Expect the best and prepare for whatever. Here’s a Truth … you didn’t get pregnant to have a vaginal birth nor a surgical one … you got pregnant to have a baby! So what does it mean for you if YOU want a vaginal birth after a Cesarean if not having one means you disconnect from your baby’s birth journey?
Unfortunately, that is happening too often. We’ve been living in a ‘choice-based’ approach to pregnancy and childbirth. We get downright pissed off if we don’t get the birth we ‘want’ or ‘choose’. We need to shift the birth paradigm to include a ‘skills-based’ approach to every pregnancy and each birth because you and your baby are always connected through the activity of giving birth from your perspective and being born from your baby’s.
That’s why being skilled is so essential. You might not like what is happening to you or around you but when you have skills you’ll focus more on what you ‘do’ than on what is ‘happening’.
You also want to do everything you absolutely can to achieve a successful VBAC. You absolutely must:
- Prepare your pregnant body realistically to become a birthing body.
- Learn skills to work with the naturally occurring pain of dilation.
- Prepare your baby’s birth passage so you open up to let your baby out.
- Have your partner learn effective birth coaching skills so they can really help you work with your baby’s efforts to come down, through and out your body.
Giving birth no longer just ‘happens’ to you. Giving birth becomes the activity you do moment-to-moment in a skillful manner. Then your desire to have a VBAC becomes more realistic and if you have a surgical birth you will still use your skills while being prepped and during surgery, because you are having a baby and using skills is what parents do.
All Birthing Better VBAC skills were developed by hundreds of VBAC families in the early 1970s and housed in Common Knowledge Trust.