Calmbirth – Reframing what birth looks & feels like and changing our birth culture.

As a girl I grew up exposed to mainstream media in which birthing women on TV or in the movies were always portrayed to be screaming, swearing at their partners, and huffing and puffing whilst squeezing their partner’s hands so tightly, and pushing their babies out so hard that I thought that they would both pass out! Even today, with everything we know about birth, these prevalent stereotypical images become deeply ingrained in us as individuals, and in our culture, influencing our beliefs and perceptions of labour and birth –  planting seeds of fear and doubt around giving birth.

But not all births are like that and nor do they have to be!

Calmbirth strives to challenge our cultural beliefs and perceptions around birth, reframing what birth actually looks and feels like, empowering women to trust and work with their bodies, and educating their partners and caregivers to provide the support they need. This enables women and their partners to then experience birth as a normal part of life and creating positive birth experiences.

The primary emphasis of Calmbirth is understanding the mind-body connection and how a women’s state of mind, in fact a couples state of mind, can influence the labour and birth process in many different ways, physically as well as emotionally.

Calmbirth assists couples to retrain and reprogram their response to stress, instilling confidence in so that they can work with birth on all levels. It teaches couples to be proactive in their births as opposed to reactive.

The Calmbirth program also includes fear release techniques through guided relaxation, to help couples reframe their beliefs about Birth, moving past any negative emotions around birth and replacing them with emotions that instill confidence.

As Caregivers and providers of quality and evidence based childbirth education our job is to challenge the present birth culture that is based around fear and unnecessary medical interventions and to provide couples to be with all the knowledge, skills and tools they need to work together to create the best birth for them and their babies and to empower them with information about all their birth choices.

We are proud to say that our Calmbirth program is changing birth culture. As Australia’s leading Childbirth Education Program and now that Calmbirth is part of the antenatal structure in both private and public mainstream maternity hospitals in NSW, we will continue to do our part in improving the birth outcomes for birthing families and shifting the cultural perceptions of birth.