What exactly is childbirth?
That might seem like a simple question, and perhaps, prior to modern maternity healthcare, it had a simple answer. All pregnant women eventually had a labor (contractions) and gave birth vaginally to a baby. Whatever happened at a birth happened.
This doesn’t mean traditional cultures were entirely helpless. All cultures had their own healthcare systems. However, the modern healthcare model is very recent in terms of our humanity.
These days, many women still labor and have vaginal
births, often under the watchful standards of the modern maternity
system. Many other women, though, have surgical births either after laboring or without
so much as one contraction. Caesareans are a new option in the history of childbirth.
Many pregnant women have strong
emotions about their birth experience. In the past 30-40 years, society has instigated the idea that "the birth" is meant to
be as beautiful as a wedding. In previous generations, women wanted a healthy baby and to recover well; now there is an equal focus on how much a woman "suffers" during labor and birth.
This has led to an important element not present
in previous generations: choice.
Through Birth Plans, people are seeking to choose
what type of birth they experience. The problem is that there’s still no way to know what your
birth will be like, which brings us to the most important element, often
lacking in the birthing experience today: learned, practiced, and used birth
and coaching skills. For a relatively short period of time, Lamaze and Bradley
methods were widely used, but even those well-tested systems only offered skills to achieve a "natural" birth rather than skills for all pregnant families to
use in any kind of birth.
Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method® touches more primal and basic realities: we are all part of the same human species, and all pregnant women will give birth one way or another. There is no right or wrong, good or bad about childbirth. The birth of your baby is important to you. This means you will do your best to have a safe birth experience for yourself and baby. Our babies are THAT important. We focus on ourselves when we are pregnant, but we must focus on our babies during birth.
Childbirth is the natural transformative
journey that you, the pregnant woman, and you, the coach, will take with each other and possibly along with your extended family and friends. So you and your partner (at least) need to know
the answers to these questions:
- What are your roles in birth?
- What are your tasks for your respective roles?
- What will you face when doing this task?
- Do you have the rights skills for this task?
- How do you best prepare for your task?
- When and how will you use these skills while
doing this task?
Why do want to ask these questions? Your baby! No matter how your baby enters the world, you get to work with your baby’s efforts together as a family. Doing so is empowering, satisfying, meaningful, and real.
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