A Quick Guide On What To Read For An Empowered and Informed Birth

Modern birth has become scary, medical, and often, an experience mamas fear. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are many resources available to get educated and take power of your birth. After planning my last homebirth, and beginning to plan my second (see my birth plan here), I have found endless amazing resources to learn how to take charge of pregnancy and birth and get the experience you want.

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The Best Books To Read During Pregnancy

The Positive Birth Book: A New Approach to Pregnancy, Birth, and The Early Weeks

This book will help you understand all your options in pregnancy and birth and decipher what the best plan is for you. It’s full of facts and information and is not judgmental, regardless of what kind of birth you want. It even gives information on how to have a woman-centered and empowered C-section. I also recommend this book because it pulls on experiences from many different women quoting them on their personal birth experiences.

Natural Childbirth The Bradley Way

A straight forward guide to succeed in natural child birth. The book goes into depth on how to prepare your body for a healthy labor, what labor will entail, how to involve your birth partner, and how to get the information you need to make informed decision for your birth and avoid induction and surgery.

Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy

A funny and personal reflection and assessment of the modern culture around pregnancy and birth as well as the science of pregnancy and birth. A great guide to understand the basics from miscarriage, pregnancy, and labor, to postpartum and breastfeeding.

Sacred Pregnancy A Loving Guide and Journal for Expecting Mothers

A spiritual guide to pregnancy. This is one of my favorites for pregnancy because it provides resources and ideas to connect to your pregnancy experience and your baby. This also doubles as a pregnancy journal with weekly journal prompts to ensure you are feeling positive and connected to your pregnancy process.

Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth

This book focuses on women’s natural abilities to birth and empowering them to believe in their bodies abilities with science backed information. It’s a great guide to understanding how to optimize your chances of a natural birth, naturally lower pain during labor and even learn about orgasmic birth.

Mindful Birthing

A helpful guide on making pregnancy, birth, and postpartum a positive and calm experience that pulls research from the neuroscience and mind/body medical field. The book provides effective methods to reduce stress and pain while improving confidence and connection.

Hypnobirthing Home Study Course Manual: Step-by-Step Guide To an Easy, Natural, and Pain Free Birth

A great guide to learn hypnobirthing and avoid other forms of pain management. This book boasts “Over 85 percent of Hypnobirthing Home Study Course mothers birthed naturally and easily, with most saying they were entirely comfortable throughout the birth and didn’t even think of asking for pain medication.” The book focuses on teaching you to control your thoughts and gain control of your experience.

I hope with all of these empowering resources you will be able to kick the great of pregnancy and birth and gain control over your experience.

Also read The Best Resources for Planning Your Ideal Birth and My Natural Birth Plan for my information and inspiration!

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Books for natural pregnancy and birth


Book to read for an empowered natural birth

The Best Resources For Planning Your Ideal Birth

My Favorite Resources To Visualize A Positive Birth

Having the birth experience you want requires planning, education, and understanding. It’s important to know all the whys behind different approaches to birth and navigate what will be best for you and your baby. If you approach birth without knowledge, your birth experience will be whatever your medical professional would like it to be rather than your own preferred experience because unless you give direction, others will take the lead. There are endless resources to understanding and learning all about birth. In order to align with the birth you want, it’s important to dive into that experience. Here are a few of my favorite resources to help learn more about birth and decipher your own ideal birth.

As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small stipend for any purchases made. Thanks for supporting a work at home mom!

The Birth Hour Podcast

“The Birth Hour Podcast” is one of my favorite and one of the most accessible resources. I listen on Spotify, but it’s available on a myriad of platforms. It’s important to be aware though that it shares ALL types of stories, including the more negative or more medical focused experiences, but it’s a great place to start in figuring out what you may or may not want. This resource is all about the birth stories and not so much the educational side of things or hearing research behind birth although it does come up occasionally. It’s a great place to start when forming ideas about your ideal birth because you’ll begin forming a vocabulary around birth and hear about all the different things that can come up and the approaches to birth. I think it may be ideal to lay off this resource or be more selective with episodes once you do have a set birth plan to make sure you’re not filling yourself with fear or giving yourself different visions of birth than you would like.

