Childbirth is the most important role a woman has in our community.
A pregnant/birthing woman deserves the utmost respect.
When her birth expectations are interfered with, she loses control and feels like a failure.
The common message that still prevails is ‘you have a healthy baby’, therefore you should be grateful.
So you have no rights to have feelings or questions about the birth experience?
What I hear and see is women who are broken. They have profound guilt at daring to voice these strong, powerful negative and damaging emotions surrounding their birthing experience.
The unspoken implication is that they don’t care about the baby, only themselves, and it’s a way of saying that how you give birth does not matter.
This emotional state must be acknowledged and support provided, otherwise this will affect her sense of self-esteem and bonding with her baby, and the relationship with her partner.
This significant life event should never be devalued and a woman’s sense of worth undermined.
Childbirth is an intense and powerful experience that will change a woman’s identity. It is about her and her unborn baby. Thinking about labour and birthing evokes a tremendous amount of anxiety, fear, excitement and anticipation. A woman’s sense of personal identity is changing. A woman needs the opportunity to explore the relationship to her changing body, mind and identity, if she is going to be ready for birthing.
Prenatal care
We don’t treat the prenatal period as one of family making, which it is. A woman’s positive feelings about her femininity come from a sense of support, acceptance and encouragement to express herself as a whole person, in any way that contributes to her sense of well-being. The determining factor in a woman’s self-esteem is that she has the opportunity to address her own emotional changes about becoming a mother and the experience of her body and developing baby in utero, labour, birthing and postpartum.
When women address the emotional aspects of their transition to motherhood, their potential for complications of labour is decreased. Anxiety and fears have been decreased.
There are many factors which influence a woman leading up to birthing including:
· Her mothers and grandmothers experiences and stories of birth
· Her experience of how she came into the world
· Her relationship to her own mother and father
· Her expectations about motherhood
· Over dramatized media stories
· Incorrect information in books, television programs etc.
Holistic Care
How women choose to give birth will be influenced by availability of choice. When emotional factors are included as part of routine prenatal care, research has shown a decrease in complications of labour and increases in women’s self-esteem.
A doula is essential to the woman and her partner. A doula has the time, to listen, guide, explain choices, and explore innermost thoughts. Doulas provide invaluable information and preparation for birthing, supporting both the birthing woman and her partner. Protecting, nurturing and advocating so the woman can enter her zone, and feel safe to do, whatever she needs to, to birth her baby.
The roller coaster of emotions is what Mum and Dad experience following a traumatic birth.
Both need emotional support. Healing Birth Trauma