E27: What do Folks Hope for in the Childbirth Experience?

This episode of the Ordinary Doula Podcast promises to illuminate the deeper aspirations expectant families harbor for their labor and birth experiences. As we unravel the threads of hundreds of birth records, you'll be privy to the surprising trends and heartfelt desires that shape the childbirth narrative, going well beyond the universal wish for a healthy mother and child.

Join us as we traverse the heartfelt revelations and unique preferences that have emerged from my extensive research and personal encounters with couples preparing for their transformative moment. You'll discover the overwhelming preference for unmedicated births and how such choices reflect on the evolving landscape of childbirth. By sharing these stories and analyses, we aim to offer a reflective space for you—or your partner—to align your personal birth expectations with the collective wisdom of thousands who've journeyed before you. This is not just an episode; it's an invitation to empower your own birth story with the richness of shared knowledge and experience.

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Show Credits

Host: Angie Rosier
Music: Michael Hicks
Photographer: Toni Walker
Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood
Producer: Gillian Rosier
Voiceover: Ryan Parker

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning, where we help prepare folks for labor and birth with expertise coming from 20 years of experience in a busy doula practice, helping thousands of people prepare for labor, providing essential knowledge and tools for positive and empowering birth experiences.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Hello and welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast. My name is Angie Rozier and I am your host. We are sponsored by Birth Learning and today I want to talk a little bit about what people want from their birth experience. So over the course of my career I got my master's degree a few years ago and I was able to look at my career and several years of records of you know, I love to take notes birth notes, prenatal notes as I meet with my clients and I got to really dive into the data and find out several amazing aspects of childbirth and do the work specifically within that. So I want to share a little bit of a little piece of that with you today.

Speaker 2: 1:32

And one of the things we looked at was what do people want from their birth experience? And this is like beyond the obvious, right, like everybody wants to be healthy. They want to come out of this healthy and happy and have a healthy baby. So that was not what we were looking at, but going a little bit deeper and seeing what people wanted. So as we prepare our folks for childbirth, we go over these things. This is why I have hundreds and hundreds of records of this is we ask people what they want. So if there's a partner involved, we would ask the partner first, kind of as a little, if we ask the pregnant person first, the partner would usually just echo whatever they said. So we kind of designed it so that as we prepare people, we would we want to know what they want out of this. How can we get them what they want, and everybody's gonna be a little bit different in what they want and it helps illustrate what's important to people about childbirth. So as we looked at this over hundreds of records we kind of get to see patterns and what people want. So we'd ask the partner first. There was no limit to the number of goals. Like we would ask them like what's your goal for this experience? And there's no limit to the number that they could share we it was an open-ended question, so we didn't like there was no scale. They had to say, okay, of these three things, what do you want? They could just answer with whatever came to mind. So they came up with their own answers. Men often had never thought about this before. If the partner was a man, whereas the pregnant person had a lot more answers to give us, they had, with no surprise, thought a lot more about what it was they wanted from the experience and we're speaking specifically about the birth experience, right Like what labor and childbirth and what they want out of that experience, knowing that a lot of people go into that kind of nervous, you know. So I'm going to kind of go through our top answers. As I aggregated the data, some cool patterns came out and kind of realized this is people who are using a doula, right, so they're seeking out doula support, like independently they're seeking out doula support. So that can give us some right away some generalizations of who it is we're talking to.

Speaker 2: 3:46

But the first thing that the pregnant person wanted was to avoid pain medication, so like to avoid getting an epidural, to go unmedicated, to have natural childbirth, whatever that was. That was the top desire and that was anywhere from 65 to 73% of our clients over a period of over 15 years had the desire to some extent to avoid pain medication, which surprised me. That was that really surprised me. So that's a range of about 8% and that's kind of categorized in those who absolutely did not want to use pain medication, to those who probably didn't want to use pain medication. So we're looking, you know a pretty high percent. The majority of people didn't want to. As I looked at the data later, just as a little side note, about 60% of our folks did not use an epidural, so we had about a 40% epidural usage rate.

Speaker 2: 4:43

I'm going to stick with the pregnant person now and just kind of walk through the things that they wanted out of their birth experience and, if you are pregnant, see, kind of consider what it is that you want. Maybe you want pain medication, maybe like avoiding it is not something that's interesting to you and you're definitely planning on getting in. That Totally cool. But there's a whole lot more to this experience than just getting the baby out right. There's a lot of. This is a pretty epic life event and so there's a whole lot more to it than that. So the second thing that the pregnant people wanted was a positive experience. They wanted a positive experience and remember they're hiring doulas, so that taught me that people know they have to reach out to their own resources to find that positive experience. It's kind of difficult to just get on their own.

