3 reasons you need a birth plan

Birth plans get a lot of bad press, with people insisting that if you make a plan for your birth and it doesn’t work out, then you will be left feeling more disappointed than if you didn’t write one at all. I get what they’re saying… I just disagree entirely.

As grown adults, we make plans all the time, even if we’re not really conscious of it. We have a rough plan when we go on holiday, but if it doesn’t exactly go to plan, it doesn’t tend to leave us with crushing disappointment. I know the stakes are higher when it comes to birth, but my point is that when we make a plan, we generally do so knowing that it doesn’t always come to fruition entirely.

Here are three reasons I think a birth plan is a really crucial part of your birth preparation:

1)      If you don’t plan for the birth that you want, then it is not very likely to happen. And this is true regardless of how you want your baby to come out – physiological birth, vaginal birth with an epidural, a powerful caesarean birth, a home birth… to make all these births a positive experience, it require planning, and a belief that this is the birth that you will get.

 Practicing visualisations and positive affirmations are the perfect way for you to shift your mindset, and begin to actually believe that the birth you want is the birth you are going to have.  Once your birth plan is written, you can stick a copy on the fridge so you see it often and begin to internalise your plan.

 2)      The process of writing your plan will give you so much clarity. It will help you realise what it is that you want, and it will prompt you to consider things that you didn’t realise you had to consider. For example, there are different types of fetal monitoring available, that will affect your birth in different ways. This is good information to understand, so you can make an informed decision, because evidence shows that different forms of monitoring have different outcomes.

 My birth planning sessions will help you discover so many of the small but significant decisions you need to make, and give you the tools to make decisions that feel right to you.

3)      Birth plans put the power back in your hands. You need a physical copy of what you want your midwife to know. This shows them that you know your shit, you’ve thought about how you want things done, and here is the paper to guide them. If you go in to your birth with no decisions made, no plans, forward-thinking, then you have much less control over what happens in that space.

It is so important to know that you are the ones calling the shots. There is nothing more heart breaking than finding out after birth that you had more options than you thought.

 Writing a birth plan can feel like an overwhelming task in pregnancy, which is why I offer one-to-one birth planning sessions over Zoom. Find out more here, and contact me to book!