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By Pernille, on April 19th, 2011 
A lot of you know that I recently went through a miscarriage at 13 weeks. I wanted to share with you some amazing things I have learned on my journey through the three months of being pregnant and going through the miscarriage.
Being a Doula and then getting pregnant makes you realise that it is vastly different supporting birth from the outside, to being in birth. Despite having birthed twice before, it was a good thing to be reminded of, when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant after Christmas. I know a lot about birth, about hospitals and obstetrics, but I very quickly realised that despite all of that, I had lots of preparation to do. It was a more soulful type of preparation though that I needed, one that connected me with my strength and trust in birth and one that took my fears and worries seriously enough, to really look at them. I wanted a natural homebirth, like many other birth workers do, but I realised that I needed to prepare myself to a place where I could have a good birth no matter how my journey would unfold. And that is not an easy task!
In the end, I never made it that far; my baby only stayed for a short time. I did start my preparation slowly by writing in my journal and doing some drawings, and maybe this also helped me on the journey I had to do. I have learned so much and for that I am so grateful for the short time and the birth journey this baby gave me.
I went to the hospital because I was spotting and an ultrasound confirmed that our baby was no longer with us. The news was heart breaking and we were all devastated. I was sent home to let the baby come by itself, which was what I wanted. I don’t know if this is now standard procedure in a miscarriage or if this was a case of ‘we actually don’t have any beds left and this woman seems to be ok with going home’. I don’t know. But for me this was the best thing. Continue reading Empowering birth
By Pernille, on December 5th, 2010  Miscarriage is often not counted as anything much. The foetus is not really a child in medical terms and no one around you have got much of a relationship to this pregnancy yet. But for the woman, who was pregnant, it is big. Even if she is only 12 weeks, she has spend that time getting used to the fact that she is going to be a mother, she might have had morning sickness and sore boobs and she is loosing a baby, who was already created in her mind. It often feels very unreal and the feelings can be difficult to make sense of rationally. I found, in the middle of my sadness over our miscarriage, was worry about my body being able and worry about if I had done something wrong or had had emotions I shouldn’t have had. But I also felt relief because I deep down knew something hadn’t been right.
The Dads who experiences their women having miscarriages, do have some of those same feelings but also a whole range of different feelings and they are often a bit forgotten and not expected to grief and have big feelings. This is not something we talk about and I would have never thought about this before it happened to us. The following is a short story my husband wrote, based on his experiences, when I had a miscarriage back in Denmark in 1998. It’s not meant to be representative of Dads at all, it’s just one voice among many.
Peanut
The building loomed tall and dark as we approached, and the sun fell into shadows. The autumn wind was suddenly that much colder, but we nevertheless hesitated outside the doors, looking carefully in each other’s eyes, seeking silent assurances.
‘It’ll be OK’, I whispered, hoping my voice sounded confident.
She smiled weakly, and we turned and entered the silently opening doors of the hospital.
The corridors were like that of any other hospital, shiny and blank – a clean slate for the pre-conceptions and fears of the patient or visitor. I had never been a patient here, and the only times I’d visited had been the joyful occasions of the birth of friends’ children. Somehow though, the place seemed to me like a trap, the walls sterile and unknowable, waiting to surprise us.
We found the right corridor and approached the main desk. The obligatory wait found us huddled in a corner of the ward, on blue plastic chairs screwed to the floor. We could not comfort each other in such a position, and the public surroundings silenced us from voicing our fears. Eventually a nurse came and led us to an examination room. The doctor came in a few minutes later, shaking our hands, his manner brisk and a bit distant.
‘Right. What have we got here? 12 weeks pregnant, spot bleeding a few weeks ago, more yesterday and then this morning, this time a bit stronger and darker. Hmm.’
He looked up from his notes and looked at us for a few silent seconds.
‘It’s probably nothing serious, but we should give you a vaginal scan to check it out properly.’
It wasn’t a question.
Rebecca hesitated, finding her voice.
‘I don’t really want to have a scan. Isn’t a physical examination enough?’
His seemed irritated. His brow furrowed a little and his tone became slightly lecturing.
‘No, it’s not. I can see here that your doctor did the same 2 days ago, and found everything to be fine. Obviously, me doing the same now would have similar results. We need to see what’s happening in there. What are your concerns regarding scanning? You know, it’s perfectly safe.’
Another statement. I checked my anger before answering. I focused on the ends of the stethoscope hanging around his neck.
‘Doctor’, I began, seeing the effect that one word had on his mien.
‘My wife and I do have reservations about the ultimate safety of scanning, but that’s not really the issue here. We only want to avoid it if possible. If such a scanning is unavoidable and the only way to obtain an accurate diagnosis, I’m sure Rebecca would reconsider. Do you consider it unavoidable?’
‘Well, yes, as you put it that way. That’s my professional opinion.’
‘Could you give us a few minutes Doctor?’
