...to say that birth plans contribute to womens unhappiness around labour?

[CAG12]

Ive read a lot of threads and a great deal of women seem to be unhappy because they didnt get to stick to their birth plan, for many reasons spanning from medical to facilities not available etc. Should women be encouraged to have a loose plan of how they want their labour but also encouraged not to set their heart on it?

Im 23 weeks pregnant and I know ill be asked about my birth plan soon by my midwife. Just gathering opinion! Thanks for reading

With my first I genuinely didn't see the point of a birth plan so I never made one. I figured that I couldn't possibly know what would happen so I would just go with the flow and trust that the midwives etc would know what they were doing.

I'm still pretty surprised with myself because I'm typically a planner, I struggle a lot with anxiety and I normally have difficulty processing things when they don't go according to plan. So I think in some ways you are not being unreasonable because it certainly helped my anxiety in not having a plan as instead I accepted that this was something I couldn't control.

That being said, my labour was so straightforward it may as well have been textbook and I do wonder how I would have felt if I'd experienced problems.

YANBU.

Most people don’t know enough about childbirth and all the possible complications and interventions to have a useful birth plan.
A friend of mine works on postnatal ward and there’s always one mother who has a laminated birth plan demanding candles, aromatherapy etc and condemning all interventions. Of course some of these women end up having emergency sections or assisted deliveries. They tend to feel quite angry and cheated or just depressed about how things went. So no, not especially helpful.

I don't remember ever making a proper birth plan, only get the baby out and give me any drugs I need. I've never felt any disappointment about how my births went. I can never understand why people get worked up about things not going to plan. It's a very unpredictable process.

After ds birth I got the feeling that you might as well leave your birth plan & your dignity outside the delivery room. Nobody looked at my birth plan, I might as well have not bothered, the staff only did what they wanted & totally ignored any input from me, me husband or my mum. Then they wonder why many new mums get PND.

Like what everyone else says - good to have as long as are open minded. I couldn't talk throughout labour so it was good to have it. The midwife was amazing and had clearly read it carefully. It allowed her to anticipate needs and explain things i.e. bringing me the birth ball because plan said I might find one helpful and explaining why she was recommending episiotomy even though I said id prefer not to.

Also it's good for things that are reasonably predictable i.e. vitamin K .

And the process of writing it helped me to look into possibilities so I knew what might happen and it wasn't a huge shock at the time.

Making plans for a scary event makes people feel more in control so it can be a good thing, but yes, it can lead to disappointment later on, so maybe calling it something else, preferences as suggested above, will be better.

No one ever asked to see mine and things went pear shaped so quickly that DH didn't have much of a chance to advocate for me and ensure we got any of the things we wanted (like delayed cord clamping) though he did try where he could.

Good to think about what might happen and what you might want but also to bear in mind it may also all go out the window - some of my requests at the time were entirely ignored which I couldn't care about at the time but actually feel quite annoyed about now.

I was encouraged from the start to have 'birth preferences' by midwives and my hypnobirthing coach, during all conversations about it we all acknowledged that it was my preferences rather than a plan and we discussed what I would like in various scenarios- eg. My preference was for a water birth, but with GD and a big baby requiring induction I knew that was unlikely so had alternate preferences.

As it turned out my serene water birth using only hypnosis and active birthing turned into 19 hour long labour, epidural and EMCS. Because I'd acknowledged that being a possibility and not focused on a birth 'plan' it isn't a big deal. the stay in scbu wasn't as easy to get over but I definitely don't unhappy or any kind of failure around how birth went and I think that is really down to the mindset of preferences rather than plans.

OP, try to think of it as your preferences and think about what you would like in various situations (eg. How do you feel about episiotomy, forceps, c-section etc). You can find loads of examples online as a guide and do discuss with your midwife as well as doing your own research.