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May 2016 Moms
pelicanesque
member
Birth Plan Resources?
pelicanesque
member
Just today I made the call at 13 weeks to switch to an OB/GYN and hospital that are closer to me, and I think I chose a doc in a practice that supports natural birth. (BTW, I'm in NYC, it's Dr. Anna Rhee who has admitting privileges to Mt. Sinai Roosevelt's Birthing Center). I don't go in until mid-November for my first appt, as I just had my 1st trimester scans and ultrasounds and such.
So let me get to the point...the books I've come across and websites and other resources say "come up with a birth plan", but they don't necessarily give you the resources to let you decide what should be in your plan. I get bits and bobs here and there on the forums, mostly about epidurals. I see advice like "ask your doc about intermittent monitoring", but I don't know what that means. Some women choose a more natural birth approach and some don't. I think I might want to go the natural route in the birthing center (hence the doc choice), but I actually don't really know what I'm getting myself into. I'm leaning this way because I'm an organic-eating environmentalist closet-hippie and it seems like most of the women I know have had doulas, home births, etc. But where can I actually read up on this stuff, where I can actually weigh all the pros and cons instead of finding myself saying "no, I don't want an epidural because someone said they're evil"? Can you tell I don't have a lot of friends that have had kids? :-/
TIA!
So let me get to the point...the books I've come across and websites and other resources say "come up with a birth plan", but they don't necessarily give you the resources to let you decide what should be in your plan. I get bits and bobs here and there on the forums, mostly about epidurals. I see advice like "ask your doc about intermittent monitoring", but I don't know what that means. Some women choose a more natural birth approach and some don't. I think I might want to go the natural route in the birthing center (hence the doc choice), but I actually don't really know what I'm getting myself into. I'm leaning this way because I'm an organic-eating environmentalist closet-hippie and it seems like most of the women I know have had doulas, home births, etc. But where can I actually read up on this stuff, where I can actually weigh all the pros and cons instead of finding myself saying "no, I don't want an epidural because someone said they're evil"? Can you tell I don't have a lot of friends that have had kids? :-/
TIA!
Re: Birth Plan Resources?
Anyway, she talks about the pros and cons of epidurals, intermittent monitoring, and other things that might be part of your birth plan. Some of the book pertains to her own decisions and how she made those choices for herself, but much more of it is devoted to what the studies show, what the quality of those studies is, and what conclusions can fairly be drawn from that evidence. The book really does a great job of laying out the data and then stepping back and saying "so that's the evidence, now you decide what you want to do with it."
My personal plan is to review those chapters as I get farther along in this whole thing, do additional research on the parts I'm not sure about, discuss it with my OB (and maybe my doula if I end up hiring a doula), and then make a birth plan after taking all those factors into consideration.
And I highly recommend taking a NON-hospital birth class, 8-12 weeks, and you can really get comfortable with understanding your birth plan options there.