Caesareans and Your Pink Kit
Birthing Better with The Pink Kit Method® claims a unique place in childbirth. You will find here no judgment about where you birth, with whom, whether you should/should not use pain relief, or the pros and cons of natural births versus medical ones. There are lots of other resources you can tap into for those discussions and viewpoints.
The job of The Pink Kit is not to take sides, but to encourage you, as a pregnant woman, and you, as a partner, to move beyond the politics of childbirth and become skilled birthing partners. The birth of your child is special and precious to you! You want to make the most of the experience and reduce or eliminate suffering or trauma.
Birthing Better with the Pink Kit Method® is all about birthing better, even if you don’t have a better birth. Birthing better is possible in every single birth. Preserving positive birth memories that are bigger than the negative ones is a choice you make. You’re more likely to gain those positive memories when you use skills throughout your baby’s birth, because you’ll look back on what you did rather than what happened to you.
Changing your perspective
Changing childbirth means we have to change our perspective. No woman gets pregnant to “have” a medical or natural birth. Women get pregnant to have a baby. This means we must change the focus from “outcome” to how you can be truly engaged in your baby’s birthing process. And the way to stay engaged is to become skilled at giving birth. Up to now, society has not framed childbirth in this manner.
Our modern societies don’t put any emphasis on childbirth skills because we are more or less fixed in a time warp based on an old adage that you’ll hear repeated again and again: “There is no way to know what your birth will be like; therefore, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Does this then mean that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to prevent a surgical birth? Is birth ruled by Fate?
Fate and you
From a Birthing Better Pink Kit perspective, there is absolute validity in the first part of that old adage. There really is no way to know what your birth will be like. However, the conclusion is inaccurate. You can do heaps to reduce and even eliminate many of the common causes for all medical interventions, including emergency Caesareans.
There has been an effort to give some control over the fate of childbirth by providing information so families can make “choices,” in the hope that “choices” will lead to a better birth experience. This approach also takes into consideration a modern medical profession that exercises strict vigilance over pregnancy and childbirth. This is both positive, if you need care, and negative, if you feel pressured into care you don’t want or believe you or your baby needs.
The problem with “choice” is that we can’t choose most of what occurs in the birth because there is no way to know what your birth will be like. (No one plans an emergency Caesarean. That’s why it’s called an “emergency.”)
So “choosing” what type of birth you want won’t necessarily lead to the birth you choose, and you might face an emergency Caesarean that, in hindsight, you may even feel was unnecessary. What a conundrum.
Birthing Better with the Pink Kit Method® offers another solution to the unpredictable fate of childbirth: developing a skilled birthing population. We must add skills to the equation. Without skills, we do leave birth to happenstance and feel submitted to fate. But when we shift our perception and behaviors, we can see giving birth as an activity that requires skillful preparation during pregnancy and skillful participation during the birthing process. Giving birth then becomes something we do, no matter how our baby is being born.
So, the first goal of this particular resource is to increase your baby’s chances of being born vaginally. The second goal is for you to continue to work with your baby if an emergency Caesarean is how your baby is brought into this world.
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