I very rarely share anything personal on this website, because I consider it rather a window to my academic self. (Well, one exception is this older post about my experiences of the Vastaamo data breach scandal). This time, I’m making another exception. When writing this post on preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, I’m 38 weeks pregnant and have come to this point from more than a two years journey of challenges. Conquering them has involved a lot of studying and learning and thus, deserves to be commented and shared through the eyes of someone who is both a scholar and a mother-in-becoming. The post is aimed to help other future parents navigate some of the jungle that is out there for anyone planning to have a baby.
The Basics of Preparing for Pregnancy and Childbirth: 1. You Have to Study a Lot Yourself
Until this journey, I was always, I’m almost ashamed to admit, a rather passive consumer of health care services. I was the kind of patient who will believe and follow whatever the doctors say. Moving to the Netherlands and having recurring meetings with a fertility doctor at our local hospital changed my outlook on this. I slowly started to realize that I need to be studying a whole lot myself, because the doctor does not have the most up-to-date information. Long story short: The doctors don’t always know best and can be shockingly unaware of the latest developments in science in their very own field.
Me and my partner, both university professors, are trained in reading academic papers and in scientific argumentation. Thus, we were able to understand that the suggestions of the doctor were nonsense and searched for a second opinion. This experience taught me that when preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, I have to have a very proactive attitude when it comes to dealing with medical professionals, and since that, I have devoured relatively a lot of literature to spur me further on the journey towards a family. In the end, from “it will be very difficult for you to have children without medical assistance” we went to a completely naturally conceived baby. That took a lot of studying about nutrition and other things. One book that helped me a lot during this trying-to-conceive phase was Aimee Raupp: Yes, You Can Get Pregnant. Some of the advise on yoga mudra practice etc. was a bit much for me, but in general, this book very nicely called my attention to healthy eating and the importance of reducing any toxins and chemicals in my environment.
The beforementioned attitude of serious self-study -and I don’t mean random Googling but reading science-based books and research papers- has also served me well during pregnancy. The midwife visits at our local clinic have mainly consisted of the assistant measuring my blood pressure and the midwife checking the baby’s heartbeat, then sending me out with “everything is progressing well”. There has been zero counseling on nutrition, exercise, or anything else. Eating is a whole art form both when trying to get pregnant and when actually waiting a baby, but the support I got on this topic consisted of two sentences: “You can’t eat everything now. Download this app and you can check if a particular food is safe to eat.” Let me say that you have to study on your own to understand ideal nutrition when preparing for pregnancy and childbirth; the standard wisdom of “take your folic acid and avoid raw fish” is simply inadequate as a guide.
For each their own, but the nutrition book that helped me a lot is Lily Nichols: Real Food for Pregnancy. This book is used as a course material in university level nutrition classes in the U.S. and contains science-based advise on how to get all the essential nutrients for your baby. The big shock for me was to understand that there is a giant gap between our conventional understanding of what is healthy eating for a pregnant woman and what the actual science says. Relying on supplements is not going to fix the problem, as many of them don’t contain anywhere near the right amount of the right nutrients. That’s why you need to have a science-based look on your diet, and this book is a great help in doing just that.
When preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, reading about pregnancy in general, not only about nutrition, is also recommendable. I often felt overwhelmed by all the myths, urban legends, and old wives tales surrounding pregnancy, and was yearning for real, down to earth but scientifically sound information. One book that was helpful and managed to relieve a lot of stress was Emily Oyster: Expecting Better. Emily Oyster is an economist who was, during her own pregnancy, shocked by the amount of scientifically ungrounded advice and procedures that she encountered even in professional healthcare. As a scholar, she started conducting a bunch of literature reviews on various topics from caffeine consumption to sleeping positions. Based on them, she gives some very sound advice that is actually based on research, managing to do all this in an authorial voice that is down-to-earth and easygoing (quite frankly, unlike in any other book mentioned in this post).
One crucial thing I learnt from her book is that I should pay attention to the research on maternal sleeping positions. For example, this 2019 meta-analysis by Cronin et al. concludes that sleeping on your back is related to an increased risk for stillbirth. Sleeping on either side is safer. Just out of curiosity, I started asking in all my midwife visits from the different people I met if they had any advice as to how I should sleep. The answer was always the same: It doesn’t matter. If you can sleep in a particular position, then it is good for the baby. This little test further confirmed to me that as sweet and kind the staff at your pregnancy clinics are, don’t expect them to be up-to-date with any research done on any topic. Did I already mention you have to study a lot on your own?
