A hospital is a place. Your hospital will have an overall personality. The maternity ward in your local hospital will have a specific personality. It’s a great idea to visit during pregnancy if you haven’t already birthed there, to see what that personality is. Regardless … you will birth there! You want to have a natural hospital birth.
- Have you defined what exactly a natural hospital birth means, looks like and what is involved?
- Are you creating a Birth Plan?
- Do you have contingency plans if your birth is not as you imagined?
- Is there a way for you to have a positive birth no matter what happens to or around you in hospital? That’s what we at Common Knowledge Trust want to talk you to about.
‘Standards of care’ and your natural hospital birth
- What’s going to happen in your local hospital when you go there to give birth?
- Do you know what things will happen once you walk in the door?
- What are you going to do for yourself? This is what we want to talk to you about.
From the moment you step into your hospital, you will be subject to the ‘standards of care’ required by law in your State or Country. Can you negotiate any of those? Sure to some degree. That is the goal of your Birth Plan. You get to tell your Obstetrician, midwife or staff in hospital what you want and don’t want. However, if there are legal ‘standards of care’ those will be hard to negotiate away. You need to investigate these and discuss them.
Another layer for you to consider is this. Your hospital may have very different standards than your birth provider. This can be compounded by your insurance company as well.
Your bottom line: If you don’t want ‘medical’ care then don’t birth in a hospital.
The important skills for your natural hospital birth
Your hospital birth will unfold in unexpected ways because birth tends to be like that. Our goal is for you and your partner/other to have a positive birth no matter how your birth actually unfolds. This is the goal of all Birthing Better families. While many made a conventional Birth Plan, they also learned skills to prepare the pregnant body to birth as well as birth and birth-coaching skills AND created a skills-based Birth Plan full of the skills they committed to using.
Skilled families are less sensitive to all the fiddle that just goes hand in hand with modern maternity hospital care. Skilled families are more likely to achieve their natural hospital birth. Skilled families are more likely to focus on what they can do for themselves rather than what happens to or around them. The benefits of becoming skilled to birth your baby are enormous. The benefit of using skills to birth your baby can spell the difference between being overwhelmed by all the standards of care and being able to work with them as you achieve your natural hospital birth.
Three types of standards of care … AMPs
You will experience assessments (A) such as:
- listening to your baby’s heart
- taking your blood pressure
- perhaps having you pee in a cup
- maybe check you for dilation
- take blood?
You’ll also have some monitoring (M):
- perhaps have a strap around your belly to constantly monitor your baby’s heart rate
- checking you regularly for dilation if you’re laboring
- double-checking your blood pressure
- if you’re having a Caesarean then all your vital signs will be monitored
Perhaps you’ll experience some procedures(P):
- your membranes may be swept to stimulate dilation
- you may have an induction of labor to get it started
- if you’re having a Caesarean then you’ll be prepped and probably given an epidural
In other words, hospitals (obstetricians, midwives, and staff) are doing all these AMPs in order to safeguard you and your baby’s well-being. Whether you like these things or not, whether you believe these are ‘interventions’ or not, whether you think having any of these AMPs will stop you from having a natural hospital birth or not …. all of these are what the present ‘evidence-based maternity care’ believes is important. That’s is why they are called ‘standards of care’.
Interventions or AMPs?
If you’re a natural birth advocate you’ll refer to them as ‘interventions’. You must be very clear about what you want and don’t want AND be able to get on with your birth even if you have heaps. This is what we want to talk to you about. Skilled women birth naturally even when there are tubes coming out of every hole! They get on with their birth and let the fiddle just become part of that experience. They also think relatively … ‘I’m not living in a war zone’ or ‘I’m not living in a country where women have no medical care, so I’m just going to get on with giving birth my way’.
Bottom line: If you don’t want any AMPs then do not birth in a hospital!
No matter what happens to or around you, your hospital is just a place. Maybe where you want to be or not. So, we recommend that you become highly skilled. This is what Birthing Better Families did and why hundreds of families developed all these skills.
These are the WHY reasons to become skilled:
- Families want something they can do for themselves
- Women want to cope, manage and stay on top of their whole birth experience and want their partner to know how to help.
- Men want to know how to help their birthing partner realistically and effectively.
- Families want to reduce and prevent birth trauma.
- Families don’t want their medical issues from becoming major problems. Yes … skills can reduce and prevent medical issues from blowing up. In fact, there is no correlation between how many risks a woman has with the ability of her baby to come out of her body or for her to cope well.
Some of the happy side-effects of using your birth and birth-coaching skills:
- The Cascade of Intervention you fear is greatly reduced because birth moves along, women cope and just don’t need as much ‘intervention’
- Families feel proud of themselves even if they didn’t have a perfect birth.
- They experience significantly less birth trauma and feel less traumatized by challenging births.
- They adjust to their newborns better.
Consider this comparison
You might not be happy with your local hospital but it could be worse. You could be in countries like Iraq or Syria. You could be experiencing famine or live in a country with no medical care. You could be birthing 2 generations ago when you labored alone in a hospital and were knocked out during the birth and your partner went to the pub! Cheer up, become skilled and here’s our Birthing Better Childbirth Preparation eBook on Hospital Birth
You can achieve your natural hospital birth … because giving birth is the natural conclusion of being pregnant.
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Birthing Better skills were developed by moms and dads in the early 1970s in the US and used by many thousands globally in all types of birth. Birthing Better online birthing classes are housed in Common Knowledge Trust.