So you want to be a birthworker? Or perhaps you already are a doula or childbirth educator and you are looking to grow your business.  Before we move any further I want to take a moment and think about what it is that lead you to this work. 

Pause, evaluate.

As an educator trainer, I have heard participants share many why stories.  Perhaps you love babies and pregnancy and found this to be the perfect combination of the two.  Maybe you always dreamed of being a nurse, but the thought of placing an IV was more than your stomach could handle.  Is it that you see the journey to parenthood as so profound that you simply wish to be a part of the journey?  Did the news reports of American women dying in childbirth leave you frustrated, concerned, and looking for an opportunity to help?

For me, it was that my first birth left me feeling so strong and powerful that I wanted to share the positive experience with other families and I knew becoming a birthworker was the right path for me.  Some people enter the field for the complete opposite reason, that their births left them feeling small or marginalized and they want to save future families from these feelings. 

Whatever your rationale is, it is so important that you uncover it and own it before proceeding down this path.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is that you may need that rationale to keep you moving forward when things get hard and let me tell you, starting a new business is hard.  Super rewarding, but oh so hard. 

The other reason is a really important one as well.  Perhaps you or someone you love had a less than stellar birth experience and you want to help parents not travel through those difficulties.  If that is your motivation I highly recommend giving yourself some time to process those negative feelings and determine how you can make them positive.

Having a baby is an incredibly exciting time for a family.  As childbirth educators we have the opportunity to take that excitement and from it build strong, confident, and happy families.  We also have the opportunity to build distrust within the medical community and parents who may experience trauma from their birth experience because they felt like they were constantly having to fight.

I think Pitocin is one of the interventions that highlight this difference the best.  So many parents leave their childbirth classes thinking I don’t want Pitocin because it is going to make it impossible to have birth without an epidural.  I know that both can exist, I did it.  Do I love Pitocin? Absolutely not!  In fact it sucks, but you know what else sucks? Irregular contractions that go on for a very long time without progress.  I compare Pitocin to working out on a treadmill.  You are chugging along on the treadmill feeling good and then someone comes up and increases the speed.  After a little bit, you adjust and keep chugging along.  Then they do it again, and again, and again.  Each time they do it you need a little bit to adjust, but you can keep chugging along, you just need that adjustment period.  It is your care team’s job in those instances to determine what is the appropriate speed for you.  Once labor gets into a good pattern, they stop.

There is a time when Pitocin is necessary.  Is it overused? Probably.  Is it still necessary sometimes? Absolutely.  It’s important to remember that it is a medication.  We use medications when things are not performing optimally. I regularly have headaches.  I rarely take medication to make them stop.  My first step is to drink more water, then I work on releasing tension, or find what is causing the headache.  On occasion nothing I do works and I have to remember that ibuprofen will help.  I go months without ever using it, but it is a tool in case I need it.

So how do we make sure that families have every tool at their disposal to decrease the likelihood that the need for Pitocin is even mentioned?  That’s our job as educators.  Give them the tools like changing positions, waiting until active labor to go to the hospital, creating a low sensory birthing space, and so on so that their contractions don’t become irregular and if they do, don’t stay that way.

I have to tread carefully in my classes when I discuss epidurals.  I got one with my second birth and it almost killed us (little dramatic, maybe, but it wasn’t good).  I lost consciousness and my sister tells me my blood pressure was 40/10.  Henry was born via emergency cesarean 20 minutes after the epidural was placed.  Where I teach there is a 90% epidural rate, so how to I not bring that trauma into the classroom.

I talk about it.  I talk about why I decided to get the epidural (to relax my pelvic floor muscles and allow baby to descend, plus I had been laboring hard for a long time and was exhausted) and I talk about how that isn’t the norm.  The epidural can cause blood pressures to drop, but my case was the exception, not the rule.  Typically, if there is a drop in blood pressures, nurses are able to administer medication through the IV and bring it back to appropriate levels.  And for the nurses who may be wondering, yes, I had two bags of fluid before I got the epidural and had been drinking water throughout labor, it was just a fluke.  Flukes happen in every aspect of life, including birth. 

The good news is that I don’t actually have trauma from that traumatic experience.  I was well informed going in and not pressured into any decisions in the time leading up to the cesarean.  I asked the appropriate questions before making any decisions and was given the time I needed to choose my course of action.  There wasn’t much time when things went south, so I trusted my care team to do what was best.  When I look back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

We can help the families who take our class follow this same path by encouraging them to ask BRAIN questions.  What are the Benefits? What are the Risks? Are there any Alternatives? What is my Intuition telling me? Does this have to happen Now?  Also, in the time leading up to birth, how can we help them build dialogue with their care provider so that trust is further developed?

Once you have defined why you entered (or want to enter) birthwork it becomes easier to create your elevator speech.  This is a two minute (or less) introduction that you share with people at cocktail parties, book clubs, or anywhere people ask, “so what are you up to these days?”  Which, let’s face it, is essentially everywhere.  Having a simple (memorized) response to this question makes it easier to build referrals.  More on elevator speeches next week.  This week, define your why.

Learn even more about building and launching your childbirth educator career.