What Does This Financial Crisis Mean To Childbirth?

21 April 2009

As a registered not-for-profit charitable Trust, Common Knowledge Trust, we have an obligation to uphold our goals and objectives and work toward bringing them into public awareness.

This means, my job is always to articulate what CKT is about and how our goals and objectives impact and are impacted by changes in society.

Right now we are at an end of a era. Since the mid 1980s everyone has gotten fat of the hog so to speak. We've wanted more, gotten more, gone into debt for more, wanted everything to be easy and painless. We just wanted, got and felt entitled to our super abundance.

Human nature is like that sometimes. We feast when we can. Of course there's a flip side, we store when we need to.

How does this relate to childbirth?

When I gave birth to my first child in 1970 there was lots of positive changes happening. Too many for me to recount. People were hopeful that birth would find a balance between being a 'natural part of life' and the modern health care that was available. And, for a while it looked like this would happen.

From my perspective a lot had to do with Lamaze and Bradley childbirth education. These two systems were based on skills and fathers active participation in labour and birth. For many millions of families childbirth skills went into their births and enriched their experience.

But these two systems had one really fatal flaw ... they wanted to reduce the use of medical care and increase natural birth. Sounds good but in reality, this has had a huge unintended negative consequence. It set one birth against another as though a 'natural' birth was superior to a 'medical' birth.

This is flawed thinking because the birth of our children is always, always special and should be respected and valued as such.

But anyway, I'm trying to get to my point about what is happening now. There isn't just a change in finances, there has to be a change in everything we do and how we live on this planet.

We have programs on TV like SuperNanny that clearly show how lovely families don't have the skills to have a happy family. She teaches 'skills' but they have to be learned and used.

We have programs about weight loss to help people become inspired by the hard work and skills to lose and maintain weight loss. But, you have to learn them and do the work.

We have Dr. Phil who helps families (both men and women) to find better ways to live but once again, you have to learn the skills and use them.

Here's where The Pink Kit Method For Birthing Better® comes in. It's the only childbirth education, childbirth preparation, childbirth skills resource that is inclusive of all births just because pregnancy precedes giving birth.

Once you are pregnant you cannot avoid giving birth. Since the birth of each of our children is important then we all need the right skills to do the activity of getting our baby out of our body.

And men? ... Well you put them in there, now help get them out.

We're standing on a brink. If we don't change our attitude then within a generation most babies could be born by a surgical birth. That doesn't make the birth less special, it makes it a major surgical procedure. That's sort of like going into debt rather than saving because it's just easier.

Birth is not complex but sometimes health issues require medical care. That shouldn't stop you from enjoying preparing your body for birth (and know that this is an essential part of being pregnant). Nor should any reason stop you from learning skills that both of you can use to help your baby come out of your body ... even during a surgical procedure.

But once you are skilled then you are more likely to reduce all the common medical interventions ... just like you can reduce many common chronic diseases by being more fit or have a happier family by knowing how to parent or partner.

Here are our Pink Kit childbirth statistics. These come from families who have self-learned and then used their Pink Kit skills in whatever birth they had. But there's something not shown in the statistics. Those families who had lots of medical care felt better about their birth experiences because they 'birthed better' in and around all the health care they needed.

In other words, it's never been an issue about health care the problem in childbirth is a fundamental lack of skills! That can and should change and that is what Common Knowledge Trust works toward every single day ... to grow a skilled birthing population.