HOW DO WE GROW A SKILLED BIRTHING POPULATION?
It’s going to be you! You have the power! Without you childbirth will remain the same. You will either have an empowered birth or not … as an individual. And that individual hit or miss will continue to be the stumbling block to empowered births for the majority of families. Until you, you, you and you see that giving birth is bigger than just your individual birth then nothing will change. You have the power to understand that a skilled birthing population could have a positive impact on your individual birth and the births of millions of women now and into the future just as it did for those few short years in the mid1960s/70s.
You’ve got to want to use birth and coaching skills in whatever birth you experience.
You’ve got to want your loved ones to use birth and coaching skills no matter how their birth unfolds.
You’ve got to want your clients to behave in a skillful manner no matter what happens at their birth … and you have to encourage that.
You’ve got to use Social Media to talk to others about the importance of birth and coaching skills. Share a list of Skills-based resources with each other. Talk to each other about how you prepared your pregnant body to become a birthing body and what skills you used during your baby’s birth. Get specific and not so general. Hearing someone say: ‘I breathed’ doesn’t say much or ‘I relaxed’. How? To grow a skilled birthing population we have to really be specific about how-to. It’s like having a young child who reaches for a red berry on a bush. You will teach them which red berry is safe and which ones aren’t. Just talking about ‘breathing’ is like talking about ‘berries’ rather than ‘you can eat the raspberry or strawberry’ but not the holly berry.
You’ve got to stop believing women need to be so stupid that they can’t or shouldn’t link our amazing brain to our body. You’ve got to stop believing that those beautiful births you see on YouTube are devoid of skills. In fact, what you are seeing are women deeply using skills at every moment … whether they’ve learned exactly how to breathe and relax at the moment, from a class, a book or by the lack of birth skills at a previous birth and thought it out by the next birth. The most common thing 2nd time moms say: ‘I’ve got to relax more or focus on good breathing more’. We learn from every birth … we learn skills! You’ve got to believe in our skills and want skills to become a normal and natural part of birth preparation and birth participation.
You’ve got to want more than to hope for an easy, lucky or good birth. You’ve got to want your husband/other/or yourself to know how-to work through your baby’s birth journey.
You’ve got to want to include all families in an empowered and skilled birth experience rather than perpetuating the rift in childbirth that pits women against one another based on whether they birthed at home or hospital, with a midwife or doctor or had a natural or medical birth.
You have the power. You can empower yourself and others with the concept for a Skills-based approach to all pregnancies and every birth.
Talk about this with your friends. Talk more deeply about how the lack of birth and coaching skills impacted your birth or someone you know or love. Talk about what people need to google to find out about different skills-based resources. Talk about the differences between the skilled-based resources. Talk about whether they offered you ways to prepare your pregnant body as well as birth participation skills. Talk, talk, talk. Then the Movement for a Skills-based approach to all pregnancies and every birth will grow … you have the power.