Birth Choices Seminar - $20 can save you a lot of pain

"Is this the right street?"

"It's so dark" 

"That's what the address said" 

The high beam came on and the central locking checked as we pulled into Pearse Street in North Fremantle for our appointment at the Community Midwifery office. We arrived early and went in to have a look. The Birth Choices session was to start at 7pm and I was wondering whether this was such a good idea. Who would turn up and what would they be like? 

As Pip the facilitator kickstarted the meeting, everyone seemed comfortable as we introduced ourselves. The guys seemed to all be here for the same reason - to support our partners and to get educated. For $20, this session would tell us the choices that we have with giving birth. There are more choices than Public v Private and as we learnt, the choice between Natural v Cesarean was no longer just choosing between apples and oranges. 

Many of us came to realise that there was an incentive for private hospitals to encourage planned or cesarean births even though it is more risky for the mother. The lack of continuity of care in the birth process whether we went private or public took many of us by surprise. The other option is to go with a community midwife program. If you are accepted, you will be assigned two midwives who will accompany the mother through the process starting from 16 weeks. One of the two midwives will be the one going to the hospital or birth centre with you and if everything works according to plan, she will also be the one delivering the baby - not an obstetrician. For people in Australia, this sounds alarming, but we don't realise that in most other places in the world, a midwife would be the one delivering the baby. 

Another stand out thing I learnt from the session was about water births. Why do people have water births? I never realised that the reason for water births was not because the couple were into something like scientology or something. It is actually a natural way of easing the pain of the mother as she gives birth. Strangely, doctors seem to see epidurals (injection near the spine as a pain killer) as safer than a bath full of salty water. 

We enjoyed attending the Birth Choices seminar and wondered why hardly anyone else had heard of this. Why was such an important seminar found in the midst of shipping containers and anonymous streets of Fremantle? If you are having a baby in the future, you should get to one of these talks and "get educated". The Community Midwifery Program can be found here and information about the Birth Choices talk here.