What do you wish you’d known before you’d birthed? What stopped you hearing the nurturing advice you received?
One more comment I received when I asked women these questions was: why go to hospital for 15 mins of pushing and then come home? Stay home in the first place!
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Great video, Janet. That’s our goal—women getting the birth they really want the first time, not the third. Thanks for making this, I’ll put it on my FB page.
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Oh thanks! Glad you like it!
How can we help women to trust their bodies for their first births? So many subsequent births are ‘healing’ experiences. Wouldn’t it be lovely if no harm was done the first time that required healing.
Thanks for this – I will be directing first time pregnant women to this post.
Thank you, Rachel. Lovely to see you drop by. I think the work that women do towards healing from suboptimal birthing experiences is largely what creates healing rather than the birth at the end of it. I’ve written before that hoping birth will heal us is like waiting on lotto to buy food. I see women experience beautiful births after trauma and then feel so enraged as they realise from the depths of their psyches what damage was done to them and their babies and I think many of us are taken unawares by that too.
After every birth we rejig our experiences, whether all loving gentle births or a mix of violent, traumatic and other peaceful births. I really do think the journey of birth is a lifetime. Birth is a journey and not a destination in almost every way, I think! I know this will be familiar to you.
As you say, if only we could support women to avoid that initial trauma but in a patriarchy where fear of birth and hatred of our bodies is inculcated from girlhood, this seems a large ask! I think women often try to listen but are unable to hear the wisdom of those returning and most of us really don’t realise how bad it actually is at the coalface. It’s truly shocking and women are so unprepared.