Title:
Pregnancy and Childbirth are the Gateway to Parenthood
Word Count:
2306
Summary:
This gateway is recognised in absolutely all cultures as being a
significant transition in a person’s life just as reaching puberty. When
we reach puberty, we move from being a child to an adult. When we get
pregnant and give birth, we move from being a woman and man to being a
mother and father. These are huge changes. Puberty for a woman occurs at
one time … menses starts. For young boys this is not as clear a time.
Keywords:
hospital, birth, women, midwife, fathers, pregnant, childbirth, babies,
labour, pelvis, diaphragm, born
Article Body:
This gateway is recognised in absolutely all cultures as being a
significant transition in a person’s life just as reaching puberty. When
we reach puberty, we move from being a child to an adult. When we get
pregnant and give birth, we move from being a woman and man to being a
mother and father. These are huge changes. Puberty for a woman occurs at
one time … menses starts. For young boys this is not as clear a time.
Pregnancy and childbirth is an experience that only women physically
experience. There is truth in the statement ‘no one will do the labour
except you.’ However, pregnancy and childbirth stimulate emotional
changes in both men and women. Many cultures honour the becoming a
father. Many fathers exhibit physical and emotional sympathetic symptoms
when their partner is pregnant. This has been given termed ‘Couvade
symptoms.’ The Pink Kit Method for birthing better™ resources have been
loved by fathers ever where. They like the practical, can do approach and
they can do. Men are absolutely wonderful childbirth coaches. Remember,
they have all been born through a woman’s body. No woman has been inside
a man’s body. And, they have the same body. Once they learn to work with
the ‘pain’ of labour being part of the process (unless told differently)
rather than indicating a ‘problem’; men will bring persistent and
determined skills that their partners can rely on.
In modern maternity care, the role of the father in childbirth has
changed dramatically in the past 30 years.
Up to the 1970s fathers were excluded from the labour and delivery. In
some cultures this exclusion existed historically and still exists. Women
were left alone in a hospital ward or room while staff periodically came
in and checked them. Since the 1970s fathers have been encouraged to
support their partner in labour.
As an aside, there are many terms used in childbirth discussions that no
one has bothered to define or clarify but we are somehow all expected to

know. Do your own research and ask 20 people what a natural birth is,
what interventions mean or what a father is supposed to do to support his
partner in labour. You’ll discover that we use those terms to mean or
imply something significant yet few people have the same understanding.
Since The Pink Kit Method has been used by so many women and men, we have
come to find our own set of definitions. Birth is natural, it comes at
the conclusion of pregnancy. Birth is natural, so is pain, death,
bleeding, long labours, quick births, tears, pain free experiences,
tension, relaxation, screaming, quiet breathing and all the combinations
you can imagine. Childbirth interventions can be lying down for a vaginal
exam, taking a shower if you’re tense, having someone breathe with you,
taking castor oil to stimulate labour along with all the medical
assessments, monitoring and procedures that people discuss. Fathers,
friends and relatives who support a woman can be there yet not know what
to do, feel useless, helpless, a failure, know how to breathe with the
woman, touch her just right, encourage her or wish someone would give her
pain relief because she is so obviously suffering.
Variability is the name of the game in childbirth.
Yet, childbirth is a remarkably same experience for all women. (At the
moment we will assume a woman will labour to give birth. Women who plan
an elective delivery for personal choice or necessity can still use The
Pink Kit Method. Doing so gives expectant parents a sense of involvement
and closeness not offered in other types of childbirth education. Many of
the skills learned are applicable.) Childbirth is an exercise in
plumbing. An object will move through your container. Your job is to get
out of the way of the object. In other words, work with the process of
opening up for the object and ejecting it. The opening up phase of
childbirth is accompanied by a series of contractions that open the
diaphragm (cervix). Once the cervix is open and when the object has moved
through the tube (pelvis), the contractions begin to eject the object by
opening the aperture (vagina).
Not one woman in history or any place on Earth has given birth by a
different experience. No baby has popped out of the crown of a woman’s
head after a shiver started at her big toe, moving up her body until her
cranium separated. No baby has delivered out a mouth, nose or ear. As
silly as it sounds, we must remind ourselves of our similarities. Instead
people have focused on all the variability’s, diversity and differences.
Common Knowledge Trust shares our similarities:
· The childbirth preparation that does prepare our physical container
to allow this object to pass through it with less trauma.
· The positive birthing behaviours we can use to work through the
process of childbirth even when we don’t like the experience AND in and
around all medical care.
· The real and effective coaching skills that help women stay
focused, open, relaxed and willing to meet the challenge of childbirth.
Pregnant women and expectant fathers have a specific window of
opportunity to prepare for childbirth in the last 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The pregnant body is beginning to prepare for childbirth and so is the

