What Happens When Birth Professionals Are Skilled

7 January 2008

I had an interesting conversation with a midwife the other day. She is just starting her practice and very much admires some local midwives who are known to as 'natural birth midwives'. She made a comment to me about how each midwife grows over time to develop her own style as she becomes more skilled.

That's definitely true. Anyone who does something over and over again will become skilled and definitely develop their own style or way of doing things.

In the birth field this can have terrible consequences for the customer or client.

Just think about it ... the more skilled the professional the easier it is to rely on them.

For a midwife she will continue to work with one couple after another. Yet those couples can have a tendency to blur together. It's not like the same couple will birth over and over again learning how-to birth/coach while she is becoming more skilled.

She'll become more skilled yet attending couples that aren't. Over time it's easy to see why midwives feel 'I can get a woman through birth'.

That's often the reasonable reason Common Knowledge Trust is given by midwives when we suggest they grow a skilled birthing population by encouraging their clients to learn how-to birth/coach. They frankly tell us: 'I can get a woman through labour'.

Is that the point? Do we want our birth professionals to do that? Doesn't that tire them out? Does it leave them discouraged when another woman doesn't cope well with her birth and the midwife has to work hard to get the woman through it? Does it leave midwives discouraged that another man has not known what to do?

It's so tempting to use skills to help someone else. However, if we grow a skilled birthing population and tie being pregnant with learning how-to birth/coach then more expectant parents will come into their labour able to work with their baby's efforts to be born.

That's really what birth should be about.