Creative Birth Workshop - Glasgow

It was with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation from the Birth Project to facilitate two small group discussions at their recent Creative Birth workshop in Glasgow. There were eight group sessions in total and three other facilitators with whom it was an inspiration to work alongside. Overall, we comprised a mix of midwives (experienced, newly qualified & student), educators, doulas, birth activists and one film director hailing from across Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, gathered together to explore ways of supporting better birth experiences for the women and couples we work with.

How inspiring was that!!

My sessions were to focus on 'Protecting the Birth Environment' and as I listened to the participant's contributions unfolding, there were three aspects that struck me most strongly. Firstly, I felt so proud of the doulas who showed no fear in speaking out about some really elemental aspects of working as birth supporters, who demonstrated an awareness of the potential to disturb the birth environment ourselves and of the importance therefore of maintaining mindfulness and integrity when asked to be present in another woman's birthspace. Secondly, I was reminded of and duly humbled by the often hard hitting challenges that student midwives face in their desire to question practice yet maintain the status quo with their senior colleagues and the hospital system, and also by the real difficulties that qualified midwives face in their attempts to uphold their vision for gentle birth while working within a predominantly medicalised model. Thirdly, and quite shockingly, I learnt that no matter how difficult we know the situation to be in Scotland viz protecting and promoting normal birth physiology, it seems that the position in Ireland is far worse.

Stripping back to basics and centering a little on ourselves, as women, as mothers, as birthers as well as birth supporters was where we started therefore. The pre and perinatal therapeutic practice of American psychologist and researcher Ray Castellino offers us some insight into how the imprints from the time around our own births can influence the way we are in the world as adults. His work is based on the principle that our bodies hold the memory of everything that has ever happened to us in our lifetime, meaning that each time we are present at the birth of a baby, we are potentially tapping in to the memories of our own birth. If there was a lot of fear, trauma, drugs or separation, around our own experience for example, then it would make sense that we might find deep feelings surfacing for us when we are in the birth environment of another woman, although it is equally possible that we are not conscious of how we truly feel about birth, let alone from where our feelings originate. Yet if we are better able to understand and resolve any issues around our own felt sense of birth, perhaps we can be better equipped to stand firm when supporting birthing women?

While only a brief taster of how we might further reconnect to ourselves in this way, my hope is that through doing so we can raise our self awareness and integrity as birth supporters. If we feel safe enough within ourselves to effectively support expectant parents to have the confidence to rise to the challenge and truly choose the care that feels right for them, perhaps we can also be part of instigating creative birth practices within a wider arena?

During the second half of our session, we looked at what else we could do to protect the birth environment in a practical way, through maintaining privacy and quiet for the mother for example, through simply sitting beside her rather than adopting a task orientated approach. And the eternal question of what to do with the bed in the middle of the room! We talked about what happens when shifts change and how this can generate the potential for disturbance, and, rather than asking the mother for eye contact and answers to our questions as we take over her care, how nurturing a space to - as one student midwife put it - "gather a sense" of what is going on in her labour may be a more creative way of supporting of the physiological process. And we debated the value of offering relevant, honest and practical birth preparation sessions, while still being able to tick the boxes on 'pain relief' or 'labour ward tour', including ways of enabling parents to embrace the responsibility of preparing for the birth of their baby with an informed appreciation of how the birth environment has the potential to disturb (or not disturb) the birth process.

All 50 participants gathered together at the close of the day for some general feedback from each group. Given our collective awareness of the notorious shortfalls between theory and practice, it seemed that the workshops had nonetheless provided an effective forum for positive and inclusive discussion on changing birth practices to embrace greater creativity in protecting normality. Perhaps more significantly, and certainly at a personal level, was that it had been a multi-disciplined forum: this felt like such a valuable step in building harmonious working relationships between every one of us who profess to be working towards the single same thing - supporting parents to enjoy the most positive birth experience possible.

That in itself was certainly something to celebrate!

The Birth Project is a group of 9 passionate women including Jo Murphy-Lawless, sociologist at Trinity College, Dublin, Nadine Edwards, Vice-Chair of AIMS and a director of the Pregnancy & Parents Centre, Edinburgh and Rosemary Mander, Emeritus Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh, plus further likeminded midwifery educators, independent midwives and one film director practising across Scotland and Ireland. Popular as ever, this was the third workshop run by the group in as many years.