Are You Really Serious About Changing Childbirth?

24 March 2009

What a bizarre title to this post! You are not responsible for changing 'Childbirth' ... that's a big ask.

You are responsible for your birth. If you are a care provider, you are not responsible for another woman's birth experience ... she is and so is her partner.

The Pink Kit Method For Birthing Better® has grown since the 1970s yet only been a publicly available resource since 2001.

When the concept of growing a skilled birthing and coaching population was put forth, it was ridiculed by childbirth advocates ... both in the natural birth movement and medical model.

Why should a great concept be ridiculed? Well the Natural Birth Movement laughed at the concept because:

• Isn't birth so natural that women don't need to be taught how to give birth?
• Once women have the choice of a continuity of care midwife and home birth and rejects medical care (unless necessary) then birth will be natural.
• Women don't need to be told what to do, they are mothers and intuitively know what's best for her baby.

The medical model laughed because:

• Too many Birth Plans fail.
• There's no way to know what your birth will be like therefore there's no way to prepare for it.
• If a woman (and her partner) wants to do anything that's their choice.

Years down the road, The Pink Kit Method stopped being ridiculed and then was violently opposed.

Why should that happen?

The medical model opposed the concept that women could learn how to give birth because:

• There's no way to know what a birth will be like so there is nothing you can do. It's out of your control.
• If women and men are skilled they will take unreasonable risks.
• There's no sense in getting a woman's hope up that she'll have a 'natural' birth when she already has health issues that require medical care.

The Natural Birth Movement violently opposed the concept that society needs to expect a skilled birthing population because:

• Birth is natural, cats are taught to birth women don't need to be. Women breathe all the time and will breathe in labour ... what's there to learn?
• Birth is an individual experience and one thing does not fit everyone.
• The reason birth is the way it is has to do with the medical profession that puts fear into women when birth is fundamentally a safe part of a healthy woman's life.

So, where are we now?

Close to the third stage where the concept of having expectant parents:

• Prepare their pregnant body to give birth (because 100% of pregnant women will give birth and pregnancy will make a transition to giving birth without exception).
• Learn both birthing and coaching skills so that you can work together through this activity of giving birth ... whether medical or natural and inclusive of having a non-labouring Caesarean.
• Use their birth and coaching skills to work with their baby's efforts to be born because doing so brings you closer together, fills the time-frame of this activity, works in absolutely all births AND essential to your new activity of being a parent.

This process is nothing new.

"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident." -Schoepenhouer

What is your role in all of this?

If you're pregnant you need the birth and coaching skills for yourself as both a mother and father-to-be just as you need the complex skills you taught yourself to drive. Without them what would happen if you took a journey (another activity) and didn't know how-to drive?

If you're a birth professional then you absolutely must want to see more women cope, manage, deal with and handle labour pains as a skilled woman rather than just get by and get through birth. Because you see lots of births you absolutely know how many women don't know how-to birth. Your attitude makes a difference. You know that women who feel good about their birth are more ready to parent. AND you absolutely must want men to know how to help more than what you are seeing now. You know that couples who work together are more likely to stay together.

Let's all uplift childbirth to an activity that deserves a high level of skills. If we don't intuitively know what foods are safe or poisonous even though hunger is a natural physiological process then let's acknowledge that birth and coaching skills can be self learned and used in every birth situation.

Together let's imagine a world in which every single mother-to-be feels enjoys taking time during her pregnancy to prepare her body, learn skills that will work in every type of birth then use those skills in whatever birth unfolds ... including cesareans ... Why not?

Together let's imagine a world in which every single father-to-be also enjoys helping his partner prepare her pregnant body to let out a big object (his child), learn the skills to help her do this activity (and build her confidence in him) and use those coaching skills in whatever birth unfolds.

Together we can change childbirth.