Not For Me … Woman’s Story
“I was told about BirthingBetter by a friend who had had a homebirth. We thought that was nuts. We were going to hospital for all the bells and whistles. I thought BirthingBetter would be about natural birth or alternative. My husband, thankfully, didn’t know enough about childbirth to have much of an opinion so when my friend’s husband told him to look through BirthingBetter … he did. He told me that the skills appeared to be practical and have no philosophy attached at all. I peeked and boy am I glad I did. We still had our baby in hospital with some of the bells and whistles, but when it comes push to shove I had to do the work and I sure did it better with these skills.”
Not For Me … Man’s Story
“Never would we have had our baby in hospital. Pregnancy isn’t a sickness and my wife felt terrific. She was healthy and we had a great midwifery team to work with us. We heard about BirthingBetter but it wasn’t for us. Birth is natural. My wife will know what to do. Our midwife was the one who changed our mind. She had worked with several families who had used BirthingBetter and she thought it won’t hurt to go over it. Thankfully we did. So much of it made sense to us. We could see how preparing my wife’s pregnant body to let out such a big object and then helping her work with potential pain as the process happened just made sense. So, we got stuck in and had a hoot of a time doing this. I learned so much about pregnancy and the plumbing of childbirth. We had a terrific birth at home. We felt absolutely certain that our BirthingBetter skills enhanced my wife’s trust of her body to birth and the skills certainly helped me to help her maintain a good body alignment and inner relaxation. Besides it developed us as a couple and family. That’s what ultimately sold it to us … our closeness.
Birth Is Birth
The oppositional conflict between medical and natural birth has only existed since the late 1970s! But there is no conflict with the skills you are learning. Childbirth will ‘naturally’ come after pregnancy … no matter how it happens. Now you don’t have to sit in one camp or the other. Just learn, practice and use your skills in whatever of the four types of childbirth you have.
The conflicts between medical/natural, home/hospital, doctor/midwife should never have existed. They are the unintended negative consequences of some very valuable and positive changes in childbirth that occurred in the late 1960s … The Birth Plans and choices based on informed consent. Unfortunately this unintended conflict this has left strained feelings among pregnant women. They don’t know what’s ‘right’.
Your BirthingBetter skills will clearly help you understand that there is no ‘right’ birth. You will have the birth you will have on the day you give birth … either just as you imagined (not likely) or as it happens (100% true).
Yet, child’s birth is absolutely unique to you and you can birth beautifully with your BirthingBetter skills. This means every birth is as valued and no one has to live with the shame, blame and guilt so prevalent at the present. Once pregnancy and childbirth are linked by a set of universally learned and used skills … all births will be ‘right’.
Develop a healthy curiosity about how your friends and family define specific childbirth words. This will be an eye opener! Confusion abounds. No wonder we’re told ‘birth is an individual experience.’
Childbirth Is So Many Things
Childbirth is an event … ‘an occurrence, especially one that is particularly significant, interesting, exciting, or unusual’ (Encarta Dictionary®) … without doubt one of Life’s biggest events.
And childbirth is an experience … ‘something that happens to somebody, or an event that somebody is involved in’ (Encarta Dictionary®) … one hundred percent of pregnant women will give birth one way or another. You won’t miss it.
Then childbirth is a process … ‘a series of natural occurrences that produce change or development’ (Encarta Dictionary®) … childbirth has a beginning, middle and end that takes place over a finite period of time. This is the rhythm of childbirth.
More than anything childbirth is an ACTIVITY … ‘something that somebody takes part in or does; energetic physical movement or exercise; work, movement, or whatever somebody is doing’ (Encarta Dictionary®).
Yet, this activity occurs infrequently in any family’s life and each one is different even for the same woman. So it’s easy to make the assumption that birth is both unknowable and individualistic.
But when we see childbirth as an activity that manifests in 4 types of birth. Yes, we can see a labour/delivery compared to a cesarean as ‘different’. As we take a broader view that we have done all along, we can see birth as always the ‘activity’ of working with your baby’s efforts to be born. This is SO important to fully grasp.