2. Babies Are a Business
It dawned upon me as we were trying to have a baby that supporting people to get pregnant is a massive business of its own. When finally pregnant, I realized that pregnancy and getting ready for a baby are, if possible, an even bigger business. The point is that when preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, you will encounter plenty of people trying to figure out your pain point -your fear, your shame, your dream, your need- and then push that button as hard as possible to make you give them your money.
At one point before becoming pregnant, I read a sort of American self-help-guide that had a very strong “You can do it, girl”, gung-ho type of vibe, covered in metaphorical pink and glitter. The author was also selling some counseling services, and I got terribly curious of her practice (being a former clinical psychologist and teaching clinical skills at a university, I couldn’t help but wanting to figure out what she was up to). The session consisted of her trying to upsell me a crazily expensive series of group meetings for women trying to conceive. The strategy: Figure out my values and fears within the first minutes of the conversation, then underline that my fears will come true AND I will not be true to my values unless I buy her group coaching. Once you figure out someone’s selling techniques and money-grabbing attitude, you become considerably less willing to put your money into that. I will not mention the name of the book nor the author here, because I don’t believe she deserves to get any free advertisement from me.
Here comes another example of how much fear-mongering and manipulativeness is out there targeted at people who want to become parents. I wanted to do some guided meditation with a person who marketed themselves as being specialized in pregnancy. During the session this person informed me that the reason of my repeated miscarriages was that my past cancer treatments with chemo had caused a toxic state within me. She said I literally suffocated the babies. This was a very harsh attempt at selling me even more of her meditation and group session services. As I had 10 years of being a clinical psychologist behind me at that point, I had already been accustomed to hearing delusional stuff from people and taking it with neutral curiosity. However, I can only imagine how traumatizing such words can be for a person who takes them fully in and believes them. There doesn’t seem to be any limits as to what kind of psychological and verbal toxicity can be targeted at women who already are feeling vulnerable when preparing for pregnancy and childbirth.
In our consumerist, capitalist society, it is extremely easy to believe that when preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, you need first and foremost to use a lot of money. From pregnancy supplements to the abundance of clothes and other items you need (or “need”) for your baby, the sellers know how to push your fears and dreams to make you take out your bank card. Sometimes it seems like the whole preparation for a new family member is all about buying material things. Be aware that any product can be sold as pregnancy/maternity/baby relevant, then conveniently adding some extra on the prize. Just to give you one example: Google “pregnancy ball” and see how much they cost. Then check the prize of a “gym ball”. They are essentially the same thing. The only difference is that a pregnancy ball can cost about 30 euros more. Of course, all the sellers want to make you believe that your baby’s health and safety, or at least your identity as a good parent, depends on using money and purchasing certain products or services. Don’t let anyone guilt- or fear-trap you into unnecessary purchases. Preparing for pregnancy and childbirth is not only about buying all the things. In my opinion, it is mainly a psychological and physi(ologi)cal journey.
3. Prepare Mentally and Physically, but Try to Avoid Overwhelm
A while ago I was reading a Finnish discussion board for mothers. A newly pregnant first time mom was asking the fellow mommas for advise as to how to prepare for birth. An overwhelming majority, to my shock, said something along the lines of “You don’t need to prepare at all, just go to the hospital and the midwives tell you what to do”. At the same time, I was reading a bunch of newspaper and magazine articles telling me how in Finland, the levels of fear of labor are on the rise, Cesareans increasing, and young mothers having more and more negative experiences of delivery. Apparently you only get delivery coaching online anymore, if at all. My friend working at a hospital confirmed this, stating that she is so happy I’m giving birth in the Netherlands and not in Finland. It doesn’t make any sense to me that while the public support for birthgivers, especially for people who would want to give birth naturally and with minimal medical interventions, is so low, women themselves are not taking a more active stance towards their labor. My two cents would be that you have to study and prepare yourself for childbirth: You have to know what to expect, be prepared to make informed choices, and have yourself mentally and physically as ready as you can. It doesn’t seem like a great idea to give all responsibility of your birthing experience into the hands of medical professionals and then get surprised that things didn’t go your way.
