(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bum and bod, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe.
This is where it all goes down. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. If you're new here, hi, I'm Taylor, childbirth educator and your birth prep bestie.
If you're not, hey girl, I'm so glad you're back. Today, we're going to be talking about something that I know is on your mind. Whether you're eight weeks pregnant or 38 weeks pregnant, y'all are all thinking about a birth plan.
And maybe you've started one, maybe you haven't even opened the notes app yet to start dumping out your ideas. Maybe you've downloaded one of those free checklists, felt totally overwhelmed and thought, is this really going to matter when I'm actually in labor? I've been there. I've been the mom who had a birth plan, but didn't know how to use it.
I've also been the mom who had a plan and a strategy and walked out of that birth experience, feeling powerful, aligned, and fully in control. And that's what I want for you. So today I'm going to be answering the three most common questions I get about birth plans.
I've been asked these in DMS, in coaching calls by my students, and even by random mamas that I've met in real life. Today, I feel like busting some myths. Okay.
We're going to have some real talk. We're going to be prepping your heart and your head to take charge of your experience. That's what we're all about here.
That is at the core of everything that we do is making sure that you're the one making the decisions for yourself and for your baby, because honestly, and truly there is nobody better to do that work than you. And if this episode lights a fire in you and you're ready to finally make a birth plan, that isn't just a wishlist, but a power move, then you have to come to my free event, the birth plan party on Friday, April 25th. You're going to walk away with a real strategy, a plan that reflects your voice and your values and the confidence to walk into that hospital.
Like the head girly in charge. I know you are. There's more information and the link to register in the show notes for you.
I'll probably talk more about it at the end. Um, this is honestly, truly my favorite event that I, that I host. So I'm super pumped for it.
I would love to have you there. You guys are going to leave with literally everything you need to make a plan that is perfectly tailored for your wants and needs for your birth experience. I send you guys a little goodie bag filled with like digital resources and stuff to help you take action on what you're going to learn that day.
I want you guys to get these results. Okay. Please come.
It's free. Nothing to lose. I'll send you the replay.
If you can't make it live, but try to make it live because I do Q and a at the end, I would love to have you for that. Okay. I'm way too excited about this party.
Let's get into this episode of question. Number one, do birth plans even work? I hear this one literally all the time. Like Taylor, does it even matter? Like don't things just happen during labor? What's the point if birth is unpredictable anyway, isn't it just setting myself up for disappointment? And I hear all that.
I get why you guys are asking those questions, but let's break this down. Most people who say birth plans don't work have either never made one or made one, but had no clue how to enforce it or watch someone else's plan fall apart because it was just a piece of paper, not a fully formed birth strategy, which spoiler alert is what you need. So here's what I want you to hear loud and clear today.
It's not that birth plans don't work. It's that most birth plans are not built to survive the hospital system. You cannot just check a few boxes on a downloadable form and expect to walk out with an empowered birth story.
I'm sorry. I wish it were that way. I wish you could just print off your preferences and you go in and hand it to them and they just do their absolute best to try to pull that off for you.
But that is very, very rarely the case because here's the truth about the hospital. It's not designed for physiological birth. Physiological birth is bad for their bottom line.
That doesn't make money. It doesn't make repeat customers. It doesn't make demand for their products.
It's running on protocols and routines that prioritize efficiency over experience. And it often defaults to interventions, not because you need them, but because it's easier for them or more lucrative or whatever the case may be. If birth plan doesn't account for that, their birth plan is probably going to trump yours that day.
Because yes, every single provider has a plan already for how they want your birth to go. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you chose a provider who aligns with what you're wanting for your birth experience. Or if you're working with somebody who's valuing your wants and needs for your birth experience over their typical plan.
My first birth experience, I had what I thought was a plan, right? I didn't want an epidural. I wanted a vaginal birth. And I thought like telling them those things was going to have, you know, they would support that and they would help me try to achieve that.
That's what I thought was going to happen. Now, I will never know for sure, but looking back at the situation, it almost felt like when I told them what my plan was for no epidural, first of all, my doctor laughed at me. Red flag, number one.
That was stupid of me to continue that relationship, but I did. So it really felt like they took it as a challenge to push me towards that experience. As soon as I got there, there was nothing wrong.
I was progressing fine. I was at five centimeters. I had been laboring all day.
My contractions were in an active pattern. Like everything was going as it should have gone. And as soon as I got there, continuous monitoring hooked me up to an in my body, Pitocin, cervical checks, like every hour, at least they were doing them like very frequently.
My water was broken for me pretty close after I got there and I left having a birth experience that felt like everything was done to me. Like I was an object that day, not something that I was an active part of because I didn't understand the system that I was walking into. I didn't know how to advocate for myself and for what I wanted.
