Choosing the best

There are many advances that let us know how are baby will be and will help us during such a special moment as giving birth (three-dimensional ultrasound, monitoring, epidural injection). But we can really hope for much more.

The birth of a child responds to a profound vital need.  It goes beyond just a genital and sexual fact.  It is the moment at which we collaborate with nature for starting a new life.  But also with ourselves in a family, for creating a space for love and happiness.  These elements should make us believe it is not only a medical situation, of illness and risk, but is related to life, pleasure, joy, hope, the intense emotions.

A woman about to give birth is a person under a lot of pressure. “Behave properly, breathe correctly, don’t loose control, relax…” Are requests too harsh for a woman afraid of giving birth.  But in reality, it goes beyond the medical, the most important thing is that mother and baby are all right, healthy and happy.

There is no single proper way for giving birth, the woman and her partner could decide many of the details of this important moment.  If every woman would be encouraged to choose how to have her child, where, in which way, everyone would search for what they need.  Except in certain health details, that an efficient professional can easily control, a delivery can take place in many different ways.

Preparing for this moment is going a different route: searching for people that can help, finding the best place.

It is working with the body.  It is very different from doing gymnastics, or learning how to breath and push (physiological act that responds to reflex, as in hunger for example).

Working with your body is searching for yourself.  Discovering what you can and can’t do.  What you desire and fear.

Preparing is taking fear and pain, which exist and are justified, and learn how to use them in your favor and not against you, for favoring the process.

Discovering much more practical, daily, simple and close strategies than an epidural anesthesia, the name means “anesthesia – sensibility privation”, it not only silences pain, but also pleasure.

Collaborated in this article: Dra. Raquel Schallman

The reasons for a c-section: when is this surgery necessary?.

Wells and Morton, two north American dentists, discovered the principles of anesthesia.