Preparing for Natural Childbirth

To start this blog I think it important to start at the very beginning!  My outlook on birthing was open minded.  Too many times have I seen programs, overheard stories or read books about mothers insisting on Natural home water births for their first child imagining quiet music whilst baby easily pops out – only to be rudely shocked when things go wrong and they get rushed into hospital for an emergency caesarean and then feel depressed afterwards because feel they let themselves down.  By no means am I against home water births – however I think having a certain expectation about your birthing experience when you have never done it before could result in disappointment. I decided to go easier on myself:  I was going to equip myself with as many tools as possible to make my child’s birth a natural one, but have open minded expectations, if on the day it didn’t go the way I planned I was going to go with the flow and not be hard on myself if things go wrong.  Here are the tools I equipped myself with:

·         After months of pondering whether to go public or private – booking myself into both ! – I finally found an obstetrician that had a passion for Natural birth - he was fantastic and advised me to do a Calm Birth Course.

·         We enrolled for a Calm Birth (http://www.calmbirth.com.au)  This course just really made sense to me – bases its philosophy around the fact that women fear birth – they call it “fear, tension, pain syndrome” and essentially after hearing from every woman how excruciating child birth is your body goes into fear mode when labour starts – this gets adrenaline pumping and adrenaline is responsible for “fight or flight”, resulting in blood being pumped to your extremities (to fight or flight), leaving less blood and nutrients where it is needed at the time which is around the uterus.  The course teaches calm breathing techniques and also taught my husband what his role will be – which is not to try and “save” me but support me. 

·         I read some books on the matter:

-Gentle birth, Gentle mothering by Sarah Buckley,

-Natural way to better birth and bonding by Francesca Naish

·         I did prenatal yoga

·         Regular acupuncture – studies show promising results that  regular acupuncture during pregnancy reduces the length of labour http://www.medicalacupuncture.org/aama_marf/journal/vol17_3/article_2.html

·         Took some vitamins to assist – magnesium in particular which assists with muscle contractions and improves energy much needed for childbirth.

In the next blog post I will discuss my birthing experience