Most expectant families are not interested in or know about the history of childbirth trends in the US or in their country. Who really cares? A family is having a baby and that is all they care about. By far the vast majority of expectant parents just follow the maternity norm in the community where they live. Sure a few pregnant women are really seeking some form of ‘ideal’ birth (in their mind, what they’ve read or seen). These pregnant women either live in communities where choices are available to them or not. Because there is no societal expectation that they should become skilled then their whole birth potential rests on what happens to or around them.
So let’s just refresh ourselves about the recent childbirth trends. In the US the profession of midwifery was depressed legally in most States until as recently as the 1980s. There have always been people willing to act as ‘the midwife’. Many of those were lay midwives (without formal and recognized training), nurses who also attended births, Vietnam medics and a few obstetricians or family doctors willing to attend home births. Some of these very compassionate and dedicated people also acted as the ‘support’ person or ‘coach’ for the woman but they could not transfer their care if the woman went to hospital during The Birth.
In other countries where midwifery was and remains part of the maternity system pregnant women either had the option of home birth with a recognized midwife (usually a nurse midwife) or was attended by staff midwives in hospitals.
As mentioned in the 1960s/70s there was a societal expectation for a skilled birthing population but in the 1980s that was totally replaced by the present choice-based childbirth trend. In other countries there has never really been a dedicated skills-based childbirth trend and choices in some modern countries were more likely to be part of maternity care and in others there were no choices for home births yet midwives saw the women during pregnancy, in birth and afterwards but not as continuity of care providers.
In the 1970s if you were paying attention to the natural birth/midwifery movement several interesting things happened. The message to pregnant women was simple … you don’t need skills. For the small percentage of women who could find a midwife to attend a home birth, these unskilled women began to put pressure on the midwives to offer continuity of care and be their primary birth coach. This resulted in exhausted women who worked as midwives. They tried to resolve this by having a ‘midwifery assistant’ or ‘midwifery student’ (informal training) attend and take some of the burden.
This system began to symbolically reduce the empowerment of the pregnant women. In reality under a follow-your-doctor’s-orders childbirth trend, the millions of skilled families got on using their skills in a system that had staff obstetrical nurses and obstetricians who came in and left and hospital standards of care they could do nothing about. For that small percent of women wanting a home birth with a midwife, they often perceived of the midwife as a woman who was gifted in her instinct and intuition and had a calling … and trusted her. As one famous author said: ‘Trust your midwife’. This means the unskilled women stopped trusting themselves. This often produced longer, more tiring labors and too often exhausted women who worked as midwives and their own families who suffered from their dedication to ‘Women’.
So the assistant or student became another layer between a woman’s own capacity and reliance on the birth provider. In the 1970s doulas began to develop. Their role was to be ‘coach’ and ‘advocate’ for this new Choice-based trend. This provided another layer: woman, doula, student, assistant, midwife.
Today many doulas advertise all the skills they bring to the birth. Instead of women/men being skilled the skills reside in the doula or the midwife as well as the obstetrician. We are burying birthing women and definitely fathers-to-be under a longer and longer list of people who can offer skills to help them achieve what they ‘want’ in their Birth Plan while not focusing at all on what we, as birthing families, can do for ourselves so we can always skillfully work through our baby’s birth journey.
And we know this … women who work as doulas are not available everywhere (another example of who ‘choices’ are not broad enough) and often another financial burden.
We’ve got to get back to basics. All expectant families need to self-learn birth and coaching skills. No system works well when one part of that system has no skills and is just making choices about what they want. This puts too much pressure on the other members of the system to supply the unskilled ‘partner’ with what they want without the partner doing any work for it.
There is NO doubt there are many women who want to be involved in birth and offer their services because they love pregnancy, birth and babies. But this ultimately is all about themselves. There is no doubt that pregnant women (and less so for fathers) want other ‘knowledgeable’ and skilled women around them. Partly that comes from the reality that they lack skills or guidance in how or where to get them. This means they will rely too heavily on others … and unnecessarily.
The solution for doulas is simple. Have a number of skills-based resources and require your clients to take responsibility to become skilled partners. Have them make a conventional Birth Plan and a Skills-based Birth Plan. Unlike childbirth educators you’ll be at their birth. This means you can spend your time working with them with the skills they’ve learned and encourage them to use those skills throughout The Birth. Gosh, it’s just more fun working with skilled families then not!
It’s also a financial asset to you to rent or include in your fee the skills-based resource the family chooses. Making some living from what you love should include getting your clients to learn birth/coaching skills no matter what birth they are choosing or will have.
Here’s a link how one couple worked through The Pink Kit. We hope you’ll consider becoming a local distributor for this skills-based resource. It won The Reader’s Choice Award for the Best Childbirth Product 2012 for a good reason … the skills work in every type of birth!
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/
Please join the Movement to grow a Skills-based childbirth trend. Don’t’ let another birth go by without that family being skilled.
Doulas can play a huge part in growing a skilled-birthing population by educating and enthusing families to self-learn birth/coaching skills and offering families skills-based resources.