Tag Archive | birth classes

Fathers at Birth Book

Today, I was extremely excited to learn about a new book called Fathers at Birth by Rose St. John. I am really looking forward to reading it and I think there is a deep need for a book like this in the birth community. I am mindful of the need to include father-specific information in my birth classes, but I find it difficult sometimes to locate many good resources for fathers, or to develop class content that engages fathers in a relevant and connected way.

I will post more when I’ve read it!

Edited to add: I posted more about this book and fathers at birth here.

Birth Class Brochure

Nov10

I recently created a brochure for my birth classes. I’m uploading it here because I know how useful it can be to have something you can print out to hold in your hands to read over/think about 🙂

Who is your birth link?

Oct29

There is a survey up on the Independent Childbirth blog asking who your “birth link” is—your primary connection to information about birth. Traditionally, women learned about birth from other women—informal, woman-to-woman birth sharing. Culturally, we’ve moved away from this as our primary information source (often to our detriment!).

Of course, I think independent childbirth educators and independent birth classes are great “birth links” 🙂

Thinking back to my first pregnancy, my primary birth link was the newsgroup misc.kids.pregnancy. I learned so much there and they really shaped my attitudes and beliefs about birth. I have a very birth-positive mother, but I didn’t really go to her for birth information. I felt the need for my “peers” and I found those most readily online. My other link was reading (of course!). I read voraciously and always have. It was hard to transfer “book learning” to really feeling *prepared* to actually give birth though.

I also took an independent birth class. Since I was so extensively read, I do not remember feeling like I learned many new things from the classes.

During my second pregnancy, books were huge again, but this time around my in-person friends were also a very valuable birth link. I am lucky to have a wonderful network of birthy friends who can talk about birth with me for hours on end. One friend in particular was very inspiring to me as I worked through some “issues” I had from my first birth (the birthing itself was tremendously empowering and beautiful, but afterwards I had sequestered clots and a painful manual extraction of those, a pitocin shot, and also tearing that was traumatic for me for some time to come). My friend is a fabulous example of someone who really “trusts birth” and it was so great to talk with her during the course of my pregnancy <waves to Shauna…>

Right Brain Learning Activities

Oct13

I have mentioned several times that I strive to orient my classes to “right brain” learning activities. I like this explanation of “why” to take this approach, from Family Centered Education: The Process of Teaching Birth by Trish Booth:

“In the past, much of childbirth education has been weighted toward left hemispheric functions of analysis and linear learning…However, the experience of labor and birth is not necessarily orderly and rational. In fact, emotions and beliefs play a significant role both in how a woman copes with her labor and how it progresses. Therefore, childbirth education is beginning to look at more creative, inutitive, right brain approaches to teaching…If families needed only to take a paper and pencil test or write and essay on birth, the more analytical, rational approach might suffice. However, families must experience the physical and emotional as well as intellectual parts of labor. In order to be better prepared for this intense and integrated experience, they need more integrated learning activities.”

A Father’s Role

Oct11

I recently finished reading the new book Labor of Love by Cara Muhlhahn and I was struck by this quote:

“Anyone would cry to see the way families interact around a homebirth. In a home environment, the intimacy and integrity of the family, especially the father or partner, often have pivotal roles to play. In the hospital, these key players are mostly cast aside except to hold the woman’s hand and cheer her on: ‘Push!” At home, they can support the mother in any number of invaluable ways, from regulating the temperature of the water in the pool to preparing food or choosing her favorite music.”

