Maybe your doctor or midwife will check your pelvic shape or not. Perhaps friends will tell you ‘You have childbearing hips’. Perhaps you’ve been told ‘You’re short so you’ll have trouble with giving birth’. Perhaps in a previous birth your baby got stuck and you’re not certain if your pelvis is big enough to have a natural birth. And what do you know about your pelvis? Have you really looked at a pelvis … maybe from Bones or some other TV program. Do you know the difference between women and men pelvis? Do you know whether your pelvis is one bone or more? And if more how many? Can your pelvic shape change or can you make more room in your pelvis?
These are all questions to think about. Why? Because your baby has to come down, through and out of your pelvis in order to come down into your vagina and be born. The only way your baby doesn’t have to come through your bony pelvis is if you have a Cesarean delivery.
Know your shape
Mapping Your Pelvis is one skill you’ll find on the video segment: Bony Pelvis Skills in the comprehensive course or in the short body skills course. By mapping your pelvis you’ll understand the shape through which your baby has to navigate. Here’s a short experience for you to try right now.
You’re sitting on a chair right now. Think about the distance between the bones you sit on. We call these your sit-bones. Can you create more space between them by shifting how you sit? Of course, you can. That’s what Mapping Your Pelvis skills teaches you.
Every posture or position you are in impacts the space inside your pelvis and how your baby has to navigate through that space. Your job as a birthing woman is to open up and create space for this big object.
Your job as a Birth Coach … father-to-be or other … is to remind your birthing partner to get into positions that create space. What’s neat about Birthing Better Childbirth Preparation is that we share the same human body. The positions that close your pelvis are the same that will close her’s.
Knowing the shape of your pelvis leads you to open positions and subtly adjusting the ones you are in whether sitting, lying down, standing, kneeling or walking. Our muscles and soft tissue play a huge role in how open or closed our pelvis remains throughout the activity of giving birth.
You’ll also learn to mobilize your sacrum and your tailbone.
Mapping Your Pelvis is only one of the many birth and birth-coaching skills you’ll learn the Birthing Better online birthing classes.
Birthing Better skills are housed in Common Knowledge Trust and developed by hundreds of dads and moms and used in every type of birth.