baby. Our body and baby prepare in their own way but arrive at the same
point together which is labour. If a woman needs or plans a non-labouring
delivery, her body and baby don’t know that. They are still preparing for
labour and birth. Why is childbirth called ‘labour’? It’s hard work. Use
The Pink Kit Method and learn the skills to make your work easier.
The Pink Kit Method for birthing better™ presents 4 foundations. The
first two are presented in The Pink Kit: Essential Preparations for your
birthing body which is mostly about the body preparation necessary. In
order to prepare for birth, we must have a relaxed and good understanding
of our 3D body. As one father explained ‘Until my wife and I used The
Pink Kit, I thought giving birth was about having strong muscles to push
the baby out. Now I understand it’s about creating space.’ Space creation
is done in a 3 dimensional reality, not a 2 dimensional one.
This means that we must know those parts of our body that are most
involved with birth. Because CKT is the collective voice of ordinary
people, we explain birth as plumbing: object, container, tube (pelvis),
diaphragm (cervix) and aperture (vagina). Mostly we, the container, must
prepare so that when the object decides to come out, we can work to open
our container through the process of the efforts of our baby. The
physical parts of our container must be prepared and as humans we have
minds that direct us how to do that.
Humans are gifted with an amazing mind.
We can remember the past and even alter our perceptions or responses of
what happened before. We can make plans into the future just as athletes
mentally go over the event again and again, we can imagine ourselves
working through labour and giving birth. When we prepare our container,
we use our amazing Mind. When childbirth occurs, then we can use our
minds to implement our skills in how to create space, stay open and
relaxed for our child to move through us. It’s vigorous for most of us.
Babies are big.
When we connect our mind to our body or yoke them together then we have
more control over our body and instinctive responses. For example, all
professional or amateur athletes have a sophisticated connection between
their mind and body. They’ve achieved that by practice, practice and more
practice. Although the ability to run or jump is something that humans do
naturally, these athletes do not go into their events just ‘intuitively’
or ‘instinctively’ doing those things. They learn how to do them well.
Unfortunately, we give birth infrequently and have to rely on ‘something’
other than practice to bring good labour management skills to childbirth.
That ‘something’ else is the process of labour that keeps going. There is
nothing like it in our lives really. Once labour starts, it continues and
leads us on whether we have skills or not, like it or not, are coping or
not or have a good coach or not. We can use that physiological experience
to apply the skills right away at each moment of the process. If we don’t
apply the positive skills then we often just react, particularly if there
is a lot of pain associated with labour.
We will still breathe in labour whether we breathe positively or scream.

Our body has to be in some posture or position, we can either use
positions and postures that facilitate the passage of our baby through
our body or we can get into positions we like that slow the birth process
and keep us in labour for hours longer than necessary. Although there is
a current belief that women will get into the best position, that’s
hardly the case just as many women tense up naturally to the pain of
childbirth. If the present day beliefs were true that women naturally
knew how to give birth, that would reflect by an infrequent use of pain
relief or medically assisted births. Women tense up at home, birth centre
as well as in hospital.
We cripple ourselves when we believe that external factors are the sole
reasons for good or bad births. We leave ourselves feeling victims to the
external rather than powerful within ourselves. ‘I blamed my first bad
experience on the hospital, doctor, what they made me do and my husband
for being pathetic at helping me. Next time, I changed where I gave birth
… home, changed my birth provider … a woman midwife; I still had a
horrible experience. Then I realised that I had to learn how to birth.’
True power for all of us as women and men is to have personal skills.
Childbirth is an event in our lives where it’s easy to get skilled
because the event is so similar to all women regardless of where they
birth or with whom or who they are. For such a BIG and important event
people perpetuated a belief that women should have to respond to the
experience ‘intuitively’ or ‘instinctively’ rather than with ‘skills.’
As humans we have many physiologically natural urges besides childbirth.
When we get hungry, we can browse on the nearest bush or learn to cook.
We all urinate and defecate, but we don’t do it where ever we are
sitting, we learn to hold it until we go to the toilet. The operative
word is ‘learn’. We can learn to respond to labour contractions, use our
minds and yoke our bodies and to choose positive birth behaviours in
contractions and between them.
Birth discussions revolve around women taking responsibility for making
choices about where or with whom they will birth or what they want done
or not done to them. If choice achieved the goals, then we’d all be
happy. We have assumed that ‘taking responsibility’ is about making
choices. Being responsible requires two different aspects. One is choice,
the other is skills not just options. Any woman in her right mind would
choose an easy birth, not to tear, to heal well etc. Whether most women
would choose home birth would depend on other factors: whether they
prefer the hospital, have health issues, young children at home and want
a break, home isn’t where they want to birth, it isn’t safe or quiet etc.
Not one woman would choose a birth she found too painful, to use pain
relief when she didn’t need it, have a major operation if she felt
confident and knew she and her baby were healthy or to live with
childbirth trauma. All women can have skills. So taking responsibility
is just as much about being skilled at doing something so that the
choices a person makes are more likely to actualise.
For example, if a woman doesn’t want to use pain relief then she has to
have the skills to manage the experience of labour. Such a woman can
still have a very painful labour and change her mind about her choice if

she doesn’t have the skills to cope and then feel let down or guilty.
Shame, blame and guilt are a huge part of childbirth today. A woman may
choose a home birth and find that the unexpected happens (for example,
her waters break and she doesn’t go into labour after 48 hours) and she
ends up in hospital. With skills, she can still have a wonderfully
empowering birth.
For the past 30 years birth discussions have revolved around ‘choice’ and
‘informed consent’ (information).
Common Knowledge Trust would like ‘skills’ to form the triad. When we
couple skills to choice, we are more likely to have a goal (choice) and
take steps to achieve that goal (developing and using skills). When we
couple skills to information, we can are more likely to have mastery
rather than data. Childbirth skills will only become the common knowledge
approach to childbirth when all expectant couples know that The Pink Kit
Method for birthing better™ is available and that the skills they can
teach themselves work in all birth situations because … you will have
another contraction regardless of your beliefs, where you birth, with
whom, whether you have a long labour or a short one and all the other
variables we can tell in our stories. Too often we hear pregnant women
say: ‘I hope I have a good birth.’ Hope is not a plan. The Pink Kit is
the plan.
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