Continue reading Miscarriage from a Dad’s perspective
By Pernille, on December 2nd, 2010 
‘You can’t plan your birth’. It might seem like a funny statement to make at the start of a post about writing your birth preferences. Birth has it’s own mysterious ways and we can never predict how in might go. That said, I want to make some comments and let you know about the discussion and the great ideas that came out in our Monday BaBs session about ‘writing your birth preferences’.
When you sit down to write what you would like and wont like during labour and birth, think about this exercise as a ‘motivator’ to learn about birth and the different interventions and possibilities that can occur during labour. You can never learn about all possible paths, but you can look into the most common variations and possibilities. You can learn about how others made a lovely birth space for them selves or how they communicated with staff to get treated in a respectful manner.
I think the most important way of thinking about your birth preferences is that it is a piece of paper that is going to inform a midwife, who would love to support you, just the way you would like to, about who you are. She wont know if offering you pain relief is supportive or discouraging for you unless you tell her in your birth preferences. So if you start at that point, you are already well on your way. Some of the questions you might ask yourself and write down for your midwife could be: Continue reading Writing your birth preferences
By Pernille, on November 29th, 2010 Hi everyone, here is the list of books, DVD’s and websites that were recommended by the men and women attending BaBs on the 22nd of November. They are about parenting, birth and pregnancy. They are not in any particular order and are not an expression of what we as facilitators from BaBs believe in. Use them if they speak to you  :
“The continuum Concept” by Jean Liedloff
“Three in a bed, the benefits of sharing your bed with your baby” by Deborah Jackson
The Fathers book from Nambour Hospital Antenatal Clinic
“Birthing From Within” by Pam England
“Your Competent Child” by Jesper Juul
“Unconditional Parenting” by Alfie Kohn
“Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering” by Sarah Buckley
“Save our sleep” by Tizzie Hall
“You sexy mother” by by Jodie Hedley-Ward
“The Big Stretch” DVD by Jenny Blyth
Huggies week by week pregnancy website
“Up the Duff” by Kaz Cooke
“No Cry Sleep solution” by Elizabeth Pantley
“Breastfeeding Naturally” from the ABA
“Star bright – meditations for children” by Maureen Garth
“Spiritual midwifery” by Ina May Gaskin
“Tiny Hands” sign language by Aiken Ryan
By Pernille, on November 12th, 2010 Written by Georgina Kelly, first published in Australia on The Natural Parenting website
 In order to give birth and in order to passionately say “Yes”, we need to open ourselves up wide. Our womb, the repository of life, needs the door unfastened to give birth. Our heart, the core of our being, needs to be unlocked to say a heart-felt “Yes”.
Recently I read the phrase “saying the Great Yes” in a poetry book called “Women in Praise of the Sacred” and I experienced deep feelings of resonance. Jane Hirshfield1 writes that the poets included in her book all shared themes evocative of a “spirituality of affirmation” – releasing their hearts in a trusting gesture to others and experiences. I thought at once of women birthing, and the times when many spoke or moaned “nooooo” when the sensations intensified and became seemingly overpowering. As a midwife I might, at this point encourage the woman to welcome these rushes (‘contractions’), to say ‘YES!’ as they approached and meet them with appreciation. There is such a shift in every way when a woman manages this. There is a release; the energy changes. If anyone else is present, they are simultaneously inspired to echo the “YES” in their own heart. There is a revival.
A Spiritual Practice
I believe “saying the Great Yes” is indeed spiritual practice, a spirituality of affirmation, especially in our lives as women. We women can open our hearts and greet the opportunities for enlarging and knowing found through a connection with our cycles, our pregnancies, our birthing, and our mothering. It is in these times that we can become more self-aware, enjoy a heightened consciousness, and transcend our familiar experience of self with new understanding being linked to changes in our female bodies. 2 Through the initiation of childbirth particularly, many of us are lifted up high on the power-full wave of nature, dumped and churned about, then, still breathless, thrown upon the shores of a new and glorious land. For some women, it is a wonderful, fulfilling and intense pathway where subsequently our eyes see everything in a new way – above all, our selves. Our transformation, however we birth our babies, is inevitable. No matter how we experience the journey, there is the promise that we can discover our potential for growth and maturity when we dismiss our expectations and embrace the uncertainty that nature and life offers. I believe in the intrinsic Mystery of Birth; a place beyond rational understanding, where knowledge about our selves and existence may be made known by revelation, an epiphanic experience. Through a spirituality of affirmation, we women are capable of intimacy with the sacred deep in our wombs, and can begin to appreciate the interconnectedness and the aliveness of everything.
Continue reading Saying the Great YES, a challenge of birth
By Pernille, on October 27th, 2010  In Australia today there are a few different options of birth place for women. You can birth in a private hospital, a public hospital, a birth centre, or at home. Not all options are available to women everywhere in Australia and home birth is not funded by the government in Australia at the moment. (But that is another blog post all together.)
Yet most couples find that their main decision is whether to go public or private. This post is about the differences between choosing public or private hospitals.
In our society today it seems that anything private is perceived as better quality and better care. Not many women will actually look at the statistics and understand what it involves to go private rather than public. I can only speak about how I have experienced how the hospitals work here on the Sunshine Coast in my practice as a birth doula.
