Just ordinary pregnant women in the early 1970s in the US. Like all of us pregnant women, we are just concerned about our own birth. We all want a safe pregnancy and birth with a healthy baby and mother after birth. We’d also like a positive birth experience.
Mostly, we nit-pick about every little thing about pregnancy and birth. Please keep in mind that the first childbirth preparation classes ever were being offered in the 1960s onwards. There was a very high societal expectation that expectant parents attend one … Lamaze and The Bradley Method. These were entirely ‘Skills-based’! There were no ‘choices’!
Birthing Better mothers who had previously birthed, we just wanted to nit-pick what had happened and what might happen. We learned quickly that we probably couldn’t change hospital policy or the standards of care of our Obstetrician (and we lacked the choices you have today) by the time we gave birth. We also knew a basic Truth: ‘There’s no way to know what your birth will be like’.
The Lamaze and Bradley skills worked for some of us and not for many. And even with skills, many of us had long labors and wanted to try to change that. And, we were the first group of women seeking a VBAC. Our partner/husband were just permitted to be with us and we wanted them to really know how to help us cope, manage, deal with, handle, work through, stay on top of and feel in control.
If we were having our first baby, we just wanted to feel less afraid and more confident!
We all wanted effective skills that we could use with our husband/other, working alongside all the medical assessments, monitoring and procedures and try to prevent our ‘suffering’ as well as reduce or prevent any ‘risks’ from becoming ‘problems’.
Most important, we absolutely wanted skills that would work for us no matter how our birth unfolded or the one we had without exception!
Like all pregnant women we are individuals so we had to bridge those differences. We all blink, cough and can tighten our rectum. We have a big object that has to come out of our body. Each of us does the ‘activity’ of giving birth and all of us felt more confident when we had skills to do any activity … particularly this Life-Transforming, one-off, never to be repeated, dynamic and infrequent activity.
Birthing Better skills are for all births without exception. We, Birthing Better mothers developed them for our birth because we got pregnant to have a baby not a type of birth!
We were determined to elevate birthing our babies to an activity full of effective skills. We achieved that and tens of thousands of Birthing Better mothers have used these skills no matter where birth unfolded, who is present, our circumstances and beliefs, our choices, lack of choices or change of choices and no matter what happens to and around our birth. We achieved developing a universal set of birthing skills that prevent ‘suffering’, help us feel in control while we work through this activity.