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DELIVERANCE
THE FAMILY GROOVE TALKS TO TWO ALTERNATIVE BIRTHING EXPERTS ON THE
STATE OF
CHILDBIRTH TODAY
Giving birth is a life-altering experience in more ways than just
the
obvious. It's often said that your
birthing experience is a
good
indication of where you are emotionally and physically in
terms of
dealing
with the changes that your body and life have
undergone
and will continue to go. Good, bad and ugly,
one's
birthing experience(s)
is cemented into the fabric of a woman's
life; forever impacting her
relationship with herself as woman and
as a mother. For many, the impending
special delivery is as
daunting as it is exciting; for others, it's something that's merely pushed out of their minds until the time is
upon them. As with any major changes in your life, it's important to treat this blessed commencement with as much tender loving care as you intend to give your new child. Whatever your choice—yes, you do have a a choice— for the big day, be sure to embrace it with certainty, backed by knowledge and intuition. Your baby is the one being born, but, you, too, are being delivered; delivered from the world you used to live and the last nine-plus months of baby on board to an entirely new role, new outlook, new name and new life. You've got to give your due date the due it deserves.
Here, we talk to two renowned birthing mavens on what you need to know about childbirth and how to make your delivery a unique kind of special.
Davi Kaur Khalsa is a Los Angeles-based Certified Nurse Midwife, Registered Nurse and founder of Tender Loving Childbirth (www.tlcwomanscenter.com), a center known for delivering conscious, caring and empowering birth experiences directly to the home. The progressive women's health center also helps with water births, postpartum care, breastfeeding support, nutritional counseling and more. Here, she discusses homebirth, water birth and tells us why owning our childbirth is one of the most important things we will ever do.
THE FAMILY GROOVE: What is a midwife?
Davi Kaur Khalsa: A midwife is a trained professional who provides prenatal and postpartum care, plus obstetrical, gynecological and labor and delivery services for women. There are two basic types of midwives: Certified Nurse midwives and licensed or direct entry midwives. Certified Nurse Midwives or CNMs are normally more highly trained and must have a bachelor in nursing degree prior to their midwifery education. Licensed or direct entry midwives are also well-educated and quite capable but generally will only attend home births; CNMs can deliver babies at home or in hospital settings.
For thousands of years, women have been giving birth with the assistance of midwives. The concepts and practices of midwifery have been applied through many different models of care almost since humans formed communities and depended upon each other for survival. These models of care have evolved through formalized higher education to produce the skilled licensed and certified practitioners of today. In short, midwives provide a model of care for pregnancy and birth that provides all the benefits of formal medical training but emphasizes a more natural, less intrusive and often kinder and gentler birth environment.
TFG: What is involved in a home birth?
DKK: The decision to have a homebirth involves sitting down and deciding that you are going to own your own birth process. Homebirth allows you to create the optimal birth environment for you and your child, but it also brings up many challenges that the act of taking responsibility for any process, commonly presents.
There is a lot of hysteria created by some in the traditional medical community surrounding homebirth. This environment of fear is often drummed into a woman’s psyche from an early age, creating a whole fear issue that many women have to overcome before they can comfortably choose the homebirth option.
There is no question that emergency medicine and medical and surgical intervention has an important place in childbirth, having saved the lives of countless mothers and babies when complications arise; but using surgery and emergency medicine as a normal standard of care for pregnant women has become an unfortunate reality of our current times.
Here are my steps to a preparing for a homebirth:
1. The first step after you've decided to have a homebirth is to locate a qualified homebirth midwife. Whether you choose to go with a CNM or a Licensed Midwife, find someone with whom you are comfortable. Choose a midwife that is educationally qualified, is willing to provide references and will support you and keep you on a healthy, focused preparatory path for your birth experience.
2. Next, educate yourself. Learn everything there is to know about your upcoming birth experience. I highly recommend childbirth education classes and reading everything you can about childbirth, and particularly, homebirth.
3. Create a loving supportive environment and educate those who will be present about the birth process.
4. Last but not least, this is a time for complete self-honesty. You don’t have to share your feelings with others, but it is completely necessary that you do a complete self-assessment and take time to calmly and quietly to go within yourself and to understand and resolve whatever fears or anxieties you may have about your own capacities as a mother and your own ability to experience this momentous event. Learn that you must trust yourself, your own capabilities as a woman and mother and trust Mother Nature and her most perfect and unique process. Childbirth is the single most transforming experience a woman can have and if you empower yourself and take positive advantage of this amazing experience, you grow emotionally and spiritually to heights you could only have previously imagined.
TFG: What are the benefits of a homebirth?
