empowering birth Archives - Birth Connection

How to prepare for a positive birth?

by Pernille
1
| preparing for birth
30/07/2012

Imagine if you knew exactly what your birth would be like and therefore could prepare accordingly. In my work teaching childbirth preparation, I think about what we need to know about to have a good experience, feel informed, confident and ready, all the time? What do we need to know to have a positive birth, regardless of how our birth unfolds? ‘Birthing From Within’ always inspires me greatly and yet again, as I am continuously searching and working on this issue, I was inspired by Pam England’s ‘knowings’: The Primordial Knowing or instinctual knowing, the modern knowing and knowing yourself....
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Birth Journeys

by Pernille
Comment
| doula
09/07/2012

This is a beautiful book about birth. It has a broad variety of different kinds of birth and all personal stories written by the mothers themselves interspersed with expert fact, figures and opinion about different issues all important to birth and parenting. This book was donated to our recent BaBs raffle and we also got 4 books to sell. All proceeds are going to BaBs. Give me a call or an email if you are interested. ——————————————————————————————————————————————– “Stop listening to horror stories. Be reassured, excited and inspired. Find out how beautiful and powerful birth can be. Discover the keys to...
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Continuity of Care

by Pernille
1
| preparing for birth
21/06/2012

When I was recently at the ‘Nambour Markets’ promoting our Face of Birth screening night on Friday, where we will also be raising awareness of continuity models of midwifery care, I was again reminded that so many women don’t know their options, before choosing a care provider, and even more seem to just choose what is culturally trendy and safe i.e. what their friends did – private hospital and obstetric care. This is despite all research and evidence pointing to midwifery led continuity of care, being the one where women report greatest satisfaction, has least intervention and the best outcomes....
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Movie screening and continuity of care info night

by Pernille
Comment
| BaBs
07/06/2012

Midwife Australia is proud to invite you to the movie screening of the popular movie “FACE OF BIRTH“and “continuity of midwifery care information night” This event is all about raising awareness of choices in childbirth and the benefits of continuity of care. The event also celebrates 5 years for our local Sunshine Coast BaBs group, (a program of the Maternity Coalition), which is a peer support mothers group for both pregnant women, and new Mums of all kinds, and will be raising money to keep BaBs going for another 5. As such we are holding a MEGA Raffle with 50-60 great...
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To say pain or not to say pain

by Pernille
Comment
| preparing for birth
23/05/2012

Last month one of my beautiful doula client couples lent me a very interesting video. It was about an acupuncturist who was doing pre-natal groups on preparing for birth, and Chinese philosophy around that. It was really interesting. She was using moxa and a particular type of massage to release pelvic tension. She was also explaining things from the yin and yang perspective, which made a lot of sense. She did say one thing right at the beginning of this video though, which made me think about pain and how we as pregnant women are encouraged to approach labour pain....
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Do not ‘bring up’ children

by Pernille
Comment
| parenting
21/04/2012

This article was written by Jesper Juul and translated by Hayes van der Meer – FamilyLab Australia/New Zealand –www.familylab.com.au It was probably easier raising children centuries ago. Ideas and methods only changed slightly from one generation to the next. Parents simply raised their children the way they had been raised themselves. They knew what to do and how to do it. …Until recently! Since 1990s a new major trend has been introduced every four years or so. In a highly chaotic fashion the media, mothers’ groups, friends and experts have developed and introduced new techniques with rapid speed. These fads, which many of them become,...
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Fear of Birth

by Pernille
1
| preparing for birth
20/04/2012

Women have birthed babies successfully for millenniums. We don’t know if they were scared. Some of them probably were. It would be pretty unnatural not to have worries and even fear of something so epic and unknown in many ways. The difference, I suppose is that women in the past, partly was part of birth from a very early age, as birth just happened in amongst life in general, but they also had women around them, who they knew, had relationships with and whom they had seen help other women to birth. This, I imagine, must have provided some sort...
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The key to meaningful birth preparation

by Pernille
3
| birth, Birth Preferences, celebrating mothers, choosing your care giver, doula, homebirth, interventions, preparing for birth
12/02/2012

The key to meaningful birth preparation: Prepare for pain, intensity and the unexpected There seem to be a common belief in our culture today; that as long as a woman thinks positively about birth & is determined to birth without drugs, then that will give her a good birth. And if a woman worries about cesareans or pain, that will somehow manifest itself for her birth. I remember it well myself, giving birth to my first child about 10 years ago. I was determined to prove that birth was natural and that I would show them all where to put...
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Soulful birth preparation

by Pernille
Comment
| birth, Birth Preferences, celebrating mothers, choosing your care giver, preparing for birth
26/10/2011

Most couples in Australia do pre-natal preparation classes before the birth of their child. Most of us feel it is important to get information about this big event, which is foreign to most of us in our culture today. For others it is about taking time to focus on baby, in their otherwise busy lives and maybe to connect with other families in the same situation. All these reasons are important and valid. But what might we learn in a typical pre-natal class? And what do we actually really need to learn to feel prepared, as we don’t know how...
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Is Birth Getting Harder?

by Pernille
6
| birth, Birth Preferences, choosing your care giver, doula, homebirth, interventions
15/06/2011

Based on a presentation by midwife and lecturer Rachel Reed. Check out her very informative website: MidwifeThinking Birth is rarely described as easy, and in today’s culture birth is surrounded by lots of fear and feelings of danger and risk. However, for most women the safest and healthiest way to birth is a normal, vaginal birth with no unnecessary interventions. In today’s Australia though, only a minority of women birth in this safest and healthiest way. According to Neonatal Perinatal Statistics, only 37% of women in Queensland, go into labour themselves and birth their baby without medical or surgical assistance....
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