What does 'taking responsibility' in childbirth mean?

29 Dec 2006

If sooooooo many people are willing to read a driving manual and spend hours learning how to drive safely, then why are so many pregnant women not as focused on learning skills in order to give birth?

Well that's a curious question isn't it? In reality as parents we are willing to lay down our lives for our children. And after the birth we spend a great deal of time tending and caring for our children. So learning birth skills as a woman in the last 16 weeks of pregnancy certainly doesn't take more time than tending to our babies ... so 'being busy' is really an excuse and not a reasonable reason.

In reality learning birth skills are learned for two primary reasons:

1. Have a safe birth for you and your baby ... your ability to reduce potential risks
2. To reduce your own suffering from the natural pain of childbirth
   

Let's now put 16 weeks needed to learn the skills necessary to drive safely and compare that to 16 weeks of caring for our new born (or any age for our children) and the 16 last weeks of pregnancy to learn skills to have a safe birth. Put those three 16 weeks tasks into an order indicating of importance to you.

Sadly most people will put learning birth skills last.

What I've learned in travelling worldwide and asking hundreds and thousands of women what skills they were taught is that we are not passing childbirth skills down through the generations.

This reminded me of a joke I heard that seemed to fit our collective ignorance:

'Mother, why do you cut the ends off the ham before you cook it?

'I don't know, my mother taught me ... go ask your grandmother.'

'Grandmother, why did you cut the ends off the ham before you cook it?'

'I don't really know, my mother taught me ... go ask your greatgrandmother.'

'Greatgrandmother, why did you cut the ends off the ham before you cook it?

'It didn't fit in the pan.'

In reality the message most of us get from our mothers, grandmothers and greatgrandmothers about birth is:

'It hurts, you'll get through it.'

Well, do you know that's not enough. We need very specific skills to 'get through' labour because that concept has been hugely effected by modern maternity care ... medical pain relief and cesarean deliveries.

In fact, it's beginning to look as though this generation will tell their children.

'Just have your baby cut out of your body' or 'Get that epidural immediately.'

Well, does that make sense if there are simple skills that we can learn to:

1. Have a safe birth for ourself and our baby ... our ability to reduce potential risks
2. Reduce our own suffering from the natural pain of childbirth

We'll continue to discuss how we can make a simple shift in childbirth in the next few blogs. We also need to differentiate between the need for medical care and when we are using modern medicine in a non-essential way.

Are we as women to blame? Absolutely NOT, we have just been ignorant until now. The Pink Kit Method For Birthing Better® will change all of this.

Why is there such inertia in childbirth?

28 Dec, 2006

I hope everyone had a great Christmas or holiday celebration and is headed toward a wonderful new year.

I've received an email from a person who has recently purchased The Pink Kit Package. She's a first time mother and isn't really certain why she needs to prepare for birth. More exactly she feels she's done her research and read all the wellknown birth book. She feels confident that her midwife will 'be there for me when I need them'.

She purchased The Pink Kit Package because she wanted to see if there was something new she may have missed. So, she challenged me to tell her why she needed to work through the resources.

As one human being with my own personal opinions, beliefs and experiences frankly it doesn't matter to me what she does. Like most of us, I'm really mostly interested in my own experience to birth (years ago!). Politically I'm more interested in the environment but my job is to echo all the thousands of families who have come through my Life and discussed their births.

But one of the things we had to do is to find our common denominator and not focus on all our differences. We had to find analogies ... other aspects of our life ... that could guide us to what was right, wrong, good or bad or even expected of us. So far the best analogy to childbirth preparation is learning to drive a car.

I know I've probably talked about this before but it comes up again and again and each time there's more awareness. So we can compare a woman who is 16 weeks away from giving birth to someone who wants to get their license in 16 weeks.

That certainly stimulates urgency doesn't it. We know we have to study the book. Although the book is full of photos and illustrations, there are a huge number of driving and road safety facts we need to know in order to pass our written exam and be safe on the road afterwards. We know we basically have to show up on the day and pass our exams. Luckily with birth we don't have a written exam as well. But studying the Pink Kit Package resources are no different from the driving manual. We have to think, practice, remember and make sense of something we have not experienced.

The driving manual then leads into our practical experience ... driving a car. The two go hand in hand. We have to learn all the right signs, signals, road markings from the manual then get into the car and learn the appropriate skills to drive.

Obviously the BIG difference between driving and giving birth is there is absolutely no practice before we go into labour. Since The Pink Kit skills come from the collective experience of thousands of families over a 35 year period AND relate to human behaviors then we can practice with our mind. Labour will start one day. It will unfold and we then have skills to use at every single moment.

Why do we need to use a skill at every moment of labour? Well, when we drive do we have to pay attention at every moment? Of course we do. We not only have to pay attention to the road signs, other cars, weather conditions, where we're going; we need to make certain we handle the car appropriately ... not speeding, braking smoothly, putting on the turn signal and looking through the mirrors.

The only difference with childbirth is that instead of paying attention to all the outside things, we are given internal messages (contractions, pain, space between, nausea, tiredness) and with skills we can then respond to the messages.

If we don't have the skills then we tend to be 'reactive' to the messages and often feel out of control when the naturally occuring pain of contractions gets beyond our natural ability to cope.

