As pure luck happened there was 2 doctors on staff for the long weekend who had experience in delivering breech babies and were willing to help me out. This meant that I could give birth to my baby boy the way I wanted. It was an amazing experience and one held in wonder by many of the hospital staff having not had a planned breech birth occur at their hospital in over 20 years. I had so many of my midwives and nurses explain how blessed they felt to be a part of the labour.

We have been really keen to share our birth story with you, Karen, and the Calmbirth community.

As I touched on with you during our Calmbirth weekend, I had been told that I had servere cholestasis the day before Calmbirth with my bile acids increasing to 140 from 18 the week before. I had been informed that I would likely need to be induced at 35 weeks which ended up being the case.

I hope our story helps other women who experience cholestasis as I found it be a bit of a lonely diagnosis as it is one of those strange pregnancy induced conditions that aren’t really spoken of and there are only a few well established resources, research or guidelines out there.

Although we only really had a week from attending Calmbirth to the induction, we practiced every day and used as much from the learnings as we could to prepare and it really helped us.

Shannon’s birth story is so empowering because it is such a wonderful example of navigating informed decision-making and choices around breech birth.  I am so glad she had the confidence to critically think and make the informed decisions she felt were best for them and the birth of their little one. Not only do so many women not have the confidence, but they also don’t realise they have a choice and as you know it makes the world of difference.