I’m going to do heaps of audio posts at the moment on questions I’ve answered over the years. Pregnant women everywhere want to know is childbirth safe so they can make choices and decisions that make sense. It’s true that many women are creating their Birth Plan of what they want or don’t want. Underlying those choices is always the question: ‘Is my decision going to hurt my baby’ or ‘Will childbirth be safe if I make this decision?’
Most women actually are more afraid for their baby than themselves and think about childbirth safety in terms of their baby and not themselves. And what defines safe childbirth … only an alive mother and baby? No the fears and anxiety go further, deeper and broader than that.
Is childbirth safe audio is 6:58.
Birthing Better families wanted to reduce and prevent the complex issues many had from becoming ‘problems’. When a pregnant woman is faced with: ‘What if there is a problem?’ or ‘There may be a problem with the baby’ she will do anything to try to guarantee the wellbeing and safety of her child.
There are NO generic ‘problems’. Problems come from specific issues each individual pregnant woman and baby may face. Birthing Better skills can reduce or prevent many of the ‘issues’ from becoming ‘problems because many of the ‘problems’ that cause more medical care are: Delay in first/second stage of labor AND women who do not cope well with the natural occurring pain of contractions. And other ‘health’ issues that could become ‘problems’ can be mitigated by having progressing labor and delivery that is not delayed.
If you have a health issue and want to know how Birthing Better families addressed specific ones let us know. We’ll answer your individual questions about childbirth safety.
Other skills-based methods: Lamaze, Bradley, Hypnobirthing/babies. Active Birth, Calm birth do not focus their skills at all on increasing childbirth safety for mother and baby. Their skills focus exclusively on achieving a natural birth, painless labor, and less medical care. This means they teach people to think about the type of birth as an ideology rather than birth as the activity each woman must do as safely as possible. And our responsibility as mothers is our own and baby’s safety.
This is why the medical profession is all about ‘a healthy mother and baby’ as a goal. This produces a conflict between the natural birth advocates who believe that fundamentally childbirth is safe and the obstetrical model that believes childbirth is essentially unsafe until it’s over. And in the middle it is us … the mothers and fathers … who are basically being told by both groups that there is nothing each of us can do to make childbirth as safe as possible for ourselves and babies. THAT’S NOT TRUE!
Birth is both safe and not safe and this talk explains the issues Birthing Better families faced and why these skills were developed and why they are equally important to each of you.
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.