Alva MacSherry had her first baby in Ireland and her second in France. The differences? No queues, plenty of classes, unstinting attention - and a home help. Oh, and all free
I had my first baby on bin day. As every expectant mother in Dublin knows, bin day brings traffic to a standstill. The car inched along on the way to hospital, and I hung from the door during contractions, but there was plenty of time. I smiled bravely and chirped: "No, no hurry dear, I'm fine."
Second baby, four years on, last month. It's 3 a.m.: there is no traffic at all. I'm wishing there was, because I'm about to give birth and we're a bloody long way from Holles Street or any humanity at all. We are, in fact, hurtling through the French countryside at about 80 miles an hour. And I am not fine at all. Only willpower is standing between this baby and local newspaper headlines.
Before we go any further, I'll tell you that both pregnancies ended happily, with bouncing baby girls delivered in the usual manner. Which is about all the two pregnancies had in common, because birth is a different ball game in France.
There's a very matter-of-fact attitude to birth in Ireland. If you're a healthy woman having a healthy baby, then really it's up to you to get on with it and not be overburdening the system. The sooner you and the infant can get on your feet and back home, the better for everyone. See you when it's time for school.
But we don't live in Dublin any more. I, my husband and our big daughter - now four - moved to France two years ago, to sidestep the rat race. With the imminent arrival of our second child, we got up close and personal to some seriously French healthcare - for better and for worse.
The French healthcare industry is huge. It costs a lot, but most French people would consider it worth the toll. Round here, if you need to see a hospital consultant you may have to wait a week. If it's something pressing you'll see your consultant the same day.
So when you're pregnant it's all-singing, all-dancing. Between a heavily medicalised approach to pregnancy - la grossesse - and a government determined to increase the numbers of children per household, you're in for some serious cossetting, checking and poking. This can be disconcerting if you're Irish and used to being considered healthy if you're still standing. Of course later, when, as a second-time mother, you're getting child support from the fifth month of pregnancy, as well as home help three hours a week until three months after the birth, you may get over the shock.
My pregnancy care in Ireland was wholly straightforward. At the National Maternity Hospital, on Holles Street, with 20 or 30 other women, I would queue each month, clutching my urine sample. At the top of that queue a midwife would rather grumpily weigh me. I would join another queue, shuffling along a bench in a corridor as the line moved along for, oh, about an hour, and take my turn in a cabinet where some doctor - never the same one twice - would feel my abdomen and ask a couple of questions. Consultation would take about three minutes. I had one scan. It wasn't fancy, but it sufficed.
Post-delivery didn't really suffice, in retrospect. Six women and six crying babies in a ward, other people's visitors flicking back the curtain while I tried to learn to breastfeed . . . and I was paying for the privilege.
I've described this to French women, and they get an appalled, embarrassed look, as if they're reconsidering Ireland's right to membership of the EU, the First World and polite society. There are never more than two to a room in a French hospital.
And that's public medicine. Free.
Here in France my gynaecologist oversaw the first five months of my pregnancy. It's a luxurious service, with plenty of time to talk, easy access to scans - because she had her own ultrasound scanner - and tests for everything imaginable. In the course of my pregnancy I turned out not to have HIV, syphilis, toxoplasmosis (I didn't have toxoplasmosis seven times), enough iron, diabetes and lots of other stuff. Some of these tests are obligatory, others just heavily advised.
All of them made me feel as if I were on alert for a medical emergency, which hardly made for a restful pregnancy. French people, who actually are constantly on the alert for a medical emergency, tell me they find all this probing reassuring.
Much more fun were the pre-natal courses (free, again). I did two. The first was a seven-week course, four hours a week, including relaxation, yoga classes and birthing theory. It's really hard to do yoga in a foreign language. Contorting your body while trying to understand obscure instructions is much like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. "Platformez le dos," our wispy yoga teacher would murmur. Uh?
Meanwhile we learned incredibly effective breathing techniques, located and practised using different sets of muscles for delivery, had a psychiatrist in to answer our questions and explain the psyche of the pregnant woman. It was very impressive.
The second of my preparation courses included aqua exercises in the local pool while the lunchtime length-swimmers ploughed up and down beside us. I cherish the memory of we seven heavily pregnant women drifting, bellies-up, our heads between the knees of the next, supported on a float.
Nobody was hysterical with laughter or embarrassment. The French are sooo much more grown up than us.
My class even had a straight-faced discussion on "la déclenchement italienne". I don't know the English for this, but basically it's bringing on childbirth by having sex. We examined the merits of this over our midday meal, for which my classmates unloaded tuna salads, Waldorf salads, salades Niçoise, rolls, Ryvita, Greek yogurts and sachets of honey, pieces of cheese, oranges and little sharp knives, slices of tart, flan, crème caramel. Every lower shelf of the food triangle got its fair hearing.
Because, of course, pregnancy combines two of France's national passions: health and eating.
Gaining weight is an official no-no. The state, like every French woman, takes its fight against excess pounds very seriously. When you're pregnant, the health people send you a guide to pregnancy, birth and the first three years of your child's life. In it you'll find 10 pages on how to eat in pregnancy. The first topic? How not to gain excess weight. Only then does it go into eating extra cheese and drinking two glasses of mineral water a day (for fluoride, in case you're asking).
The delivery was over so quickly that it's hard to do a comparison with the Irish birth. We staggered into the maternity clinic and the midwife, Marie-Lore, greeted us at the door, popped me up on an examination table and delivered the baby.
One thing stands out: Marie-Lore kept saying, "C'est vous qui guide" (You're the boss), and, yes, that was the way it seemed to me, too. All that preparation must have paid off.
After delivery came the biggest contrast with Ireland. Despite a complication-free birth I was offered seven days of peace and quiet in a single-bed room with Caroline Ruth, ma petite française. This space to get to know my new daughter - after all, probably the only extended period we'll ever spend alone - was the best thank-you gift the state could have given me for having more than one child.
A last word. The French government's efforts are paying off and the number of women having further children is on the increase, so much so that France is ranked second in Europe for the number of children per mother. Second to Ireland, funnily enough.
As we now get our plastic surgery done in South Africa and our teeth fixed in Poland, is there any reason you shouldn't travel to have a baby? Armed with an E111 form, anyone has a right to medical care, including pregnancy care, in any other EU state. If you are staying longer than a year, you need an E104, to say you have been insured at home.
You may not fly after the seventh month of pregnancy without a letter from your medical team, andit is said in any case to be an unpleasant experience.
You are free to choose where you will have your child, although home births are limited by the availability of midwives. I chose a midwife-led team in a quiet country clinic where 300 babies are delivered a year.
Even with quite fluent French, it took a while to amass the necessary vocabulary. Many hospital consultants have excellent English.