All these posts are attempting to do one thing … grow a Skills-based approach to all pregnancies and every birth. This can only happen when we are incredibly honest with ourselves about the gaps in or failure of the present Choice-based childbirth trend.
A Choice-based childbirth trend actually was set up to encourage those families who wanted to ‘choose’ more natural births and if possible continuity and primary care with a midwife. That was the goal. Get midwives to provide continuity of care as primary care providers, accept home birth as normal and reduce medical assessments, monitoring and procedures. These are great goals and really won’t happen. Although New Zealand put in place a Midwifery Model of Care in 1990 trying to achieve these goals. Twenty years later the Caesarean rate has more than doubled and is as high as many obstetric lead maternity systems. It’s not a failure of either system … from the viewpoint of ‘delivery of service’. It’s a failure of our society that does not have an expectation that expectant parents learn, practice and use birth and coaching skills.
In the Choice-based trend, there’s an expectation the service providers will provide the choices we want but how can they do that? They can’t.
At the moment we’re cherry picking those births where women have ‘chosen’ a home birth, in water with a midwife and are able to cope well with the labor, have no problems for themselves and baby as ‘good’ births and all the other births fall into a range of categories that are deemed not as ‘good’. We cannot do this to one another.
Although many of the childbirth books attribute supernatural powers to midwives this is not accurate and has put too much pressure on these dedicated women. You are NOT born a midwife. You choose to do that as a calling, profession or occupation or employment. You can love what you do and you can believe you are very, very skilled. But you got those skills through hard work not because you ‘intuited’ and used your ‘instincts’ to care for the women. The more skills you have the more those subjective capacities are heightened because you are more likely to notice the subtle changes between a birth going well and one that isn’t. But there are few women who work as midwives who have not spent years and years and years becoming skilled.
At the same time, they do not encourage the women they work with to become skilled. In fact, the message has been ‘birth is natural you don’t need to learn how to birth’. This is crazy when you think about it. First, it puts too much pressure on the woman who is offering midwifery care to make certain that she can pick up those subtle cues when something isn’t going right … and that’s just not possible. Second, why won’t a woman who works as a midwife want to work with skilled birthing women (and fathers/others) whose skills may reduce or prevent any number of common problems?
Although our charitable Trust is New Zealand based, Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method® evolved in the US in the early 1970s at a time when the initial Skills-based childbirth trend was being replaced by the present Choice-based trend. Without that comparison what we say would not have such more power. Without being in a country that has had a Midwifery Model of Care and watched the lack of birth and coaching skills undermine the dedicated women who work as midwives … due to their own messaging … we could never say what we’re saying.
We KNOW. We know that birth and coaching skills change childbirth because we saw that during the 20 years in the US where there was a societal expectation that all families learn, practice and use birth/coaching skills. Birth providers attended millions upon millions upon millions (yes, millions … there are 3,800,000 babies born every year in the US) skilled birthing families. This changed childbirth for the positive and opened up choices. But skills were laughed at by natural birth and midwifery advocates and were lost, replaced by ‘information’ and Birth Plans. So childbirth is really going backward in the US because almost no family is skilled and birth providers are increasing their pressure for more medical procedures.
We KNOW that midwifery alone does not change childbirth because New Zealand has shown that. Yet, their system is still the best in the world because every family has their own continuity of care and primary care midwife. This is what works without a doubt. This is what families want. They want to see the same person throughout pregnancy, birth and afterwards even when they need lots of medical attention. They want continuity of care with a primary care provider and New Zealand leads the way. At the same time, achieving fewer Caesareans and less usage of epidurals (if that is anyone’s goal) comes directly back to birth/coaching skills for families. Without a societal expectation for birth/coaching skills in New Zealand more women are choosing elective Caesareans and epidurals as soon as possible.
We can’t tell women ‘don’t fear birth’. We have to have the skills to work through the birth experience.
If women want more midwives then they need to become more skilled in order to reduce and prevent many of the problems that lead to increased medical assessments, monitoring and procedures. But they need more skills so midwifery care can be mainstream even when there is a need, want or pressure to have lots of medical assessment, monitoring and procedures.
Instead of midwives getting high from a home birth in water, they get their satisfaction from working with skilled families. Instead of families believing midwives will provide the birth they want and then are disappointed by the many reasons that does not happen, they will realize that their own skills provide them with the best experience and empowerment.
If we truly want continuity of care and primary care offered by women who work as midwives then we absolutely need a birthing population that takes the responsibility to become skilled.
Here’s a link. This link will be put on all the posts. Kristen has 6 kids, the last 3 are PK babies. She KNOWS about birth and is one of our affiliates. That means if you purchase The Pink Kit through her she gets a commission. Her husband Scott’s first baby was a Pink Kit experience. He’ll explain how The Pink Kit made certain he was able to become a skilled birth coach to a woman who had previously had three great births.!
Kristen’s written a time-line calendar for use of The Pink Kit. You just need to sign up to her mail list (we don’t keep a mail list) and she’ll send you the Time Line. She’s worked through both Edition #2 and #3 of The PInk Kit so she knows all it’s imperfections and la-dee-dahs past them to the skills she wants to improve for each birth. Can women and men have better births each time? Sure can! The more skilled, the more we master the experience.
http://blog.naturalbirthandbabycare.com/pink-kit-timeline-from-natural-birth-and-baby-care-com/
Please join the Movement to grow a Skills-based childbirth trend. Don’t’ let another birth go by without that family being skilled.