How To Decide Where To Have Your Baby
Where You Give Birth Matters
I know that for many women the question of where you will birth has a lot to do with your insurance provider.
It can limit some choices, but until you find out for sure what facilities and providers are in your network, you won’t know!
Ask the questions so you can really make a choice about where you want to birth. You can chose between different hospitals in your area, stand alone birth centers, birth centers connected to a hospital, and home birth.
Will You Have An OB/GYN Or A Midwife?
In all of those places you’ll have different types of providers. The main two are obstetrician’s (OB) and certified nurse midwives (CNM).
To put it in pretty general terms, OB’s tend to practice conservatively, trying to control for as many risks and adverse outcomes as possible.
CNM’s tend to have a more relaxed approach to birth and see it less as something to be controlled and more as a natural event.
Often women will see the OB they’ve already been going to for pregnancy care. Sometimes you’ll be surprised to discover that they don’t have the same views or care about the same things that you do when it comes to birth.
In this case it’s totally okay to do some research and seek out a new provider. You want to find someone who will listen to you, answer all your questions and who aligns with your values and beliefs around birth.
Where Do Our Ideas And Beliefs About Birth Come From?
Let’s talk about where those values and beliefs come from for a moment. None of us grew up without developing some ideas and beliefs around birth even if we never actually thought about it until now.
From movies and tv shows to the stories that may have floated around us from family members and later on friends or co-workers, we have unconciously developed our ideas and beliefs around birth.
As a result of the stories and media we grew up with some of us will have more positive beliefs about the possibilities of birth and some will have more of a negative spin, but almost all of us have taken on the idea that it is something to be feared!
These unconscious ideas and beliefs about birth created over our lifetime will inform our decision making when it comes to where and how we decide to give birth.
It’s important to distinguish what you believe and how you came to them from the beliefs of those directly around you.
Do your ideas feel right to you as the person you have grown into? How much are you being influenced by the beliefs of those around you?
Ask yourself the question, “Birth is ____”, or, “I expect birth to be___”. Write down your answers. Which ones resonate with you and align with how you think of birth right now, and even more importantly, how you want to think of birth in the future.
Reframing Our Learned Messaging About Birth
If the picture you have of birth is rooted in other’s traumatic or stressful experiences you want to try and reframe your outlook so that you can approach your birth with fresher eyes.
For some reason people really like to randomly come up to pregnant women and just tell them all of the scariest things about birth they can remember, of course starting with their own horrendous experience first.
I believe this is a sign that we don’t talk enough about our birth experiences and that people don’t know how to listen to them.
There is an expectation in our society that you are just supposed to be happy after you have a baby and that’s it and that as long as you ended up with a healthy baby nothing else matters.
Of course some mom’s whose stories need to be told did not end with a healthy baby and it is my wish for them that they find a wonderful support person or group to process their grief and disappointment with.
So often pregnant women become the walking depositories for their fellow birthers awful birth stories leaving moms to feel afraid or hopeless, like no matter what they do birth is just difficult and something is likely to go wrong.
This is why it’s so important to understand and explore the reasons behind your choices and to begin to reframe birth as a normal event that is relatively uncomplicated for women who are healthy and have had normal pregnancies.
It is also why it is so important to find the place of birth and the provider within that place who will support you in having this normal experience by following evidence based practices and following your wishes and your bodies natural rhythms and patterns as much as possible while paying close attention to any clinical abnormalities thereby keeping everyone safe without causing any undue harm.
Maybe you don’t know what to think about birth. babylist has a wonderful list of book suggestions that depict normal birth and are supportive of all types of birth plans.
These books will also help you do the reframing I mentioned above, again, seeing birth as a normal process and when loving preparation takes place, you can have an empowering birth experience even when things don’t go according to plan.
So back to deciding where to give birth…what information do you have about each place of birth, do you have all the information you need? Is your family or your friends strongly influencing your decision? How about insurance?
I know this can be a really tricky thing to navigate and our hands can be tied by financial restraints but if at all possible try not to make a decision based on finances and insurance alone.
Midwives and birth centers offer payment plans or discounts in certain situations if that is something that you are interested in but are unsure about the cost.
No matter what facility you chose for your birth you want to chose a practitioner who listens to you and answers all of your questions.
Do you trust this person? What about them makes you feel they are trustworthy? Your body has the ability to respond to how you feel about the environment and either release more of the birthing hormone oxytocin or if it feels unsafe or threatened it will shut down oxytocin.
Is your decision largely based on the fear of what ifs?
I would be concerned if you didn’t have any fear about labor or birth at all, but we want to aim for a healthy dose of fear, not debilitating fear.
A healthy dose of fear can sharpen your intuition and lead you to getting certain information or care that you need. It is natural to have fear of the unknown and birth is certainly a venture into the unknown.
On the flip side, an excess of fear can lead us to abandoning our intuition completely and turning all of our power over to the “experts”.
I say experts in quotations because although doctors and midwives are certainly experts, they are not the expert on you and what you want and need to feel comfortable, safe and capable of birthing.
Therefore, having an understanding of what your own beliefs and expectations are around birth will help you to make an informed decision about where to have your baby.
Once you’ve settled on your place of birth you want to start thinking about how you can make it feel like home so that you’ll feel as safe and relaxed in your space as possible.
My post on making your delivery room more cozy goes into detail about what you can do at home or at the hospital or birth center to always keep the focus on enhancing oxytocin.
There is also a really sweet activity for moms and partners to do that results in some very special symbols to bring with you to your birth as well.
Related Posts By Bridgetown Doula
