Family-centered birth

Family-centered birth

Family-centered birth puts mothers at the centre of the birthing process and supports them in ways that are safe, compassionate and empowering. It's about trusting in the capacity of healthy, informed women to give birth to their own children, making use of medical interventions only when necessary. The techniques used in family-centered birth are supported by a growing body of research.

The approach taken in many maternity wards around the world is that safest way to support birth is to use medical procedures and equipment to control and monitor it as much as possible, irrespective how much that may interfere with any natural processes that may also be supporting the health and safety of mother and child. This was a reasonable approach at the time that it was developed, when the natural process of birth had not been studied and was not widely understood. In the absence of strong evidence to suggest that trusting in the natural process of birth was anything more than an attractive but naïve idea, many practitioners and policy makers embraced excessive medical intervention.

However, in recent decades new evidence has emerged. As acknowledged by the policies of well-informed authorities including the World Health Organization and the Indonesian government, a growing body of evidence shows that there is an effective natural process to birth, and that interventions in that process often create more risk than they reduce.Interventions can also be unpleasant or even traumatic for mothers and babies.
 
The family-centered birth techniques that RSM advocates include being compassionate and kind towards birthing mothers, respecting the right to privacy, allowing mothers to move around during labor, encouraging non-supine birthing positions, early skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby, non-pharmacological pain relief, training midwives to provide personal support, encouraging breastfeeding, and delayed cord clamping. All of these techniques are recommended by the World Health Organization in their publication Care in Normal Birth: a practical guide. Click here to download it in pdf format.

We also allow mothers to pursue birthing techniques that are not widely embraced by mainstream medical institutions. Water birth, for example, has been studied extensively with no indication of increased risks and with strong indication of improved health and happiness outcomes. It is also enormously popular with those mothers who have experienced it. Our midwives have experience in water birth deliveries and we intend to provide facilities for it in our new clinic.

Full descriptions of the family-centered birth techniques we advocate, including personal accounts and links to independent research, will be available on this website soon.