I have noticed this as well–I recently watched the new documentary Orgasmic Birth and was struck by the glaring differences in how fathers behaved at home compared to in hospitals. At home, they embraced their wives. They danced, they murmured, they stroked, they kissed, they held. At the hospital, they held her hand or tentatively stroked her back (with body at a distance–just a hand reaching out to lightly touch her). I’ve seen this in real life as well. I tell men in my classes not to be “scared” of their wives in labor, but to walk through the waves (of discomfort, anxiety, whatever) and just hold and love her. I tell them that they do not need to be “trained” to be more “special” or different than they are. They don’t need to be doulas. What they need to do is love her the way they love her and reach out to her to show her that. I tell them that hospitals can be intimidating and it can be awkward to show physical affection in that setting, but to do reach past that and do it anyway. I’ve read a number of posts and emails recently about whether fathers belong at birth–I think they do, but I also think that the hospital climate too often discourages them from having a real role or being valuable. I think they can be stripped of their position as “lover” and “father” and left feeling helpless and useless.

Which Pelvis Model to Buy?

Sep17

The content in the post was originally made in response to a question on a message board regarding what type of pelvis model do childbirth educators suggest for use in birth classes. I’m posting similar content here for any fellow childbirth educators who may come to this blog looking for pelvis feedback 🙂 Some people had expressed disappointment with a very tiny pelvis model that is out there for sale (and looks deceptively larger in photos) and others were concerned about whether the pelvis was flexible or not and also whether it had “bolts” at the joints for flexibility. Here is my response:

I have a non-mobile pelvis I bought from ebay (around $50) and like it quite a lot. It doesn’t have the flexibility elements, but I point to each joint and describe how it can flex, and that seems to be enough for most people. (The seller was “vanscience” when my husband got it for me for Christmas, not sure what is on there now.)

Then, I have the very tiny one as well (purchased from ebay, not from the Doula Shop). It is only about two inches probably. This is the one I actually prefer to use to show some of the cardinal movements and posterior/anterior positioning of the baby. I have a tiny fetus that I picked up from Birthright. It is a “12 weeks fetus,” but in an odd twist of providence, it fits PERFECTLY through that tiny, cheap pelvis that I regretting having for a long time. Now, I love it and find it really useful. My mom knitted me a tiny uterus with dilating cervix that exactly fits the tiny baby as well! The tiny baby even gets “stuck” on the back of the pelvis when it posterior and then when it rotates to anterior, it slides right through with a little “push.” It is like they were made to go together. The baby is hard plastic, so I can’t flex it to show all the movements, but they get the idea. I just share that babies go through a series of cardinal movements, but I don’t go through a big demo of exactly each one, I just show the baby rotating and slipping through.

I find the tiny set really easy to manipulate and convenient to demo with. The large one works well for tipping back and forth to show how different positions might compress or open and to point out the parts that are flexible in real life. But, I actually find that people seemed more interested in the positioning of the baby when I started to use the tiny set to show that part. I generally teach private, one-on-one classes, so that might be why it works so well for me. It would not work well in an up-in-front-of-a-class setting.

So, I use the big pelvis and big uterus and big baby each as separate teaching tools and then the little pelvis and baby as a “unit.”

Just wanted to share that that tiny pelvis isn’t all horrible! (though, man, was I disappointed when I got it and saw its microscopic nature. I was like, “this is a rat pelvis!”)

Movement and pain

Jun14

A brief quote from Biance Lepori an Italian architect who specializes in the design of birth rooms:

“Even pain dissolves with movement; pain killers are a consequence of stillness.” (emphasis mine)

This architect specifically designs rooms that support physiological birth–birth that unfolds accords to the natural biological processes of the woman, on her own timeline, and under her own power.

I emphasize active, normal (physiological) birth in my classes. I feel like the use of movement is one of the single most important ways we have to embrace labor and its rhythms and also to support healthy, physiological birth. Though I teach a variety of positions for labor and birth, “birthing room” yoga poses, and encourage practicing them, I believe that the movements you need during labor come from within and arise spontaneously during labor, not from specific training and practice. The key is the FREEDOM to use movement in the way you need to (many women end up being denied the right to free movement during labor 😦 ). The benefit to practicing different positions and movements prior to birth is that you gain a “body memory” of how to move your body in labor supporting ways.