DKK: Homebirth has many obvious benefits and some not so apparent. One of the most apparent benefits is a cozier, more loving and respectful environment for mother and child to experience this momentous transformation. Also, childbirth becomes a true family experience rather than a surgical procedure, allowing mother and child to bond immediately and giving this newly arrived child a more peaceful and secure entrance into this world. One of the less obvious but extremely beneficial results is the self-empowerment that occurs when a woman owns her own birth process. This tends to give a woman a more positive and powerful self image helping her to be a more confident and focused mother.
There are medical benefits also. As we have heard too often these days, hospitals themselves can be a great place to pick up infections and diseases. Not to mention controlling the attitudes of sometimes obnoxious nurses or doctors and the often noisy and sterile environment of many hospitals can be all but impossible.
TFG: What is a water birth?
DKK: A waterbirth birth is a birth that takes place with the mother in what is usually a small spa type pool of water. These pools are available in most area for rent or purchase and are easily set up and removed. Many hospitals that use midwives have these pools available for mothers wishing to birth in water. The baby is born in the water and is gently lifted right away up to the surface into his mother's arms.
TFG: What are the benefits of a water birth?
DKK: Many women feel more comfortable birthing in water. If a woman likes water, she may find herself wanting to be in water during her labor and maybe her birth as well. For many women their bodies guide them to immerse into water during labor. Warm, safe, more private, less possibility for unnecessary interventions. While a woman in labor relaxes in a warm pool, free from gravity's pull on her body, her body is less likely to secrete stress-related hormones. This allows her body to produce the pain-inhibitors, endorphins, which augment her energy for labor and birth, which, in turn may decrease labor discomfort.
TFG: What do women need to know about alternative birthing options in general (meaning alternative to a hospital birth)?
DKK: The most important concept to understand about pregnancy and birth is that options other than hospital birth exist. In the United States, women use OBs for their pregnancy without even thinking or knowing about midwives. Midwives are experts in normal birth and the majority of medical communities throughout the rest of the world use midwives to care for normal, low-risk women during their pregnancy and birth; and by doing so experience lower rates of infant mortality and maternal and infant injury.
OBs are expert in complications—that is their forté. Some OBs have not experienced normal birth, they do not know what a normal, non-intervention birth is like. Women need to know that if they want the best chances for a normal, natural birth their best choice is a midwife. A midwife will support and empower a woman during labor in ways that many OBs do not have the time or interest to do.
Women need to know that pregnancy is a time for them to research, explore and investigate birth alternatives and not leave it up to an OB because they have been told that he or she know what is right for them. Why is a woman so willing to give up her power and control over the singleemost potent function in her life? The inevitability of harm coming to herself or her child has been has been hysterically put forth as the result of any woman who did not resign her birth process to the control of an obstetrician in a hospital setting. This fear in many cases has so disconnected woman from their birth process that being knocked out and for the most part not consciously present during this joyful event has become commonplace.
Childbirth should be transforming and uplifting, at the very least it holds that potential. If a woman chooses to close her eyes to experience, knowledge and information, she is closing her eyes and heart to the experience of bonding and loving her baby at the moment of birth, a most critical moment for her relationship with herself and her baby.
TFG: What is the most important thing a woman needs to know about giving birth?
DKK: Birth is the single most transforming experience a woman can have. Trust your own power as a woman and trust nature's process. Go inside, face and resolve your fears and reservations and rise above them before labor and you will have a smoother more rewarding birth experience.
As a coach and consultant for CEOs, entrepreneurs, nonprofits and celebrities, Denise Spatafora is a master at unlocking fearlessness, creativity and accountability in all kinds of people, leaving them with the power to thrive. She's parlayed her keen abilities as a guide and mentor in the professional world into her latest empowerment foray, BornClear (www.bornclear.com), a natural childbirth education program and movement. Here this media darling and mother of two discusses the power of choice, why your conversation probably needs to change, how an aligned birth team is crucial to a beautiful birthing experience and more.
TFG: What is the BornClear method?
BornClear’s methodology rests on the principle of the mind/body connection—your thoughts affect/control your body and your physical experience. With regard to the body, BornClear teaches the physiology of labor (stages of labor, the internal chemicals available to us, which are our body’s natural pain relievers).