Speaker 2: 5:35

They also the next most common question they want to feel prepared. They want to feel prepared for what they're getting into, which is kind of an unknown. There's a lot of unknown in childbirth and in labor, but they want to feel prepared for whatever lay ahead. They also want to be involved, which sounds a little bit ridiculous, but I hear it all the time. People want to be involved in their own experience, which of course, it's their body. Right, they're going to be there, they're going to be going through it, but they want to be involved in the decision-making process. They want to be involved in all the information that's being shared. They want to understand it. They also want some sense of control.

Speaker 2: 6:10

A lot of people if we've helped folks who have had a baby before they feel like a lot of their choices were taken away and they didn't have any control over the situation and then we dropped pretty significantly. They wanted help laboring at home, knowing when to go to the hospital. They wanted the ability to bond with their partner and somebody to help them do that kind of take some pressure off their partner and have a good experience together. And then I'm going to skip over to what the partners wanted. So the and usually this was men, not always. Sometimes there was women partners, whether that's a partner or a life partner or a mom or a sister or friend, but most often it was a male partner. So the very top thing that they wanted out of the experience is that the birthing person was supported, whether that support came from them or from professional doula oftentimes it's a team effort but they wanted that person to be supported. They also wanted the second most common thing they wanted, which is the same as the second thing, that the birthing person wanted a positive experience. So they all want a positive experience, interesting that they anticipate it might be negative, right, whether this is their first baby or they did have a negative experience and it's a second or third baby, but they want that's important to them to have a positive experience. They also wanted things to go smoothly and to have minimal stress. So by having a doula there, they're hoping to just kind of have things go a little bit more smooth.

Speaker 2: 7:42

They also want to be involved. A lot of partners want to be involved. They want to be helpful. They may not know what that looks like, what that sounds like, how to do that, how to incorporate help from themselves, but they want to be involved and a doula is a really great way to involve partners to their comfort level and balance their needs of whether that's rest, nutrition, fear, unexpected things come up. They want to be involved in a positive way. Unexpected things come up. They want to be involved in a positive way they also. This is kind of fun from the dudes.

Speaker 2: 8:19

Usually they wanted a fast labor, so that's not always in our control. Sometimes it's far faster than we expect or want it to be, other times it's far slower than we want it to be. But they're interested in speed. And then this is interesting, interested in speed. And then this is interesting A very few 4% of the answers said they wanted unmedicated childbirth, which for the birthing person, for the women that was the highest percentage of answers was their goal and for the partners it was one of the lower ones. And then they also wanted bonding, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 2: 8:47

So, based on what people are seeking and hoping for their birth experiences, they collectively want to feel involved in their very own birth and listen to that Like, just listen to what that means. A birthing body and those who love and support that body have a desire to be involved. They want a sense of control over their very own birth experience, of course, and they know that they need to seek kind of their own diplomatic watchdog. I love that term for doulas. Doulas are a diplomatic watchdog to help people have those positive experiences that they're hoping for.

Speaker 2: 9:26

So whether you are pregnant, whether you're considering doula care, whether you are a doula, it's kind of helpful in all these aspects to kind of pick apart what it is people want out of their birth experience, and we have to remember that partners are having an experience as well. Our SPIG systems oftentimes negate that. They don't involve the partners as much. They get the right of passage of cutting the cord right. We remember them then, but there are so many other components where partners are involved. But they want to be involved. They want to. They want the their birthing, the birthing person to be supported. They want a positive experience both for them and, of course, for the person giving birth.

Speaker 2: 10:10

So kind of think of that wherever you are on your journey, that those things are absolutely possible. That's not asking too much is to have a positive experience where you are involved. So ask the questions when you're with your provider, be the advocate, prepare yourself ahead of time so you kind of know what to expect, although there are a lot of unexpected in childbirth, for instance, right now I'm waiting to go to a birth any minute, now trying to get a couple podcasts recorded before I go and this baby is almost three weeks early, so everybody's caught off guard. A little bit Super normal to have some unexpected things come up, but it can still be positive as we're empowered to do so. So take that information and consider what do you want from your birth experience, what does your partner want from this birth experience, and are you in a place with people and policies where you can easily get what it is that's important to you?

Speaker 2: 11:08

We'll talk more about that in other episodes as we dive a little bit more into our research and what we found as we looked at hundreds and hundreds of experiences of people over the last 15-20 years of work that we've been doing. Thank you so much for being here with the Ordinary Doula podcast. My name is Angie Rozier and hopefully today you can see someone feel someone, something, whether that's a sunset, a flower, a person. Reach out to someone in your world to feel something positive, something that brings you joy, and let that just fill your soul. Hopefully you have a great day and we'll catch you next time.

Speaker 1: 11:55

Thank you for listening to the Ordinary Doula podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning. Episode credits will be in the show notes Tune in next time as we continue to explore the many aspects of giving birth.