growing baby

Linda and I are taking Bradley Method birthing classes. The motto of this method is “husband-coached childbirth”, which is basically a set of techniques, approaches, and ideas for husbands or partners in helping mothers during labor.

The main premise of Bradley is that natural childbirth is preferred, and assisted (whether by drugs, surgery, etc) is the exception rather than the rule. The secondary premise is that there is a way for a man to be involved in the process of delivery: helping the woman with massage, breathing, support, etc. Basically, as the one not pushing a baby out of an ever-expanding aperture, I would be in a good position to kind of tell how Linda is doing and offer some sort of constructive assistance.

Now, normally, the classes are taught as 1-hour sessions once a week; since I thought that this was horribly inconvenient (plus we didn’t actually have 12 weeks left from when the most convenient classes started), we picked a series of four 3-hour classes. These are held in Santa Monica, which is pretty close to where I work.

This past Thursday was our first class. We showed up to find five other couples also interested in having a drug-free childbirth. The Bradley method isn’t necessarily against intervention, though it prefers to use it only when really necessary for medical reasons. The method was developed in response to the baby-factory approach that hospitals seem to have been following in the 1950s: overly-hospitalesque environments, anesthesia-heavy approaches, and an increasing rate of C-sections. Apparently, research (and also common sense) shows that women deliver faster, with fewer complications, when assisted by a family member or a doula — so I’m very interested in the class and what they can teach. Our doula has also suggested taking the class.

So far it’s been more of an introduction, plus some discussion about what brought the various couples to the class or what fears the women or the men had going into childbirth. We also watched a (rather horrible) movie about water births in Russia (why, oh why, couldn’t they pick any other culture to showcase?). The movie seemed to fit the following scenario: some American tourist goes to Russia; finds Russians exotic, and the things they do really intriguing; finds out that some crazy people go have their babies in the Black Sea around Crimea; goes there with a camcorder and a barely-above-amateur camera operator; films a bunch of families frolicking naked in the water, pregnant women swimming in ice-cold water during the winter, and having their babies in the summer sea or in big polycarbonate tubs of water at home. All the while, I was barely able to contain my disdain for these people having their babies basically without any access to medical help in the dirty waters of the sea. Still, the class proceeded and the teacher really only extracted one lesson from the film: that these contemporary women were having natural, unassisted childbirths and were able to make themselves look happy and were able to deal with the pain involved. Looking back at the film, this is definitely a positive lesson to extract (and so I’ll pretend that the rest of the film didn’t exist).

We also spent a bit of time practicing some relaxation techniques — the guys providing their wives with light massage, and spending a bit of time feeling the differences between tense and relaxed states of their spouses’ muscles. We also chatted about nutrition, and got some homework: there’s some written exercises to do, and some book reading to do.

More on the classes as they progress…