With this knowledge you learn to work with your body through the process rather than being distracted or working against the natural unfolding of labor. With regard to the mind, BornClear teaches tools which include visualization, meditation, manifestation and deep relaxation exercises as well as exercises to help eliminate fears and concerns, create cohesion in your birth team and devise and execute your birth plan-wish list. We have educated and inspired scores of women in this methodology, leaving them fully prepared and ready for birthing, trusting their bodies and instincts and fully connected to their power and wisdom. If this were the only course you took. you would be fully prepared. In addition, through this methodolgy, you learn so much about yourself, for it is also a journey of self-growth that can be enlightening and very empowering. Through exercises, we also uncover buried fears and concerns that that would limit the possibility of the experience as well as limit one’s body from opening naturally as designed. It does not matter where our clients give birth—a birthing center, a hospital, at home—but that they are educated and empowered about all their choices and conversations.
TFG: So many women have bad birthing experiences. Why do you think this is so?
DS: I think there are a few reasons for this problem. The first one is that the main conversation in America around birth is about fear—and there's a “hope you make it” kind of energy around it. That fear permeates all conversations, including the births we watch on TV, stories we read, stories people tell, etc. I had two beautiful, peaceful births and would give birth many times over—that is not what people normally hear. In addition to fear, people are very uneducated about all facets of the birthing process. They don't take the time to educate themselves on the options and decide what would work best for them, where they would feel safest and most taken care of.
This journey can be created: in the beginning of the BornClear course, we distinguish that the main conversation on the planet is one of fear around birth and discuss each person's own conversation about it. From there, we create the context and foster a conversation establishing that they do truly want to have for their births, which is their commitment to themselves. The rest of the course is taught inside of that context that they fostered for themselves. It's all about getting educated, being empowered, understanding the path, finding out what questions to ask and alignment of your team. Alignment of your birth team is crucial. Often times, a woman or a couple don’t align their birth team or get all questions answered before the experience happens—the lack of this kind of preparation is staggering.
Another reason for negative birth experiences happens when a woman is interrupted during birth because of fear. When this happens, her body emits stress hormones called cathecolmines, which can counteract any sense of peace or pain relief via your natural endorphins which are 400 times more powerful than morphine. In fact, the release of this hormone can stall a labor or stop it entirely. This point is where medical intervention can create a bad experience: often doctors immediately start thinking that something is wrong, which causes more stress. Then medical procedures begin which normally take the birth on a wrong turn. If the baby is not in distress, it doesn't matter how long a woman takes to dialate. Iif she is left alone in these cases to relax again and go inward and feel safe, she can release her natural endorphins, which will kick in the oxytocin to allow for labor to begin again. There are also other natural ways to release endorphins like stimulating the erogenous zones, being in the shower, light touch message, all done in a quiet, unobtrusive way. In the cases of all the people with whom I have worked who have had a bad experience, I can trace back to the point where there was this kind of interruption, fear or concern that interrupted the natural process and the woman was not left to naturally correct or re-initiate the process naturally on her own time.
One couple, in particular, told me that if they had not taken the BornClear course, there is no question the woman would have had a C-section based on the course of events that went down with their birth team—specifically their doctor—during the birth.
TFG: How can women prepare both mentally and physically for childbirth?
DS: By taking courses like BornClear the enable you to understand options. This knowledge-based empowerment affects the mental and emotional states. Other ways to prepare are pre-natal yoga, of which I am a huge advocate. Relaxation methods of any kind quiet the mind, allowing endorphins to be released into the body. To learn how to relax and go inward on your own command and the hear and feel the signals of the body is priceless. Walking, messages, quiet time listening to visualizations that resonate with you (in the bath, if you can) and anything that nurtures and connects you with yourself and the baby all prepare you for the big event.
TFG: What is a birth plan?
DS: It is your wish list of how you would like it to go, including questions about your practitioners or institution's procedures, policies and standards. It's a powerful road map to allow everyone on your birth team to speak the same language and align before the birth—all knowing what to expect and honoring the wishes of the couple/mother. This plan lines up beautifully with what they first create in the course, their context or conversation/wishes for their birth.
Most people do not create a birth plan nor review these important questions and conversations; they let the practitioner lead the way. Imagine if you were building your dream house and you let the architect, builder designer do everything they want with absolutely no input from you. You're the one living your life in that home, so why would you let someone else design it for you to their needs?
TFG: What is a birth team?
I define the birth team as your doctor/midwife, doula (if you have one), partner and extended birth team, which may be people around you that day helping like mother, father friends, etc. This team is the couple's team, with the couple and baby being the main key voice and center. The team definitely needs to be aligned based on the main key voice, which should be clear.
TFG: What should all women know about giving birth?
DS: There are amazing choices. Trust yourself and your body and the experience can be beautiful and profoundly powerful for yourself, your partner and your baby. My children watch their beautiful births on their birthdays. Their births were a great way to start their lives and my birthing as a mother.
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