I achieved my Master’s qualification by researching “Why women in Central Victoria choose to birth at home?
I did loads of background reading about what women want in birth, and tried to make sense of the research that had been done concerning women’s satisfaction with their care in birth.
The term “woman centred care” was coming up frequently, but that was quite a nebulous phrase, and it still was constrained by what the systems of maternity care were offering, not from the perception of the women being cared for.
The research identified four common issues that women spoke about concerning birth. These were, 1) safety of birth, 2) control over the birth process, 3) access to and the sharing of information, and 4) the desire for continuity of carer.
This information was still presented in a very “hospital centric” fashion. The focus was always on what the current system offered or didn’t offer, or could strive to offer, and safety was always the overriding concern for any stance. I rarely heard the women’s voices in what I was reading.
I decided that my results from my research would be totally the women’s voices of the reasons why they chose to birth at home.
And they told me amazing things. They shared their birth stories with me, and told me what was important to them. I held what’s called a focus group with the participants and gave them back all the things they had told me about their births, and asked them “what do these things you’ve told me about your births mean to you as a group of women? What is fundamentally important to you about birth that you have moved outside of the mainstream system of care provision?”
Those women, well they answered my question and they gave me four amazing themes about what is important to women in birth.
Beauty
Sacredness
Partnership and
Posterity
I know I’ve been talking a lot about homebirth so far, but I do not believe that these desires from birth relate only to birth at home. I think these four themes form the foundations that are needed for every birth regardless of the setting for birth. If your care in pregnancy and birth was grounded in ensuring these elements of care were honoured and respected and were a living part of how people interacted with you while you bring your baby into the world, imagine how that system would work. Just imagine that.
I will write about each of the four themes in more detail in the following blogs posts.