Healthy Birth Guides

Jun3

I recently received a shipment of The 2008/2009 Guide to a Healthy Birth published and distributed free of charge by Choices in Childbirth in NYC. I ordered a stack of these nice little booklets for only the cost of shipping ($11 for 50 booklets). I really like the content and plan to distribute these in my birth classes and encourage other educators to do the same. The emphasis of the booklet is on being an informed consumer and it also touches on the politics of birth and the business of birth, which I really liked. The end of the booklet has an article by Dr. Harvey Karp about the 5 S’s. I particularly enjoyed the chapter called “The Purpose and Power of Pain in Labor.”

All in all, this is a fantastic and nearly free resource and I’m pleased to have them available! Check them out yourself! (You can also download the booklet for free as a pdf.)

I first learned of these booklets from the wonderful Passion for Birth blog.

More Words for Pain

May10

A while ago I posted about needing more words for pain. I got a book for my birthday called Labor Pain (I wanted it in hopes it would have more good coping ideas for me to share with couples in birth classes). In it, she discusses the results of a study about how women feel labor pain. The most frequently used description was “sharp” (62%) followed by camping, aching, stabbing hot, shooting, and heavy. Tiring was another word used (49%), exhausting (36%, intesne (52%), and tight (44%). Other words and descriptions used were burning, grinding, stony, overwhelming, terrific, bruising, knifelike, invaded, baby in charge, powerful, relentless, crampy, like period pain, like thunderbolts, excruciating, frightening, and purposeful. Only 25% of first time mothers and 11% of mothers with other children described pain associated with labor as “horrible” or “excruciating” (the top of the pain-scale range).

Do Epidurals Impact Breastfeeding?

May10

There was a question recently on a list I belong to about the impact of epidurals on breastfeeding. The person asking the question had been told by several hospital based childbirth educators that epidurals do not “cross the placenta’ and thus do not have an impact on the baby. Since this is an issue of concern, I thought I’d share some of my response/thoughts regarding this question here. I was happy to hear Linda J. Smith speak at the LLLI conference luncheon session about this very issue–the impact of birth practices on breastfeeding–and she covered a ton of material about the impact of epidurals on breastfeeding (she also wrote a book on the same topic with the late Mary Kroeger). There is some good information, though much less complete, on her sit e. The biggest problems with epidurals are the impact on the mother rather than the baby, though the medications used in epidurals DO cross the placenta and get to the baby, they are much less seriously impactful than IV or IM narcotics. An epidural refers to the means of medication delivery not what is actually being delivered into the body, so it is hard to say definitively that one has no effect, because different anesthesiologists use different “cocktails” of drugs in their epidurals. They usually use bupivacaine as the anesthetic, but there are opoids included as well, such as *morphine* or other related opoids like that.

All the books I have as a CBE say that medications used in epidurals do make it to the baby, but effects vary. Most effects are connected to what is happening to mom—i.e. mother gets a fever as a side effect of the meds and that stresses baby. Fluid overloading leads to more fluid in baby’s lungs, etc. The main breastfeeding impact on the mother’s side is excess fluid retention in the breasts due to the fluid “bolus” administered prior to an epidural. Baby is a little sleepy following birth and then can’t latch to severely swollen breasts (which are not “normally” engorged, but excessively so due to excess fluid), and so it goes. You often hear from mothers that their nipples are “too flat” for the baby to latch on to and as you probe further you find that the flatness has NOTHING to do with the mother’s true anatomy, but has to do with that excess fluid. Women are so programmed to look inward and blame themselves for problems that it is really unfortunate (like mothers who “aren’t making enough milk” when it is really a pump with bad suction).

Basically most breastfeeding problems that have to do with birth practices are not correctly attributed to the source—the birth practices—and are instead blamed on the mother (“flat nipples”), the baby (“lazy suck”), or breastfeeding (“sometimes it just doesn’t work out”).