Since we've been talking about 'natural' or 'physiogical' birth we can now understand that skills become the foundation for any birth and can lead to a positive birth every time. Do we still breath even if we have a foetal monitor strapped to our belly? Of course. Is it better to use good breathe patterns than breathing in a tense and stressed manner? Of course.

Can we still relax inside our pelvis even if our doctor or midwife is doing a rough vaginal exam? Of course. Can relaxing inside make a rough internal less sensitive and unpleasant? Of course. Not only that. If we've done the internal work we might be so soft, relaxed and familiar with our inside that we aren't bothered to begin with.

Is it better to respond to the pain of contractions with one or more focused skills rather than feel agonized and out of control? That's like driving safely and preventing potential problems.

Curiously any individual person is more likely commit to the work it takes to get a driver's licence than to learn childbirth skills. Yet the memories we have about the birth of our children remain with us forever. The Pink Kit Package leads the way to having a positive birth just as learning to drive well can go a long way to having a safe driving history.

Let's make our children this important. Social attitudes can change.

Tomorrow we'll talk about what we learned about our need to take responsibility for our own experience.

This blog is here for lots of comments so I look forward to hearing from more of you.

Perfect example

24 Dec 2006

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Isn't Life interesting when your mind is dwelling on a topic and something comes up from an entirely different source to highlight your thoughts. I received the following in the mail the same day I posted the conversation about 'natural' and physiological birth issues. Let's think this out together and see what has happened and why these issues are so complex. Also let's think about the different roles in childbirth and who is saying what to whom. Then we'll go back to thinking about ourselves which is really all that matters.

We have to give birth and live with the consequences.

Julie wrote to me about a woman who had written to her. Julie is a Pink Kit Presenter in Illinois, USA. This woman is pregnant with her 3rd baby and at the time of the writing was 27 weeks.

'I explained about learning chidbirth skills ahead of time, and told her
about the internal work, and how it is not the same as perineal
massage. She said that one midwife told her to do perineal massage
during her second pregnancy, and another midwife said that it didn't
matter, just wait until she was in labour.

With her first birth, this woman had lots of interventions and an
episiotomy which extended into a 4th degree tear. It took a long time
before she and her husband could have sex. With #2, she had no
interventions, but she had labial tearing. Her midwife said that she
tore forward because she had so much scar tissue on her perineum.
This woman doesn't like the perineal massage. I told her the story
about the couple that couldn't have intercourse for 2 years because of
the extensive tearing and scars, and after 2 weeks of doing the
internal work, they were finally successful. (Did I remember that
right Wintergreen? It was 2 weeks, correct?) I also told her that
doing the internal work would initially be uncomfortable too, but if
she stuck with it, it would make a huge difference.'

First thing to do is to keep in mind that the Internal Work is only one skill of many you'll learn from The Pink Kit Package

Childbirth is a multi-tasking job just as driving a car is. You don't just put your foot on the gas petal and go. You have to use all your mechanical skills: steering, brake pedal, looking in the mirrors, turn signals etc. You also have to pay attention to details around you and use those mechnical skills at the same time. There is a strong socially accepted expectation that we all drive to a reasonable level of competency every time we get in the car.

Childbirth is like that. In fact, a young person wanting to get a license must do lots of reading of the manual and practicing in the car. How long does that take? Well in pregnancy, we usually have about 16 weeks to prepare for our 'TEST..... labour and birth'.

In our societies today, we place a far greater value on learning to drive than learning how to give birth. That's sad really.

Anyway this email is typical of a woman who lacks her own skills. She will naturally then go to people she perceives of as professionals to get the 'right answer'. She wasn't given the right answer because the results show neither of those answers accomplished what she wanted ... a less damaged perineum. Curiously she didn't talk about her baby's efforts to be born.

Did her baby spend a long time in her vagina without being able to pass through tight soft tissue? Did this cause her baby to have any type of distress? Was her baby delivered by forceps?

When we're pregnant, in labour and giving birth we are a team of two ... ourself and our baby. Part of the reason to prepare so vigorously during pregnancy is a committment to our children to make certain we provide the safest passage through our body for them.

Whenever we hear 'birth stories' we mostly hear them from the view point of the woman thinking about herself. That's like saying to people you don't have to think about the kids on bikes, other cars, pedestrians when you're driving ... just think about yourself. NOT.

Childbirth is NOT when you should be thinking only of yourself. The Pink Kit Package is full of the skills we must use in order to have a safer, easier birth.

Keep in mind that The Pink Kit Method represents the collective skills painstakingly from hundreds and hundreds of women and men just like ourselves and put together painstakingly slowly over a 35 year period.

The woman in the above email could have known the common sense of preparing her birth canal to let such a large object as a baby out of her body. She could have learned the skills to prepare 'down there.' And she could have gotten past her 'I don't like doing this' and gotten to a place as a mother where 'liking' to do something isn't the criteria for 'having' to do it.

However, this woman didn't know about The Pink Kit Method or The Pink Kit Package so she is suffering from an ignorance she is not responsible for.

So the next blog entry will be about the issues Common Knowledge Trust has run up against in its effort to get The Pink Kit Method and the resources known.

Anyway, I'm off to start my holiday celebrations with a dear elderly friend who used to be a trustee to Common Knowledge Trust and was the one who said.. 'Tell people to start doing this early in their pregnancy so the skills become second nature.'