If you’ve had a good or great birth experience, you might not think that you need to prepare for this next birth. Wrong. Every birth is different and there is no way you can predetermine that this birth will be as good or better.
Why should we assume that once a good birth always a good birth? Or more specifically why should we assume that a good birth is something we are entitled to because we’ve had a previous good birth experience?
That’s like saying that a good meal just happens. Actually a preparing a good meal comes from having good cooking skills. Preparation and skills are the operative words. Being hungry is as much a naturally occurring physiological process as is giving birth. It just happens more frequently and it’s more commonly known how to cook than how to give birth.
Preparing your body for giving birth is vitally important in your goal of giving birth no matter what your previous experience was like. If you end up having another great birth then all the preparation will have paid off. It’s the same for learning good birth skills. If you work with your baby’s efforts to be born, you are much more likely to know you’ve had a good birth partly because of your own efforts.
When you learn birth skills with your partner that are based on our shared human body and how to specifically prepare our body for birth then your good birth experience will be even more enriched.
After 24 weeks our pregnant body is preparing for birth. We can learn ways to prepare our body so the passage of our baby is made easier. We can learn birth skills so our participation is more full and conscious. There is no doubt that many women don’t know why or how they had a good birth. With birth skills we do know that our ability to work with our baby’s efforts become an internal dance with the sensations and messages known only to ourselves.
Giving birth is definitely not a noun or inaction. Giving birth is something each woman and her baby do together. Our baby is stimulating the container that has held it for 9 months. Birth is the action of an object that must come out of a container.
It’s important that this container be prepared to liberate a large object. All humans share something in common … our birthing body. Both men and women share the same body, so we can prepare our body with the help of our partner and learn the same set of skills such as Directed Breathing, the Pelvic Clock or Deep Touch Relaxation. Of course, we are doing the work of labour but our partner’s role is to help us feel in control and on top of the sensations of that process.
We can learn how to keep our inside soft tissue relaxed, how to keep the bony pelvis mobile and how to prepare the exit so it opens easily without delay for the baby or trauma to our own body.
This needs to be done during pregnancy no matter what birth will eventuate. Preparing our birthing body is part of the enjoyment of the experience whether we believe we will have another good birth. Preparing our birthing body also gives us more confidence that we will meet the challenge of labour no matter what. No woman likes to be surprised and unprepared.
Learning birth skills grows confidence and for a woman who has had a previous good birth also enriches her insight, instinct and intuitive capacities. Birth is an infrequent experience so why not fully enjoy the whole pregnancy, preparing for birth and learning birth skills to use that are applicable for the task at hand.
During the ‘doing’ of birth you can then work with your baby’s efforts to be born particularly when the work gets harder and more painful. A good birth experience isn’t always about having a short birth or one that wasn’t too painful to you. Having a good birth is about being involved with every moment of the experience and knowing you are working with your baby and reading the internal messages your baby is giving you.
You’ll never regret spending time during pregnancy to learn good birthing skills. Every time you are pregnant, relearn them and deepen your experience. Become a skilled birthing woman during pregnancy and see how knowing how-to birth broadens the concept of ‘good births’.