Everything would be fine.
‘It makes you feel like a child when all this stuff I’d read before was about you being so empowered,’ Lily says. ‘I just felt the opposite of that. I felt very vulnerable.’
Lily asked for a C-section.
‘Have you ever been in so much pain that you’re begging someone to slice you open?’ she jokes, adding: ‘As though a C section is a nice thing to do. It’s a mad place to be.’
But no. “Naturally,” they repeated.
Of course when Lily started to push all hell broke loose, and her baby daughter’s heart rate dropped.
She was whisked off to theatre and handed a consent form on the way in case they had to do an emergency C-section.
‘They don’t listen to a word you say most of the time, and then suddenly you have to sign this legal document, and they’re like, “Oh, she’s fine to sign this. We’ll definitely take this… She’s not high, she’s not deranged,”‘ Lily says.
They tried a ventouse suction cup – a little like a toilet plunger – which is placed on the baby’s head to assist contractions. But that didn’t work. Then came forceps, a spoon-like contraption which is also used around the baby’s head.
How many women experience traumatic births?
According to the Birth Trauma Association, who are holding Birth Trauma Awareness Week this week, 5% of women experience PTSD after birth. That’s around 25,000 to 30,000 a year in the UK.
Often women say neglect or poor communication from the health professionals looking after them contributed to their trauma.
Thankfully at this point Lily was post-epidural, as she also had an episiotomy: when a doctor cuts the area between the vaginal opening and the anus.
Lily’s partner described the scene as a ‘tug of war’.
‘They realised the reason she wasn’t coming was because she was back to back, which is the wrong position,’ says Lily.
‘That’s why I had so much pain in my back, and the cord was wrapped around her body and her neck, so she was just stuck.’
Eventually they did get her out.
‘They put the baby on you for this moment that you’re supposed to have, but you’ve just been through a massive trauma, and they’re like, “This is beautiful”. But I just feel broken.’
While the world is so conscious about mental health, it seems to Lily this is lost to maternity wards.
‘They seem to be going through some kind of checklist of how to give you postnatal depression,’ Lily half-jokes.
Every time Lily asked how to do something with her baby, she’d get judged: they would laugh at her, or roll their eyes.
‘They just seem quite angry that you don’t know how to look after a baby, even though we kept saying we haven’t done this before,’ Lily recalls.
‘I just think it’d be weird if you were really good at breastfeeding before you’d ever breastfed anyone. Where are you learning that?’
To add another smattering of humiliation to the whole experience, after her episiotomy Lily had to prove she could wee in a cardboard potty before they would let her go.
‘They make you bring it to them at the nurses’ station,’ says Lily, incredulously. ‘But you’re just like an animal at that point. At the time, you don’t think, “This bit much – why couldn’t they just come with me in the toilet? Why can’t this be more private?”‘
‘But you’re there just naked, you’re leaking out of every orifice, you don’t know night and day. You’re just, like, inhuman, by this point.’
Forceps, a ventose and episiotomy explained
According per the NHS:
A ventouse (vacuum cup) is attached to the baby’s head by suction. A soft or hard plastic or metal cup is attached by a tube to a suction device. The cup fits firmly on to your baby’s head.
During a contraction and with the help of your pushing, the obstetrician or midwife gently pulls to help deliver your baby.
Forceps are smooth metal instruments that look like large spoons or tongs. They’re curved to fit around the baby’s head. The forceps are carefully positioned around your baby’s head and joined together at the handles.
With a contraction and your pushing, an obstetrician gently pulls to help deliver your baby.
An episiotomy is when doctors cut between the vagina and the anus during childdbirth, making the opening of the vagina wider, allowing the baby to come through more easily.
In England, episiotomies are not done routinely, but in circumstances where the baby is in distress and needs to be born quickly, if there is a need for forceps or vacuum delivery (ventouse), or if there is a risk of a tear to the anus.
Lily’s story is not a one-off. She realised this when creaking the doors open to friends’ experiences years later, as each one slowly started being honest about their births, and comparing notes on their maternity ward experiences. They found disturbing similarities.
‘At first I thought it was just me, and maybe I was annoying [the doctors] or I didn’t know what to do, and all the other mothers did, and that was bad,’ Lily says.
At home, Lily’s baby wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time; she suspects partly due to the traumatic birth.
This left her feeling horrific for eight months until the sleep came, and her mood shifted.
‘What I found so frustrating in those eight months was this feeling that it should be the most magical time of my life. But actually, I felt like I was in hell, but I couldn’t tell anyone I was in hell,’ she recalls.
While there were celebratory cards all over her house saying kind words like, “You’re so lucky!” and “What a joy!”, Lily was making terrifying post-epistiotomy toilet trips in tears with her baby attached to her chest.
‘This doesn’t feel lucky?’ she remembers thinking.
After her birth, fellow NTC mums-to-be asked Lily how her experience was: ‘Was it incredible? Did you feel powerful?’
