Birth With Confidence

In this accessible, straightforward book, Rhea Dempsey draws on nearly four decades experience to show how a woman’s choice of caregivers, support team and birthplace, as well as her life experience and personal attitudes to pain, will affect her birthing experience. Featuring birth stories, current birth statistics and opportunities for guided personal reflection, Birth with Confidence provides the knowledge and practical advice that women need for the best chance of normal birth in today’s birth culture. Important topics covered in Birth With Confidence: benefits of normal physiological birth for mother and baby navigating the birth culture savvy choices for normal birth ‘circles of influence’ support or sabotage? identify your ‘pain type’ raising pain tolerance predictable ‘crises of confidence’ in labour designing a ‘facilitating environment’ for achievement Birth with confidence: savvy choices for normal birth, gives a clear account of the challenges faced by contemporary birthing women, whilst also mapping out a path to powerful birthing experiences.

Chapter 1. The birth you want: what motivates the willing woman? Chapter 2. Reality hurts: birth in the labour-bypass era Chapter 3. It’s a fine line: reframing pain in labour Chapter 4. Approaching labour: what pain type are you? Chapter 5. Crisis of confidence: when self-belief crumbles Chapter 6. The right support: who will get you through?

Since the birth of my first daughter more than thirty years ago, I have trained as a childbirth educator and counsellor and have been privileged to attend more than one thousand births in hospitals and home settings as a birth attendant. I have also been honoured to work with many, many more women and their partners and support people during my birth preparation workshops, pre-natal classes, personal birth counselling sessions and in presentations and seminars around Australia and internationally. Sadly, in more than thirty years of birth support work, I have also witnessed an unprecedented rise in unnecessary medical interventions during birth—and the development of a culture that, rather than supporting women to birth naturally, is actually undermining them. No wonder, then, that many women are fearful as they approach their labour. Will their body cope? Are they physically and emotionally prepared? Feedback during my regular presentations to midwives and medical practitioners tells me that my understanding of our birth system is ‘on the money’ but—more importantly—that women who have undertaken my birth preparation classes are better prepared to navigate the many challenges they face when trying to birth naturally. My passion is to educate women about the impact of our birth culture on the outcome of our births. Instead of fear, I want you to go into your labour with confidence in your body and your support people, and the knowledge that will give you the best possibility of natural birth.