Private hospitals often look impressive. They often have nice rooms and birth rooms with en-suites and generally good facilities. I know lots of women who choose private just to have their own room post-natally, where their partner can stay with them overnight after the birth, which is a totally understandable wish. In Public Hospitals, we are moving towards that kind of standard, but here on the Coast we have a few years yet until women get their own room after birth.
Continue reading Public or Private
By Pernille, on August 24th, 2010 
This Monday we had Midwife and Lecturer Rachel Reed at BaBs to talk about Induction.
Induction is one of the most common birth interventions in our modern world. App.1/4 of births in Queensland are medically induced and app. 20% of the remaining women, who go into labour spontaneously, have medication to speed up their labour. This is an awful lot of women having one medication or another to make labour come quicker or happen faster. This is a very busy world
Our talks at BaBs are never about whether it is right or wrong to choose a particular intervention or type of birth, but it is a lot about making sure you all know that you have a choice and to question routine procedures as they are often not evidence based.
Where there is some medical reasons for induction, the most common reason is post dates. A baby is full term anywhere between 37 weeks and 42 weeks, but lots of women go longer than that. After 42 weeks there is a slight increase in the percentage of babies, who would be better off out than in. If pregnancy goes on for more than 42 weeks it is possible to have regular check ups to be aware of whether your baby is OK in there and whether there is another reason that you are not going into labour other than that your baby isn’t ready. It is common belief these days that it is the baby who initiates labour, so we have to ask ourselves how many babies are born prematurely and with that having more breathing issues and babies going off the special care, being separated from their mother.
The reason given to women by the Obstetricians to explain why they need induction now they are past dates is most commonly that her placenta will shut down and stop working. But there is apparently no medical evidence to support this notion. It is purely a theory. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence suggesting that induction is very risky business, but not many women are given this information. Most women think they don’t have a choice about induction. “They won’t let me go any longer” is something I think we have all heard a woman say, but in fact it is your choice.
Continue reading Induction
By Pernille, on August 17th, 2010 
What do we need to know to be able to give birth? If I say our bodies are designed to birth, then why do we need to prepare and do anything else?
Birth happens in the old part of our brain. This is the instinctual and primordial part. We also have a new part of our brain though. If we didn’t have that new part, which makes us ‘thinking beings’ full of emotions, very analytical and conceptual etc, we would just birth.
But we do!
Birth has always been part of families and life in the tribe. As little girls we would have seen and heard other women give birth and we would have seen them cared for afterwards as well. These days we also have birth around us, although no where near as much and these days it is mostly through media. So what do girls, women and I suppose boys and men too, get taught about birth in our culture before they are even ready to have their own? What do we learn from TV, tabloids, story after story of horrific experiences from friends and relatives? Mostly birth is portrayed as an emergency with green cloths and mum or baby nearly dying. Or it is the “one contraction birth” in the courtroom in front of the judge and jury.
As a culture we are also very influenced by celebrities, how they birth and how they look in perfect shape with flat stomachs within weeks of having their baby. In Denmark Princess Mary has now had two births with epidural and it has started an epidural epidemic. She is now pregnant with twins, so lets see what trend that can bring on.
Apart from all this most of us give birth in institutions that have nothing to do with instinct and primordial knowledge. This is a completely different kind of knowledge which is needed to birth in our modern hospital culture. More after the jump…
Continue reading What we need to know
By Pernille, on October 23rd, 2009 
I recently had the opportunity to borrow those movies called: “Being Dad”. I was very positively surprised by the first one, but it also raised a whole lot of questions in me.
The movie shows three or four groups of men talking about their experiences and it is really relaxed and, I think, quite honest talk. It also shows the producer’s own journey as his wife is pregnant as they are filming and we actually see the birth of their daughter. The question it raised in me though is this: what is shown in this movie is very mainstream and is what’s likely to happen to a lot of people. In that way I think it is really valuable. But on the other hand by showing this view, I feel like it also confirms that this is normal and how birth is! And it is not!
I wonder if there is a way we can honour couples with the real picture and at the same time make them realise that this is not what birth is actually supposed to be like. It is not supposed to have bright lights, it is not supposed to be dominated by medical equipment, monitors, gas, epidurals and vacuum extractions. This should be extreme cases only. But it isn’t. This is very normal particularly in the cities. So do we do ‘parents to be’ a favour by showing this real stuff or are we just helping Obstetricians do what they do? It is a little bit like the question of whether you talk about and prepare for pain or not. I would love to hear what other people think about this!
By Pernille, on September 7th, 2009 
I wanted to write something about fear. Today at BaBs (Birthing and babies Community group) our topic was ‘Ceasarean, what is it, and how to have a good one’. And no pregnant women turned up! So we were sitting there with three women, two who had their babies at home and one who came especially because she had two ‘good’ ceasareans. We had the most interesting and very passionate discussion about ceasareans though, and how women who have had one get treated by other women. And we talked a whole lot about preparing for birth and facing the fact that birth can turn into a ceasarean. More after the jump…
Continue reading Facing the fear
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