Our choice of birth has been a method known as HypnoBirthing. This approach to preparing for pregnancy and childbirth emerges from the work of hypnotherapist Marie Mongan and rests on the idea that childbirth is normal and natural, not an illness or a medical emergency, and that mothers need to access their own inner peace and wisdom to be able to have a smooth, safe delivery. It is rather incredible that in our society it is radical to say that childbirth is not a medical emergency. We have grown so accustomed of thinking childbirth as complicated and scary business involving hospitals, doctors, midwives, medications, surgery, and other interventions, that an idea of normal, undisturbed birth sounds somehow radical. That is how alienated we are from nature and how brainwashed by the overly medicalized approach to something that, for the majority of women, does not need to be a medical event at all.
When my partner told his female colleague that we are training for HypnoBirthing, the first comment of this mother of two was “That method has to have been invented by a man!”. I think that comment is very telling of the sad state of natural birth in our hypermedicalized Western societies. An approach that relies on the simplest of things -learning how to breath, releasing fears, boosting your mind and body with affirmations, meditations, self hypnosis techniques, and relaxation exercises, and being informed on what kind of a mental and physical approach works best with how nature intended childbirth to happen- can seem so alien to a woman that she automatically assumes it was designed by a man. This colleague, I suppose, feels that male professionals have taken over and women’s experiences are not listened to. She’s not wrong. After all, it was the arrival of male professionals that took women into hospitals and made them give birth in the most unnatural ways -lying on their back fully medicated- for the ease and convenience of the practitioners, not for the moms. However, some more openness and curiosity to alternatives would be probably beneficial to women, or, to put it more radically, perhaps they should take birthing back to their own hands.
When learning about HypnoBirthing as a method for preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, I had three main resources. We went to take a course with the childbirth educator Chitra Natarajan via her business Akriti in Amsterdam. The course consisted of five meetings, all delivered in English to a small group of participants. I appreciated how much concrete information about what actually happens in the delivery we received. The warm and trusting atmosphere in the sessions was also very appealing. I benefited most from learning how to use my body to ease the birthing process, just by breathing in the right way and using movement and bodily positions to make the baby’s journey as easy as possible.
To gain some more hypnobirthing knowledge, I also took an online course with Saara Jämes in Finnish. Her content didn’t include any real-time interactive elements and was thus very different from the English course we took with Chitra. I enjoyed especially all the self-hypnosis scripts Saara offers. The point of these exercises, designed for purposes such as releasing fears, tuning off your body’s pain sensations, and finding a state of relaxedness, is that you read aloud a sort of hypnotic journey script to yourself. Surprisingly, reading to yourself can be quite relaxing indeed, and I often find myself falling asleep or at least feeling very drowsy when reading these scripts.
I also read the book “HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method” by Marie Mongan. I didn’t quite understand the point of sharing so many bad birthing experiences at the beginning of the book if your whole aim is to help women reprogram their minds for a positive birthing. Also, the decontextualized way of presenting all the exercises, kind of just expecting that people instantly know how to do them and they will just automatically work like magic, bothered me a bit. Learning to do self-hypnosis or even relaxation and visualization properly would, in my opinion, deserve way deeper explanations and descriptions than what this book offers. If I wouldn’t be a trained clinical psychologist, I would not understand how these exercises are supposed to work just based on this book. However, the book offers a good basic introduction into what this curious-sounding method is all about and gives you many practical tips to help you prepare for labor -or birthing, as we hypnomamas like to say.
The focus of these two HypnoBirthing courses I took was quite different. I can imagine that in general, all HypnoBirthing instructors have their own way of doing things. Whether or not you choose this or some other approach to your delivery, I recommend that when preparing for childbirth you look around and make some comparisons between different providers. Perhaps you need someone who will talk you through all the physiological turns of a delivery and help you understand what happens at this very bodily level. Perhaps you want to make sure that adequate time and effort is put on meditation, hypnosis, affirmations, and other psychological preparation. In my experience, both are important. Doing regular relaxation and preparing myself mentally by reprogramming my brain with the help of positive affirmations and self-hypnosis have helped me to wait for the delivery day not only in a relaxed manner but also excitedly.
I would like to point out that learning how to relax, how to conduct a self-hypnosis exercise, or even how to really benefit from listening to positive affirmations is a skill that takes some training. Having used hypnosis and other related techniques with clients as a clinical psychologist I can tell that sometimes people need a lot of time just to recognize they are tense and to figure out how a relaxed state in the body feels like. Running through some relaxation exercises will by itself not do anything, if you are not tuned in with your body and mind and able to acknowledge what is actually going on. In a similar way, for self-hypnosis techniques to work, you need to take some time. In my opinion, more time and effort needs to be put in thoroughly explaining and guiding people through with the kind of exercises that are central to the HypnoBirthing approach than what is often the case.
