What stance to take on birthing position…
My background and experience as functional health expert and therapist, bodyworker, Doula and scar tissue remediation specialist often leads me to look at what is the physiological path of least resistance in everything we/my patients do. And birthing is no exception.
A few weeks ago, I shared on my social media, various animation of the “knee together” birth move (which allows you to increase pelvic floor and birth canal space around baby and therefore helps birthing parent to mobilise their efforts better during contractions to get baby out). And just like that I was reminded of how political birth positioning can be.
Leg up - open widely…a recent historical addition to birthing practices
Believe or not, birthing on our backs is a relatively recent trend (which has been and is still subject of a great deal of controversy already when it was introduced in the last 200 years).
Upright birth postures has been used extensively across cultures and ages and birthing horizontally was minority practice traditionally.
And where both the dorsal position, where the birthing parent is flat on their back, and the lithotomy position (yes, I know, a birthing position which name comes from a procedure/surgery to remove bladder/kidney stones!), where the birthing parent lies on their back with their legs up in stirrups, have been used medically in the last 200/300 years we have recently started to challenge them .
Research shows now that birthing horizontally is far from allowing the best outcomes for birthing parents and babies, it is important to look at the history of the horizontal birthing position.
In a Nutshell, the adoption of a back position was both driven by a medicalisation of birthing in an attempt to curb infant and birthing parents´ mortality. Midwives started to be more and more replaced by barber surgeons and finally doctors. Birth then became a masculine affaire. Interventions were at the heart of the birthing experience seen as a disease rather than a natural stage of life. When anaesthesia was discovered, mothers were then seen as a vessel needing to deliver a baby, rather than an actor of the birthing experience.
Luckily we came a long way (also with our use of anaesthetics - stay tuned - I will soon put another blogpost on anaesthetics and birth) , however our current medical environments when it comes to delivery and positioning are still tainted by its history.
Follow Your Body’s Urges (to move, take the position you want to take and to push)
Why am I telling you all of this? Mostly so that you are aware that birthing on your back is not something that we have been doing since time immemorial, quite the opposite. If you want to birth on your back then, please do, but I want you to feel empowered and have the tools (and research backed info - please do read the articles linked on this page for further background on the subject) to follow your body’s urges to move, dance, squat do whatever it feels like during labour.
As always, if you have any questions or comments on this blog post please feel free to reach out!
