i keep hearing from my students that their birth didn't go as planned
now i quite often get comments on youtube just like this one
and it seems to me like many people must have a definite idea of how their birth will go and
i'm thinking that this idea might partially be the fault of creating a birth plan and these
comments have led me now to the recommendation that you should consider burning your birth plan
hey there if we haven't met yet my name is alice i'm a birth doula a child birth
educator and today i've got some big thoughts some big thoughts to share about birth plans
and since i do my best thinking when i'm outside walking let's hit the streets together
so this is my 17th year working as a doula my 12th year as a child birth educator
and my thoughts on this have really changed over time and i want to share why i think you
should burn your birth plan but before i get to that let me give you a little background
so birth plans they're documents that are crafted by expecting families
to give your providers a quick guide to what you want and really what you don't want from a
birth and this probably sounds like a good idea because we want our providers to be informed
about what matters most to us and keeping our care providers informed about preferences
should ultimately help them take better care of us so now i'm suggesting that we do away with
this communication tool all together i know stay with me this sounds a little unusual
i actually want to kind of reimagine this tool and talk about what other things we can do
to like stack the deck in our favor how can we ensure that our preferences are known
so the first thing i want to encourage you to do if you're expecting a baby is to really put
some careful thought into choosing your place of birth and your provider so ideally you want to
find a provider that supports the type of birth that you are interested in you want to find a
provider that respects your preferences and really has an open dialogue with you
so if you're thinking but alice i don't know my preferences that's fine that's totally fair and
this is where the difficulty can come in because i know a lot of families don't really learn about
their preferences or figure out their preferences until they get like deep into childbirth class
and at that time you might be far into your pregnancy into your relationship with your
provider and maybe changing providers either is really difficult or possibly impossible
and i've worked with so many families in this position where it's like the more that they know
they start realizing that maybe they're not with the right person and this is where sometimes the
birth plan comes in where people will start writing a birth plan with some preferences and
ideas and sometimes these ideas and preferences aren't even possible with their current provider
or are really difficult to achieve with their current provider so let's say for example i
worked with a family i remember so clearly a few years ago they wanted to avoid an induction
and they were with a provider and a practice it was a group of obs actually that had a very high
rate of induction and they weren't doing medical inductions they were really doing inductions that
were not evidence-based and my clients they created a birth plan very clear about
how they wanted low intervention they were hoping to avoid an induction and then they were
still pregnant at their 40-week appointment and were given a lot of high pressure to induce and
they didn't really have much of a choice then and they felt like their backs were up against a wall
choosing a provider gosh it's difficult and so important at the same time
so if we do let's just say you're with a provider that supports your preferences supports
what you're looking for in birth some of your preferences can actually not even be included in
a birth plan because it's just just the way they work like i remember listening to a midwife pick
up a birth plan from one of my clients where the plan said that they wanted to have limited vaginal
exams they wanted to move around in labor and she read it and she said well we do everything here
standard so is there anything else you want to share so it can be so much
easier if you're with someone who is really supportive of what you're looking for
i know i'm being really direct here but i've seen this go badly so many times and i've worked
with families who really aren't happy with their care providers during their pregnancy
and sometimes they believe that a good birth plan is going to make everything okay but unfortunately
it doesn't work out so and i know this is a really difficult situation sometimes with families
choosing a provider that listens that respects your choices and practices evidence-based medicine
is much more important than creating a birth plan but sometimes hard to figure out as well
another thing that we can do to help ensure that our preferences are known
is to create a one sheet of preferences for our birth team
okay okay i know you might be thinking isn't this birth plan
well it is similar but it's also different and the goal of this one sheet of paper
is to give our nurses our doctors our midwives insight into how they can better support us so
on this document i want you to include important information that they really need to know
if you have say fears of any procedures if you have any past trauma if you have a pre any
previous losses if you have a history of sexual abuse i would include any of that and all of that
i also recommend including something about you and your partner that allows your team to get to
know you better something like my partner and i like to laugh so feel free to make any seinfeld
references that you can or we love music we might be playing some unconventional music please know
that it brings us joy or it takes us a long time to make decisions so we'll likely gonna ask for
some alone time if there is a decision that needs to be made or please don't talk about
pain we know that pain will be present and we will ask for medication if we want it i also recommend
including your top priority top priority so what is so important to you maybe something like
my top priority is immediate skin to skin with my baby or my top priority is not pushing
on my back my top priority is maintaining a calm space during labor or my top priority is making
sure i still move around once i get an epidural it could be anything like this but just making sure
that your top priority is known is is going to be so helpful on this preferences page
so yes my recommendation to you is to throw out this concept of a birth plan replace it with
careful selection of your provider and a birth preference sheet that you discuss with your
provider way in advance of labor so what no matter what your preferences are for birth
i'd love for you to know your options when it comes to the pushing phase so in just under
five minutes you can discover pushing options that are right here in this video i feel like the
must watch for my clients and my students and i know you're going to benefit from it too
see you next week with another video bye guys let me know down below if you enjoy the walk see ya