Beyond the Birth Plan (eBook)

Getting real about pain and power

Rhea Dempsey (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
392 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9781098342456 (ISBN)

Infos

Research tells us many postnatal challenges stem from our pre-baby life: our emotional history, childhood and even babyhood. Prenatal preparation that recognises this is crucial in protecting new mothers from postnatal depression. It is also the kind of preparation Rhea Dempsey has offered for years to women wanting the best chance of intervention-free birth in our current system. In Beyond the Birth Plan Rhea outlines this emotional preparation, drawing on brain science, psychology, midwifery research, and the personal stories of many women she has supported to birth the way they want. Whatever your intentions for labour and whatever its ultimate pathway, your real plan for your birth-and beyond-starts here.

Rhea Dempsey is a highly sought after childbirth educator, counsellor, speaker, author and birth attendant with experience at over one thousand births. She is respected, both in Australia and internationally, as an insightful thinker and presenter on the topic of working with pain-both physical and psychological- in childbirth, and the implications of this for normal physiological birth and postnatal wellbeing. Rhea's first book Birth with Confidence: Savvy choices for normal birth, a bestseller published in 2013, has become a word-of-mouth classic. With three adult daughters and five grandchildren of her own, Rhea's understanding of birth has been gained from her own birth experiences and during forty years working with pregnant women, their partners, support people, midwives and medical practitioners.

Textauszug

Introduction:

My story

My first book was published in 2013, the year I became a grandmother. Birth with Confidence: Savvy choices for normal birth grew out of my decades of work as a doula and childbirth educator. It drew on my experiences with the many hundreds of women I had the privilege of supporting in labour, and on my observations of the way our birth culture had changed over the years of my work.

With my knowledge of these changes, I understood that women who were not particularly committed to an intervention-free birth—those already intending to access interventions such as epidurals, inductions and caesareans—could easily get the birth they wanted. So in writing that first book I decided to address women who expressly wanted to birth without intervention, because I knew the births they wanted were harder to realise. I called my readers willing women: willing to work through the intensity of the labour, willing to engage with the challenge because they understood the benefits such a birth could bring for their babies, for their bonding experience, and for themselves.

Since then, I’ve been attending fewer births. I still present many workshops and talk regularly to pregnant women, their partners and to midwives, but increasingly it is postnatal counselling that makes up much of my work. It is this counselling that is bringing home to me the devastating effects our current birth culture is now having on so many women. It’s not just those willing women I was addressing in my first book who are being let down. Birth trauma is on the rise. Postnatal posttraumatic stress rates are climbing.1

Assisted by organisations such as Beyond Blue and PANDA, we are better acknowledging the prevalence of postnatal depression and trauma in new mothers. We are even getting better at pondering the causes of these phenomena. But our mainstream discussions are yet to acknowledge the huge impact of a woman’s birth experience itself on her postnatal wellbeing.

In this book I want to share my understandings about this link. And to show you why the emotional preparation I have always recommended to women wanting a normal physiological birth is exactly what can benefit all women preparing for the life transition to those delightful yet demanding and emotionally complex days, weeks and early months of parenting.

My first labour

As those who have read my previous book will know, my first daughter’s birth, in England, introduced me to birth work. That labour culminated in a cascade of interventions after it stalled at six centimetres: augmentation (the use of synthetic hormones to speed up the labour), pethidine (a narcotic drug for pain management), episiotomy (an incision to the perineum), and emergency manual removal of the placenta after the cord broke during a forcefully managed third stage. Finally, there was the routine separation from my baby for hours after she was born.

I had prepared, planned and negotiated for a natural birth, as we called it in the 1970s, so this series of interventions was definitely not what I had expected. I was a physical education teacher, swimming and outdoor adventure instructor. I trusted my body. I was fit, healthy and ready to have a much-wanted baby. I believed that birthing was a normal healthy function, not an illness, and that my body would instinctively know just what to do. So I was left in shock. What had happened?

