For many years, decades, women have gone to hospitals to give birth with confidence because "doctors know what they have to do" and no one has been forced to go against them, no matter how instrumentalized the deliveries were and for more than things were done by protocol that were not necessary or actually beneficial.
As palace things go slowly, we now live a strange moment in which many women have more information than many professionals and in which new gynecologists and new midwives come to work with knowledge and theories that in many hospitals not only do not they are carried out, but they are seen as useless, excessively modern and "laughing."
Given this situation, in order for women to express their wishes in relation to childbirth, it began to be used the Birth Plan, a document that should be considered sacred (It should be mandatory, I think) and that really, right now, looks like toilet paper.
The gap between the knowledge of new and old professionals
We come from paternalistic medical care, that in which health is the responsibility of doctors and patients are passive subjects. The doctor has the knowledge, it is who decides and who tells you what you have to do and what you do not have to do. And if you don't, it makes you angry.
We come from there, but we are in a process of change in which medical care must be based on information, on prevention, on offering the user (or patient) the knowledge so that be he who decides what to do.
This is what should happen when a woman is going to give birth: receive adequate, current and truthful information so that she can make the relevant decisions.
This is, in theory, the way new professionals work, those who leave universities, prepared to be secondary actors in childbirth. The problem? That when they arrive at a hospital to work they find a lot of professional leading actors, some trying to take an "Oscar from the Academy", who not only do not let women choose, but give erroneous or biased information (so that the final decision is actually theirs) and that, in addition, ridicule the new, those who have come to change things.
The Birth Plan had to solve this
Until everything changes, women were told that they are the ones who have to make the decisions and they began to offer the possibility of making a birth plan in which they said what birth they wanted, if they wanted with epidural, if they They wanted without epidural. If they wanted to be informed of everything, at all times, or if they preferred to have the information received by another person. If they wanted to be shaved or not, they had an enema or not. If they wanted to have freedom of movement or not. If they intended to be with the baby skin with skin just born or not. And so with many performances that, in reality, They are beneficial for women and babies.
Why? Because because it seems that the new protocols do not reach the hospitals, which continue to do many things very badly, the mothers decided that they could not wait any longer, that if the changes did not arrive from above, they would have to arrive from below, from within, from interested, and began to create these documents so that professionals knew from the beginning what they wanted and so, once there, they did not have to be explaining their concerns and decisions.
But the Birth Plan is still ridiculed
Surely not everywhere, it cannot be generalized, but in many hospitals it is seen as a useless document, a document to laugh at, a document to ridicule, because "they will know what to do in a delivery."
We ourselves made a birth plan for our second child and the midwife looked at him with enough qualms. "You don't want epidural? Well, but if you get nervous we'll put it on you." Forgives? She will tell you when she is there, in the hospital, if she wants it or not. No one has to put or stop putting anything without her saying so and nobody has to decide if she is more or less nervous.
It should be sacred. It should be mandatory. Hospital professionals should receive, when a woman arrives, her history with her data and her birth plan, to see how she wants to give birth, and do everything possible to carry out her wishes (as long as she does not arrive saying that He wants a caesarean section, of course, which is not an option, but a relatively urgent intervention.)
It should be, but it isn't. And it's a shame, because many women are still treated as "crazy people who read four bullshit on the internet and think they already know everything" and all because they feel threatened their aura of power. Do you know those police officers, security guards and military officers who at the time of wearing a uniform grow and abuse their power? Well, with many professionals in white coats the same thing happens.
Ok Now it is OK. Go ahead with the birth plans. Go ahead with the claims. And go ahead with the fight from below. Only then will women give birth as they have to and babies will be born as they have to (and not as others want them to be born).
