Today I had the pleasure of attending a Rhea Dempsey talk, hosted by Peninsula Birth Support. The discussion theme was "roles at birth" but it flowed on to related topics and included the women present sharing their own experiences.
Some of the great insights we gained from Rhea included:
- The current birth culture in Australia is on where labour is optional. Rhea refers to it as "the labour bypass era".
- For women who do want to experience a normal physiological labour in this era they need to be savvy in birth, particularly during moments of the crisis of confidence
- We have lost a lot of our human physicality. She joked that the body part that gets the best workout in our culture is the thumb, the remote control digit. In circumstances like these childbirth is a "hyper-leap into outer space!"
- Rhea highlighted the fact that a lot of people approach birth with the belief that pain thresholds are static, when in fact a woman's threshold for pain can increase and decrease at different times. The idea in birth is to make sure the support circle present will help boost her threshold for pain when a crisis of confidence hits.
- Within the medical/obstetric model of birth pain is seen as suffering and the role of attendants is to "save" the mother by intervening. In contrast, in the midwifery model of birth pain is seen as potency. Midwives celebrate pain and the crisis of confidence because they are signs that birth is progressing beautifully. They see their role as working with the pain and supporting the woman through it to achieve the normal physiological birth she desires.
- Finally we talked about the role of fathers at birth and Rhea suggested that when a woman has the ideal support circle and the space is being held the father can be free to be the lover, holding, touching, kissing the mother of his child as she labours.
Next month Peninsula Birth Support is having Eastside Midwives speak about prenatal testing on April 23rd at 12:30pm at Orwil Street Community House.
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