# Our parenting blog

## Disclaimer

I wanted to write this blog with my wife about our experience as parents, starting from pregnancy. With three children now, we have gained some experience that I wanted to share with you.

Personally, I enjoy reading other people's blogs and discovering their experiences. But I also know that pregnancy and parenting are quite delicate subjects. And a statement like "We did it this way" can easily be interpreted as "This is the right way to do it" or even "You're a bad parent if you don't do it like this". Hence this warning. This blog truly aims to reflect what we have lived and learned throughout our journey. And we hope that it might be useful.

## Physiological Childbirth

My wife and I are convinced of physiological childbirth, meaning a birth without cesarean section, without synthetic hormones, and without epidural. Obviously, there are cases where interventions are necessary and life-saving. Thank God for modern obstetrics! But most often, childbirth is a natural process that does not require intervention. In what follows, I would like to explain the reasons and experiences that convinced us. We did our first and second births in a birthing center and a third in the hospital, which allows us to compare the two. I hope you can benefit from our experiences.

Before we asked ourselves the question, we thought "why not use the epidural?". Generally, medicine is not in favor of women, so why not use one of the few treatments that explicitly helps women? The pains during childbirth are so significant that trying to relieve them is a good thing, right?

Our understanding changed when we spoke with a mother who had given birth to two children and explained to us that with the epidural comes the use of synthetic hormones. Why? Pain, although we would like to avoid it, has a key function in the dynamics of childbirth. Uterine contractions, even if involuntary, are still regulated by the body. And pain is an important sensor for the body to know how to regulate contractions.

If all goes well, the mother's body produces endorphins, which reduce tobsome extent the pain, but they also produce
oxytocin, which promotes contractions! If something is not right, for example, if the baby is not well engaged in the pelvis, the body can feel it. It can try to move the baby up, for instance by causing vomiting (A vomit during childbirth is therefore a good sign!).

If now we stop the pain with the epidural, we break the dynamics of childbirth. We must add synthetic hormones to stimulate contractions. We can dose them more or less and thus manage the intensity of contractions, but ultimately, this has nothing to do with the physiological dynamics of childbirth.

## Hospital Birth or Birthing Center

After deciding to have a birth without an epidural, we really wanted to seek support that could encourage us in this direction. That's why we wanted to give birth in a birthing center. At the time, the birthing room was in a hospital, which reassured us for the worst-case scenario (As anyway we would have to go trough the hospital emergency in case of complications, I don't know if it's really faster if the birthing center is in the hospital or just, as is often the case, next to the hospital).

We were already almost too late to register in the birthing center, but we were lucky to find a great midwife. She was with us before childbirth, during childbirth, and after childbirth, which creates a quite special bond. A woman who has been important at key moments in our family life. She was already very experienced: she had children herself and had worked for several years in the hospital.

This was not only an advantage, she confided in us, because when she started doing childbirth in birthing centers, she had to unlearn several mechanisms to truly go at the rhythm of the mother and baby. Hospital protocols are implemented so that a doctor who has not seen the mother can make an informed decision, whereas in the birthing center, the midwife is in the same room throughout the childbirth. She knows how the mother is doing and is attentive to the first signs of complications. In the hospital, one prepares for all possible complications. But in the birthing center, one believes in the mother. One believes that her body knows best how to position itself, etc.

I think it's important to find a midwife who puts us at ease and with whom we are on the same wavelength, because there are all kinds.

The midwives of the birthing center we chose were ready to come every day, at any hour, during the term period. Our midwife even drove us to the birthing center. I understand that the same possibility is not necessarily available everywhere. Sometimes, it's a group of midwives who share the births in the birthing center. So we know a bit what kind of midwives might accompany us, even if we don't know exactly who we'll end up with. In any case, I find that it makes a big difference if we know the midwife who will accompany us during childbirth. For our third child, we gave birth in the hospital where the on-duty midwives tried to get to know us during the first contractions -- not the best moment for small talk.

To finish, I would like to say that of course there are also more complicated births such as with twins or when the baby is breech. In these cases, it's better to be closer to an operating room, but that doesn't mean a physiological birth is excluded.

other blogs will follow...