Why Is a Birth Plan Important For Black-Body Birthing Families?

How might a birth plan improve birthing outcomes for Black-birthing families? A birth plan is a vision of what you want your ideal birth to look like and what to do if unexpected events occur. It’s a necessary tool to communicate with your birthing team and the medical professionals caring for you. For Black birthing families, it can be the tool which safeguards their birthing experience, inviting confidence into the birthing room. Here are 4 ways a birth plan can improve the birthing experience for Black birthing families:

1. Feeling Confident About Your Choices

There are a lot of choices to make when it comes to giving birth. Where will you be located? Pain relief or no pain relief? Which pain relief? During childbirth, there may not be enough time to go through all the information to make safe, informed decisions. It’s enough to overwhelm just about anybody.

What if you could eliminate this overwhelm by making choices before the big day? By making a birth plan, you can skip the fuss of making last minute decisions and carefully consider how you want your birth to go. Sure, things might not always go to ‘plan’, but you can plan for this too. Emergency C-Section? Plan for that. Hospital transfer during home-birth? Plan for that too. By creating a plan which includes (almost) all possible events and outcomes, you can avoid any surprises and upsets by becoming confident with your choices and back-up choices.

2. Avoiding Unnecessary Challenge on the Birthing Day

Perhaps you’d like to give birth in a way that contrasts from the guidance you’ve been given, commonly known as ‘birthing outside of guidance’. Whilst this is perfectly okay to do, you may experience resistance from those offering you care, simply because there are ‘policies and procedures’ medical professionals have to uphold. Now imagine having these conversations during childbirth.

Reminder: Your birth choices are your own to make, and you should not be made to feel like their wrong because it’s ‘out-of-guidance’.

Making your plan for a birth of this nature is essential. By making a birth plan, you will communicate your preferences ahead of your birth date and navigate any possible resistance to your plan ahead of time. Resistance doesn’t necessarily mean refusal, but rather, it may take a few hurdles to get what you’re asking for. By making a plan, you can avoid jumping these hurdles on the day of birth and instead focus solely on the birth event itself.

3. Self-Advocacy

There is likely to come a time during childbirth when you’re unable to speak for yourself. For moments like this, consider if the people supporting you know exactly what you might choose. Consider how they might speak up for you when you cannot. Consider how much simpler this could be if you had it in writing.

Feeling supported by your birth team and trusting them to advocate for you starts with a plan. By making a birth plan, there will be a written document which upholds your choices. This then allows your birth team to confidently speak on your behalf, ensuring your voice is centred in all decision making. In doing this, you can trust that in moments where you cannot speak for yourself, those supporting you will make the best, most informed choices for you.

4. Preparing for the Unexpected

Childbirth can be unpredictable. You can have an idea in your mind of how you would like things to go, but in the event something unexpected occurs, how might this impact your overall experience? Ultimately, an unexpected event during childbirth does not have to result in a traumatic experience.

Traumatic experiences can occur when there’s chaos in the birth room, you lose sense and control of your surroundings, or you feel overlooked.

Considering the possibility of unexpected events in your birth plan can shift your responses from ‘traumatic’ to calm. Simply by having an awareness of what could happen. By making a plan, you can keep in mind the possibility of something unexpected happening, eliminating the surprise factor, and grounding yourself in calmness should things not go to plan. In doing so, you get to keep your autonomy no matter what happens.

Conclusion

Creating a birth plan is not about having a fixed idea of how you want your birth experience to be but rather, a flexible approach to the unpredictability of birth; choosing flow over rigidity. For Black birthing families, this also adds a layer of protection within potential hostile environments and systems, equipping them against any adversity that could arise.

We cannot expect the hostile systems to be eradicated today but we can ensure that we’re prepared for whatever might come our way.

Would you like support with planning for you birth? Check out our Birth Preparation service as well as The Full Doula Package and discover how The ReBirth Space can support you as walk into new parenthood.

With Compassion,