Before the next post why many choices -few skills fail babies, I want to ask you to envision these scenarios of birth.
#1 … A woman ‘choosing’ a home birth in water with a midwife. She labors beautifully and everyone around her sees this beauty.
She is beautiful and she is managing beautifully and she has had everything she’s wanted!
#2 … A woman is in hospital with tubes coming out every single one of her holes. She is either ‘chosen’ this situation, required it due to circumstances or been pressured to have this experience.
She (and her husband/partner/other) are working with their birth and coaching skills beautifully. In fact besides the tubes and the hospital and bed she will look very much like the woman in #1. She’s managing beautifully and her partner/other is working with her (that might also have happened in #1).
Does she look less beautiful than #1? Is she less empowered than #1? No, in fact she is using her skills in an incredibly challenging situation whether she chose it or not.
Until we can see birth and coaching skills being used in every type of birth we will not move this conversation forward nor will there be change in the childbirth trend. We will continue to believe that #1 is achievable only because of ‘choice’ and #2 can never be a totally beautiful and empowered birth.
And who is doing this? We are as women and we must stop! There is NO man who is telling us a home birth in water with a midwife is more beautiful than a hospital birth full of medical assessments, monitoring and procedures. We are doing this to ourselves and we must stop it.
If we, as women, want continuity of care and primary care … in the form of midwives then that is something we should work toward. If we believe midwives should ONLY attend #1 in order to fulfill themselves individually or professionally then we have a problem and there will never be continuity of care/primary care for all of us … women. If we believe midwives should reap the benefits of #2 then we need to understand how that scenario happens. An individual woman and her partner/other chose to become skilled and they chose to use their birth and coaching skills to work through their baby’s birth journey no matter what was happening to or around them.
The one thing we know from the few midwives who require their clients to prepare their pregnant body to give birth, learn, practice and use their birth/coaching skills KNOW that being around skilled families is really what brings incredible satisfaction to the job … not whether there happens to be some or lots of medical assessments, monitoring and procedures.
If we, as women, want more midwifery care then we had better become more skilled!
Please join the Movement to grow a Skills-based childbirth trend. Don’t’ let another birth go by without that family being skilled.
Here’s a link. This link will be put on all the posts. Kristen has 6 kids, the last 3 are PK babies. She KNOWS about birth and is one of our affiliates. That means if you purchase The Pink Kit through her she gets a commission. Her husband Scott’s first baby was a Pink Kit experience. He’ll explain how The Pink Kit made certain he was able to become a skilled birth coach to a woman who had previously had three great births!
Kristen’s written a time-line calendar for use of The Pink Kit. You just need to sign up to her mail list (we don’t keep a mail list) and she’ll send you the Time Line. She’s worked through both Edition #2 and #3 of The PInk Kit so she knows all it’s imperfections and la-dee-dahs past them to the skills she wants to improve for each birth. Can women and men have better births each time? Sure can! The more skilled, the more we master the experience.
http://blog.naturalbirthandbabycare.com/pink-kit-timeline-from-natural-birth-and-baby-care-com/