3 Things to Think About if You Want an Unmedicated Birth

For my first birth I was DETERMINED to have an unmedicated birth. I wrote out my birth plan and made a copy for the go-bags, the hospital, and my mom who would also be in attendance. Well, apparently my mom shared my birth plan with my aunt who laughed at it (I found out after the fact). She had a hard time in childbirth and assumed that I would have a hard time and not be able to have the birth I had laid out. Well, I did, 13 hours laboring at home and 4 at the hospital.

If you are talking birth with friends or relatives and how you want to give birth without medication you will usually be met with scoffs and the story of how they wanted to have an unmedicated birth but wound up with an epidural, or proceed to tell you really traumatic birth stories. I'm here to tell you that there are a lot of positive birth stories out there. In fact, this website is dedicated to them.

1. Mindset

How do you talk to yourself during hard situations now? My favorite example is the stair stepper. It's a love hate relationship. I loved the burn and the sweat but HATED the act of stair stepping. In my head I would be thinking JUST 10 MORE MINUTES. This is something I carried with me during labor but framed it this way, "just 30 more seconds in this contraction" or "ok, this is the peak I'm almost done."

Other helpful tools you can use to get your mind on the right track include: