Here we go again … more ‘interventions’ women are supposed to avoid in order to have a ‘natural’ birth. It’s exhausting isn’t it?
We got here by intentional ‘ideas’ and ‘words’ and ‘actions’ and even ‘systems’ and ‘policies’.
We have a HUGE problem in how we, Women, talk to one another about childbirth.
Manipulating positions
Ultrasounds
Not being able to eat or drink
Not respecting the woman’s choices
Standards of care
Telling the woman to ‘push’
Why is our New Zealand registered not-for-profit, charitable educational Trust speaking out now? Because of COVID and because the whole childbirth conversation needs to be slightly shifted to include growing a self-learning skilled birthing population to go along with the ‘choice-based’ trend put in place in the early 1980s.
Are birth ‘choices’ important? Of course! However, there’s no way to know what your birth will be like and babies don’t come to plan and choices are fickle to say the least. So, we know ‘choices’ are important yet so variable and actually miss the whole point of ‘giving’ birth.
Giving birth is an ‘activity’. We have to ‘do’ this activity. We can’t ‘chose’ how to do this activity unless we have effective skills. Without good birth and birth-coaching skills, then we react rather than respond.
We’ll discuss this further in our #4 part of this #5 part series on Interventions.