The external story

What I came to understand about that labour profoundly informed all the work I have done with women in the decades since. I realised that, while I had a realistic trust in the process of birth, I had been naively trusting of the hospital in which I would be labouring. I had believed the birth system—its experts, practices and procedures—was set up to support and facilitate my innate birthing capacity. In answer to my queries during pregnancy I was reassured by the hospital that it did not routinely administer a ‘shave and enema’ (shaving of the pubic area together with a medical procedure to empty the bowels), nor, I was told, did it routinely speed up labour, offer pain-reliving drugs, or perform episiotomies. I was also reassured that my baby would be ‘rooming in’ with me. The reality, as my birth outcome demonstrated, was that all of these medical procedures were routine, as was the removal of my baby after her birth.

I came to see that I had trusted the hospital’s assurances in pregnancy because I (like so many first-time mothers) was unconsciously acting out of what I call the trance of acquiescence—the culturally conditioned compliant state so many of us enter when we face medical authority. If, in pregnancy, I had not been conditioned this way, and had not been so naïve about the standard practices of the hospital, I’m sure I would have made different decisions. Indeed, for my subsequent labours, my newfound understanding led me to very different choices—homebirths in both cases. I knew by then that if I, a low-risk woman, laboured at home with caregivers who trusted birth and believed in my ability to do it, I would have a far better chance of avoiding unwanted and unnecessary intervention.

The choices I made for the births of my second and third babies were what I’ve come to call savvy choices, in contrast to the naïve status quo choices I made before the birth of my first daughter. I believe that when women are well informed about the standard procedures of our birth system and have a realistic understanding of the functional pain of labour (as well as the role of birthing hormones) they make much better choices for their births. As those who have read it will know, my first book focussed on these savvy choices—the important decisions a woman needs to make about the external circumstances of her labour.

But I’ve long been aware that there is a deeper psychological layer at work when we birth. A woman’s past, her present life circumstances and her dreams for the future all contribute to how she will feel in the midst of her labour. I can only assume this has always been the case. After all, birth is about family, about creating a future, about parenting. How many of us do not have a place of emotional vulnerability among these life themes? How many of us do not have plans to do it better than our parents, or hold fears that our history may repeat?

For me, choosing to be at home for the births of my next two daughters took care of the externals—the hospital routines and practices that had hijacked my first labour. But I still had to work on the internals: the unconscious fears I carried that had also had their place in the way my first labour unfolded.

The internal story

Reflecting on that birth during my second pregnancy I came to see that, as well as my general naïveté about the hospital, unconscious fears stemming from my childhood were part of the story.

My older brother, born eighteen months before me, was born with a major hole in his heart and was not expected to live beyond his fifth year. His early years were characterised by limits on his physical activities and heightened concerns for his health and wellbeing. My mother was a ‘mother-nurse’ to my brother through his early years. Combining fierce protective mothering with her nursing training and skills, she, together with my father, kept him alive well past the predicted age of his death. At fourteen, due to advances in medicine, my brother was one of the first few people in Victoria to receive the gift of open-heart surgery and is still alive and thriving in his early seventies.

As a young girl I had two unconscious responses to the story of my brother’s birth and early life. These acted as psychological wild cards during my pregnancy and eventually played out as the deeper story in my daughter’s birth. The first of these was the unconscious fear that my baby may also be born with some type of life-threatening problem, as my brother had been. The second, due to the miracle of the operation that saved his life, was a powerful trust in medicine.

Unconscious, unprocessed and therefore unknown to me at that time, these inner responses nevertheless created a shaky foundation on which to build my true birthing confidence. Because I was fit and healthy I felt arrogantly confident in my body and translated this, in a simplistic way, as a guarantee of my birthing ability. But, in reality, my trust and belief in my pregnant body and my birthing capacity was only a thin veneer. It was easily and progressively dismantled by a system that, unbeknownst to me then, fundamentally distrusted birth. This dismantling began in pregnancy with routine tests, measurements and worrying references to my ‘elderly’ status as a first-time mother (elderly for the time—I was twenty-eight). It continued in early labour when, after we phoned the hospital to let them know my waters were leaking, the response (without explanation) was to send an ambulance, sirens blaring, to bring me in immediately. This set off a deep anxiety in me.

We now understand so much more about a woman’s birthing hormones—about what I call the evolutionary regression, the beautifully honed hormonal sequence that unfolds in normal physiological childbirth. And we know what interrupts this. The high drama of the ambulance being sent and the unwanted routine procedures of the hospital certainly did nothing for my birthing hormones. Then—as I came to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie
• ISBN-13: 9781098342456 / 9781098342456