Reducing Pain & Increasing Confidence: A Review of Rhea Dempsey’s book on Birth
I just finished reading "Birth With Confidence: Savvy Choices for Normal Birth" last week (utilizing Hoopla Digital through the library; y'all, this is one of my favorite tools ever!). It is unapologetic in its promotion of medication free births, so that is something to keep in mind when reading it. For women who are comfortable and at ease with epidurals or hospital procedures in general, this might not be the best fit. If you're someone who has some anxiety about birth, or a woman determined to have a "natural" birth, or someone dissatisfied with how your first birth went, though, then this book is an excellent one to read in pregnancy!
Dempsey, an Australian birth educator, spends a large (and helpful) portion of her book discussing how our views of pain in childbirth are wildly different than our views of pain for so many other activities. If a woman is training for a race, we expect her to embrace and accept the pain in that vigorous training. It's functional pain, versus pain that signals something is wrong. Pain from leg day at the gym is vastly different than the pain of a sprained ankle or broken leg, for instance. According to Dempsey, the pain of childbirth is also a functional pain but instead of celebrating a woman's capabilities here, so many assume that she can't bear it and rush to immediately tell her how unbearable the pain will be. This can sabotage a woman's confidence so very much.
When it came to pain, I appreciated Dempsey's caution about programs promising natural methods to completely escape pain in birth. If a woman places all her confidence in the programs instead of in herself, for instance, and at some point she feels pain beyond the level she was expecting, she can feel betrayed and be completely demoralized.
Some level of demoralization and feeling inadequate are normal parts of birth, and this is where Rhea emphasizes that having the right kind of support with you can make all the difference. If you are wanting a medication-free birth, will you have a support team there who knows you and knows birth, helping you move through repeated "crises of confidence?" Or will you only have people there with you who cannot bear to see you in pain (usually because of their intimate relationship with you) and/or are not familiar enough with the birth process to help you through to the next stage?
The interesting thing about this additional layer of support is that the right kind of person can actually help a woman raise her pain tolerances. Isn't that astonishing and fabulous to think about?! We all have similar pain threshold, according to Dempsey, but our pain tolerance can be increased depending on our environment and the support we have. It is crucially important to have an environment that helps manage our pain (for a birthing woman, this often means calm, semi-dark, and quiet) and someone there who helps you work through the pain. The research backs this idea up: one recent study found that "doula-supported mothers reported considerably lower pain and anxiety compared with those experiencing physiological delivery (without a doula)." (source)
This lessening of pain and anxiety gets us back to the title of the book: birthing with confidence! Birth is not a mysterious event where only the sanctified few can pass its test; it's a physiological process that most women are well equipped to handle (and thank goodness for the gifts of modern medicine for the exceptions!)