If combining a scientific, informed mindset with a desire to have a natural, non-medical (undisturbed) birth seems like a difficult task, I recommend the book of Doctor Sarah Buckley named “Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering”. I read the book after intensively studying and practicing HypnoBirthing and realized that there is indeed robust scientific evidence to back up the focus on natural, non-medical, and undisturbed birthing that is so central to HypnoBirthing. The book includes a daunting amount of literature reviews on topics varying from ultrasound to Cesarean Sections and was a true eye-opener for me. This medical doctor and a mother of four busts many myths regarding childbirth and demonstrates how our overly medicalized approach, the over-emphasis on procedures, interventions, and medications, has actually made childbirth less and not more safe for women and for babies. If a non-medical approach to delivery feels like a hippie tosh to you, I would just recommend reading this book and checking out all the scientific references listed at the back of it. That being said, I have to admit that some of the more personal sections of this book, with their decorative, flowers-and-glitter-and-rainbows type of language, made me very uneasy. I can’t see myself doing this whole homeopathic-baby mandala-water yoga-Lotus dance -approach (for astonished readers, this term is my invention and meant to be a joke!). Then again, that is just me.
While I’m advocating for an informed approach to preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, even challenging the current medical standard practice where its needed, I also want to warn you about something. That something is information overload. Having done three different delivery preparation courses (in addition to the two HypnoBirthing ones, me and my partner also took more standard home classes with SamenBevallen) and read a pile of books and papers, I can say that unrealistic expectations for moms-to-be are the norm, not the exception. When I explained to my spouse everything that I’m supposed to do to prepare for delivery, based on the two HypnoBirthing Courses and the Hypnobirthing book, he said “If you could share your pregnancy with 2-3 women, then you would all together collectively be able to do all that”.
Indeed, even if you’re on a pregnancy leave with lots of time in your hands, that time can quickly be filled with the multitude of exercises that you’re supposed to do. As a university educator, what annoyed me even more than the sheer amount of things to do that was offered in most of the materials I familiarized myself with, was the unstructured way any preparation exercises things are usually presented. On every new session and on every new page you turn there is a new meditation, physical exercise routine, dietary tip, or other thing you should do. There is no prioritizing, no organization, no suggested schedule. The solution: You have to make a realistic schedule yourself. You can’t do everything, so pick three core things that you think are important to do daily. Then pick three or four more that you think are important to do on a weekly basis. The rest you do sporadically, if at all.
My own daily selection of the minimum things to do has, for the months preceding the due date, been the following: 1) affirmations 2) Rainbow relaxation (a relaxation tape you’re supposed to listen to every night to fall asleep 3) some form of physical exercise, either just walking or then exercises that specifically prepare you for labor. Closer to the due date, different exercises have been added to the daily list. The important thing to keep in mind is that pregnancy requires mental, physical, and practical preparation, and different people selling their books, courses, and other products often tend to overfocus on one aspect only, and then overload you with to-do’s pertaining to this aspect only. Even if I feel the psychological preparation offered by the HypnoBirthing approach has been invaluable, I would also recommend preparing your body. YouTube offers a lot of training and stretching advice that is helpful for pregnant people, but instead of linking any particular content here, I would urge you to talk to your doctor and explore what exercise works for you. For example, Kegel exercises are often touted as the Thing You Should Be Doing, without any deeper knowledge or acknowledgment of the fact that they are not beneficial for everyone and many people, according to research, also do them completely wrong until advised by a professional.
Conclusion
To finish off this long post, let me reiterate my point. When preparing for pregnancy and childbirth, do your homework. Read books, take a course or two (or three). Keep in mind that whatever content you consume, someone is benefitting from it financially. Are they deliberately making simple things sound complicated or triggering your fears or feelings of insufficiency to make more money? A lot of the content you encounter will contain endless lists of things you should do, to the point that it may seem you can’t sleep or eat anymore to get every “required” thing done. Don’t buy into this. Overloading people with things to do is one more technique of making them feel inadequate and hence, in even more need of expert help and advise. Make your own routine and schedule consisting of what you feel are the most important things to work on during pregnancy and don’t get lured into thinking that someone else seemingly doing more is somehow doing pregnancy better. You’re not in competition against anyone else here, and the thing you’re doing is not a sprint but a marathon.
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