The Positive Birth Program is everything you wished the hospital birth classes were.
In many ways, The Positive Birth Program is an active birth class designed for all families with everything you think will be covered in a Hospital Birth Class but usually isn’t. Hospital based birth classes tend to be less about active ways to manage your labour and pain and more about pharmaceutical pain relief options and potential interventions that may occur.
ACTIVE BIRTH is not new. It is simply a way of describing how women the world over have always behaved during labour and birth throughout history —
Janet Balaskas
The focus of active birth classes is to prepare you and your birth partner mentally and physically for birth, so you have a deeper understanding of how to manage your labour through breathing techniques, movement and relaxation tools.
The Positive Birth program teaches you a mixture of techniques you can use yourself and hands-on techniques that your birthing partner can perform like massage and acupressure to minimise the pain and amount of time spent in active labour.
Involving your partner in the classes also gives your birthing partner a clear role of how they can support you and helps to build confidence for your birthing day.
Using these active birthing techniques in the lead up to birth helps soften the ligaments around your pelvic floor as the body grows and stretches and the centre of gravity changes.
If you are looking after your body in the lead up to birth using these active techniques it helps your baby move down into an optimal position for birth.
Learn to tune into your natural instincts
If you are attending an active birth class it is far more likely you will have an active birth. We constantly see women giving birth in movies where they lay on their backs, adding to the fact we don’t get to witness other women in our lives and society give birth so our intuition to listen to our body and move how we want to move has been suppressed.
Rather than laying on your back (we are not designed to birth on our backs) you are choosing to move your body and use different positions during labour and birthing. This means tuning into your natural instincts and doing what feels right. These movements can be entirely spontaneous, or they may be movements you have learnt and practiced in your active birth class.
There are lots of benefits to an active birth such as being in an upright position which works with gravity to help your baby descend, which also means that labour may be shorter and less intervention needed. The movements can also feel good if you are in discomfort.
Your birthing partner plays a big role, so get them prepared
Feeling safe and supported during labour is vital to how your nervous system responds. The hospital midwife will not be there for every contraction you have. They have other women to support and have paperwork, blood pressure, baby monitoring and other tasks to get through. Your emotional support comes from your own birthing partner and the preparation you do for the big day.
So if having an active birth is important to you and you are aiming for minimum intervention learning these active birth techniques through The Positive Birth Program will set you up for a positive birthing experience. You’ll walk into your birth day having a toolkit and feeling confident in bringing your baby into this world.
Click here and come join a group class in 2023.