Empowered Birth Project

Instagram Account

EmpoweredBirthProject.com

The Empowered Birth Project was one of the first birth resources I was exposed to outside of my formal education and I was immediately obsessed. I had never seen birth framed as a beautiful and empowering experience before and that’s what the Instagram page is all about. This page shares real stories along with photos and videos, and emphasizes birth education and awareness. 

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Pinterest

Ok so this one is probably a no brainer, but I think Pinterest a great resource for planning a birth because you can find stories, research, and inspiration for any birth you may desire. I have a Natural Birth Inspiration board you can check out here. It provides a myriad of resources from research to things like affirmations for birth.

Books

Books can be an amazing resource as they go into depth about topics allowing you to gain more understanding and possibly even more skills to prepare you for the birth you want. This is a quick list of a few of my favorites, but I will probably write a separate article shortly to go into more depth about all of my favorite birth books.

Natural Childbirth The Bradley Way

Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth

The Doula’s Guide To Your Empowering Birth: A Complete Labor and Childbirth Companion For Parents To Be

Mindful Birthing: Training The Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond

In Your Community

Some of the most important resources you will use are those in your community. I personally suggest using a midwife group or hiring a doula (or both). They’re a great resource for natural and empowered birth options. You can also check into local Le Lethe League meetups which is a great moms’ support group for breastfeeding. I also suggest looking into local birth classes, pregnancy support groups, baby-wearers clubs, prenatal yoga, chiropractic, and acupuncture. All are amazing resources to ensure your body and mind are healthy and prepared for natural and/or an empowered birth. You’ll also find the transition to motherhood much easier if you already have a like minded mama tribe through different prenatal groups.

You can also reference My Natural Home Birth Plan for more information and ideas!

Learn how to prepare your body for labor naturally here!

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Natural Birth Plan Template!

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You may also like: Preparing For A Home Birth, Natural Ways to Prepare Your Body for an Easy and Intervention-Free Birth, A Quick Guide On What To Read For An Empowered and Informed Birth, and The Beautiful, Natural, & Unassisted Birth Story Of Our Second Child

The REAL Reasons Moms Skip The Epidural

As a mama who wanted an unmedicated birth herself, I was curious why other moms took a similar path, whether a home birth or hospital birth. I surveyed the moms of Green Mama Life and here are the REAL answers!

Not Enough Time

Fast labor, also known as precipitous labor, is defined as labor that lasts two or three hours. Many women noted they had planned to have an epidural, but were unable to due to quick labor. When quick labor occurs, women may jump into the end phase of labor quickly or arrive at the hospital too close to delivery to receive an epidural.

Hospital Understaffed

The hospital being understaffed was definitely my least favorite answer. The epidural is a choice so I find it upsetting, as I’m sure many women do, that hospital staffing is a factor in women’s birth choices. Although women noted they were usually happy with the overall experience of not receiving an epidural, I do believe we need to do better to support women in birth.

Owning The Power of The Female Body

Some women mentioned their desire to really just see what their body was capable of. A few women who skipped the drugs found they felt more empowered after experiencing natural childbirth as they really saw how amazing and capable their bodies are.

What to know about epidurals and women's experiences

Wanted The Experience

Along with owning the power of the female body, women noted they wanted the whole experience. Women were curious about what birth felt like without numbing and wanted full control over their pushing and movement.

Previous Experience

Some women mentioned their previous experiences made them want to skip the epidural. A few women noted bad experiences with the epidural leaving them with no desire to do it again while others noted experiencing an epidural with one birth and not with the second and preferred the birth and postpartum recovery experience without the epidural.

Fear of Epidural

Many women, including myself, noted our fear of the epidural. Their fears ranged from a literal fear of needles, fear of it leading to a c-section, to fear of it harming the baby. All of these fears are valid. As mentioned in the “Previous Experience” section bad experiences with epidurals do happen.

Common symptoms from an epidural include itching, nausea and vomiting, fever, soreness, and a drop in blood pressure, while more uncommon, yet still prevalent, symptoms include difficulty breathing, severe headache, infection, seizure, and nerve damage.

Healthline

Did you skip or plan to skip the epidural? What was your reason? Have you had an experience with an epidural?

You may also like: The Best Resources For Planning Your Ideal Birth, A Natural Mamas Guide to Postpartum Healing & Recovery and The Best Books To Read for Postpartum Wellness and Recovery

Skip The Epidural Women's Experiences

You may also be interested in Natural Home Birth Plan

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