I didn't know how to build a plan that could withstand the pressure and that would support my goals for my birth experience. And I learned a lot from that experience. And that's a huge reason why I do things like the birth plan party, because you guys deserve to know what you're walking into.
And I want to give you something that accounts for those hospital routines and helps you empower your support team to back you up and includes your mindset and your environment. And you know, if the plan needs to change and most importantly makes you the one in charge, like I was not in charge that day. I was a bystander.
I was like an extra at best. So birth plans do work, but only if you know how to work them. The second question I get all the time is what if my provider doesn't agree with my birth plan? Let's talk about the provider problem because you could make the most thoughtful, prayerfully considered birth plan ever.
But if your provider thinks it's optional, you're going to hit some serious friction. And this one cuts deep because I know what it's like to want to trust your provider, right? We want to trust them. We want to trust the person that we hired.
We want to think that they have our best interest at heart. We want to think that they're there to support us. We want to think that they got into this profession for all the right reasons.
We want to think surely they'll support me when the time comes, but support is way more than nodding politely at your appointments. Let me ask you a couple of questions. When you bring up wanting an unmedicated birth, do they encourage you or do they make you justify it? Are they rolling their eyes or laughing or dismissing things when you bring them up? Do they say things like, oh, we'll see how it goes, or let's not get too attached to a plan.
Birth is unpredictable. Those are red flags, babe. Your provider isn't just the person who catches the baby.
Even if they're not in the room, they're the person behind the scenes that is shaping your whole experience from the moment you enter the hospital. Telling the nurses, hey, see if she'll do a membrane sweep. Get her started on Pitocin.
Let's break her waters. Let's check her cervix again. Ask her about the epidural again.
You need somebody who believes in what you're trying to do. One of my students, let's call her Jess. She came to me late in her pregnancy.
She had a birth plan, but every time she brought it up, her OB would say, well, birth is unpredictable. You should just trust us. Y'all, just trust us is not informed consent.
Just trust us is manipulation dressed up as concern. I walked Jess through how to bring it up differently. Instead of just like, hey, this is what I'm wanting to do.
I gave her exact questions to ask. And when her provider still dismissed her, she switched at 36 weeks, which most people would think is like way too late in the game to switch, but it is never too late. If your baby is in your body, her new provider read her plan and said, sounds great.
Let's make sure everyone on the team knows what you want. And they had great conversations about it. They were so in sync with everything.
And she had an incredible birth experience and she totally would have missed it. If she hadn't realized that her provider was the weak link. I don't want any of you to think you're being difficult for asking questions and making sure that you and your provider are on the same page.
You're not being difficult. You're being prepared. You're making sure that people on your team are actually going to support you in what you're trying to pull off, not steamroll you with their policies and their procedures and their protocols and all the things that they want to do over what you actually want for your experience.
So instead of asking, do you support unmedicated birth where they can just say, yeah, we do that. Sure. Ask, how do you support a woman who is having an unmedicated physiological birth experience? How do you support a woman when her labor has stalled? What does intermittent monitoring look like in your hospital rooms? I'm not trying to say like, make it difficult for them, but like, that is kind of what I'm saying.
Like make it difficult for them to bullcrap you. It's easy for them to be like, oh yeah, we support that. But you're going to get a lot more information about your provider and the way that they do things when you're asking very specific questions.
And since my girlies are educating themselves, I know that it's going to be really easy for you to sniff out the providers that are not for you. So get specific because specific is terrific. Write that down.
Question number three. What if my birth plan flies out the window? This question at its core is a classic case of the what if monster. Your brain's job every single day of your life is to keep you safe and alive.
It does this by feeding you thoughts. What if this happens? And what if this happens? And what if this happens? When your brain doesn't want you to do something, because again, its job is to keep you safe and alive. It does that by keeping you in your comfort zone.
It's going to throw these questions at you, hoping that you will not follow through with what you're trying to do. Your brain is smart, but your brain's not that smart, right? It's not all on board with like, okay, this baby does have to exit your body in some way, shape or form, right? Your brain doesn't want you to though, because it's scary, and it's new. And you know, you've heard it's going to suck your entire life.
And it's probably going to be painful. And it's going to be this huge transition. And it makes sense that your brain is doing this.
Just because it's natural and normal doesn't mean it serves us. So how do we defeat the what if monster? We turn on the light. And that probably doesn't make sense.
So let me tell you a little story. When my oldest, who is now eight years old makes me want to cry. But when she was a toddler, she was maybe two, she was in her toddler bed, we were rearranging her room.
She was in her new bed, it was probably one of the first nights that she was in it. And she had been asleep for a while, you know, taking it like a champ. She was doing so well.
I was downstairs still for the night, probably doing laundry or watching some SVU or you know, whatever, whatever one does after kiddos go to bed. And out of nowhere, I hear her screaming, like panicking, screaming, my brain immediately goes to Oh my gosh, somebody has scaled the side of our house and broken into her room, and is now trying to kidnap her attack her hurt her, whatever, x, y, z, you know, all the things my brain's like thinking 20 thoughts at once. So I am booking it up the stairs, right? Getting there as fast as I can.
I bust into her room, I see her, she's sitting up in her bed. And she's like, screaming, crying, upset. She's pointing, I flick the light on, and she's pointing at this pile of I don't even remember what it was closed, stuffed animals, something because we were rearranging her room and redoing stuff.
And it was a pile that wasn't there the day before, right? It was like we had worked on it that day. As soon as she saw what it was, she stopped screaming, she was fine. She's taking her deep breaths, calming herself down.
As soon as I saw that she was okay, my heart, you know, stopped racing a mile a minute. And I started calming down. I was like, okay, she's safe.
She's good. She was probably thinking that that was a scary monster or something that was going to hurt her. My brain and her brain both went to worst case scenario.
But as soon as we got more information, our brains were like, oh, okay, no problem. The more information you have, the less running around room your brain has. So if you have a bunch of what ifs coming up, what if my provider pushes back when I'm in the delivery room and flips a switch? What if my birth doesn't go according to the plan and the whole plan is ruined? What if I have to have a C-section? Answer those questions.
Give your brain the information that it needs so that it stops freaking out about them. If my plan flies out the window, I have everything I need to make a new informed decision in the moment. And if you're not there, I need you to get there, okay? Educate yourself, learn the things that you need to learn, whatever you need to answer those questions for yourself and to set yourself up for success on the big day.
Do those things now in advance. We are not leaving it up to chance. We are not leaving it up to our nurses and doctors.
We are planning and preparing with intention because we want a certain experience. And I get that this question can often come from a place of like, okay, I'm doing all this work. And what if I do all this work? What if I do all the preparing and the planning and educating and all that stuff? And what if my plan still flies out the window? And I get it, right? This comes from such a tender place because you want to hope, you want to prepare, but you also don't want to set yourself up to feel crushed if things change.
And I get that. But here's the shift that you need to make. You're not planning to control every moment.
You're planning to lead every moment. Even if your plan flies out the window, you can still be head girly in charge that day. Even if your birth experience takes a turn, even if your labor stalls, even if you end up needing interventions that you didn't expect, you can still be in charge.
You can still have peace. You can still make decisions that you feel good about. And that's the difference between planning for the fantasy and planning for the reality.
Because the truth is births are unpredictable. You can't guarantee a certain outcome, no matter how much preparation and planning you pour into it. I'm sure you've heard me do this before.
I compare preparing for birth to training for a marathon. You can do all the things and show up to the race that day and still not guarantee you're going to win, right? You can set yourself up for your best chance of success. And I strongly urge you to do that, but you can't guarantee that it's going to go according to your plan that day.
Anything can happen that day. But the good news is if your plan flies out the window, your training will not. If you educated yourself on all the decisions that you needed to make for your birth experience and all the options for said decisions, and you understand the risks and the benefits for each one of those, you get to be informed when you're making a new decision in the moment when the original thing you chose is now off the table for whatever reason.
Every ounce of prep work that you're doing to support your plan is also going to support you in navigating the unplanned. So let me say this loud and clear. Your birth plan is worth making.
Your voice is worth hearing. And your birth experience is worth fighting for. But you don't have to do it alone.
You don't have to guess. You don't have to figure it out on YouTube at 2am. That's why I created the birth plan party.
It's happening April 25. It's on zoom, there's a replay available. I'm sending you home with that digital goodie bag full of resources to help you implement the things that we're going to be learning that day because information is great.
But without action to back it up, it's not going to get you very far. You're going to walk away with everything you need to create a solid strategic birth plan that you can actually use. So head to the show notes to save your seat.
It's free. It's fun. And it's going to change how you walk into your birth experience.
Because you're not just a mom hoping for the best. I know that because you probably wouldn't still be sitting here listening to this podcast episode. You're a mom who's preparing on purpose intentionally for the experience that she wants and deserves.
You're the head girlie in charge of your experience and you're wanting to set yourself up for your best chance of success all while keeping the power in your hands. Okay, I'll stop yelling at you. Thank you guys for listening.
I'm so glad that you're here and doing this work. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you at the party.
Until then, as always, happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
