A birth plan hardly ever goes to plan. (Birth Plan)

Member Name: Claribella

Product:	Birth Plan
Date:	06/12/08 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Helps you realise what you would like

Disadvantages: Doesn't always go to plan

When you become pregnant, at your first appointment with your midwife she will give you a file which you have to take to every appointment throughout your whole pregnancy. Within this file is a page where you can write a birth plan.

A birth plan is an idea of how you would like the actual birth of your baby to go. You can include just about everything on this page and you can write as little or as much as you like. I found that asking myself lots of questions really helped me. So things like:
How do you want to labour? Do you want to move around? Use a birthing ball? Use a birthing pool?
Do you want to use pain relief? Gas and air, diamorphine, epidural?
Who do you want to be with you? Partner, mum?
Do you want the baby placed on you straight away or would you prefer that they clean it off first?
Would you like to breastfeed?
Do you want your baby to have the vitamin K injection?
Would you like to deliver the placenta naturally or have an injection which makes it come out by itself?


With my first son I did a very detailed one but made sure I did it in bullet points so it was easier for the midwifes to read. My first labour turned out to be nothing like what I wanted so with my second son I only wrote a few things down.

I think birth plans do help you to think about what you would like to do during your labor but I really think they are pretty pointless. You can't really predict how your labor and birth is going to go so most of your plans go out of the window anyway. I would suggest that you write down stuff that is really important to you though. For example I knew I wanted to breastfeed and I knew a lot of people who wanted to as well but the midwifes had encouraged them to try giving their baby a bottle. If you give a baby a bottle in the very early stages of breastfeeding then it is highly likely that they won't take your breast because it's easier for them to extract milk from the bottle than it is from the breast. In my birth plan I wrote that I wanted the baby to be put to my breast straight away and under no circumstances should they give my baby a bottle. If I couldn't feed him straight away then I wrote that I would prefer them to give him my expressed milk from a little pot or in extreme circumstances give him a NG tube down his nose. Thankfully this didn't happen and he fed really well from the start.

During my second birth I didn't want to be offered pain relief at every whipstick so I wrote that I would ask if I needed pain relief.

I think childbirth is such an unpredictable thing and it's good to have an idea of what you would like to do during labour but if you do write a birth plan then don't expect it to go as you have planned.

Summary: Not always helpful