Does everyone have a birth choice/ preferences meeting?

[Pregnantpolly]

I have a birth preferences meeting at my chosen hospital in September with the consultant midwife whom I haven't met. I'm due October.
Does she just note down what I say and log it for reference or what's the purpose? It was originally booked for this month but I was unavailable.

@Pregnantpolly I'm also having an appointment with a Consultant Midwife in her birth options clinic. I'm on the high risk Consultant led pathway, but I'm only having this appointment because my community midwife arranged it for me. Your midwife might have done this for you, possibly as part of a new trust policy?

FWIW I will be asking :
-if the hospital birth centre is an option as opposed to delivery suite.
-I also need it noted that I will not have an induction at 40 weeks as suggested by the Consultant and would prefer to proceed straight to cesarean.
-I cannot have pethidine and need that clearly noted to save time.

• the risk of instrumental birth and my preferences if this is required.

Mine was a brief chat with my midwife. If you did any antenatal classes (or have them coming up), then ours covered this in more detail and gave us a template to use. Unfortunately i never got round to filling mine in for various reasons so hastily filled it out in the hospital canteen after being admitted for high BP and forgot to give it to anyone before DD was born 🤦🏻‍♀️

I think if you go on the NCT website, you can look at their doc for free?

Things that i thought about on mine:

• i didn't want pethidine so had that on there
• no to labouring on a bed (a water birth was out for me as DD needed continuous monitoring but i wanted to be as upright as possible. Midwives were brilliant at supporting this even on labour ward and made me a labouring area on the floor so i could be upright for basically the whole thing)
• avoid episiotomy wherever possible
• DH to tell me the sex
• Delayed cord clamping + cord blood donation (if during the time it was available)
• yes to vit K
• immediate skin to skin

Bit of a selected group this though wasn't it? Plenty of, in fact statistically more, women gave birth without begging for "your needle", you just didn't meet them.

What on earth?

Agree with this. I noted my preferences as: I'd like encouragement to adopt active positions during labour, I'd like to be physically supported with a compress to help avoid tearing, I'd like to be verbally advised on how I can reduce chances of tearing while pushing, id like skin to skin with baby immediately if possible, I'd like support to latch the baby as soon as possible, I'd like delayed cord clamping and DH to cut the cord, I'd like a managed 3rd stage, baby should have the vitamin K injection. DH knew all of this off by heart. My DH and I also had agreements between us like if something happened to me he was to stay with the baby and to do stuff like skin to skin for an hour, dress baby etc rather than a midwife taking the baby. I figured the general assumption is that you want to avoid a crash section but that anything can happen, so went with stuff that I knew had benefits to baby and could be adopted in many scenarios.

This is a bit unfair.

I filled in a birth plan form and then kept to it for as long as possible.

We lost ds' heartbeat so all hell broke loose and the plan went out of the window but until then my midwife team was calm, respectful and knew my (very ordinary) preferences.

This was my comment every time I was asked for my birth plan... "well, I'd like to avoid forceps or caesarean, but we can't exactly plan that".

Mind you, I suppose it is called preferences for a reason... I stated that I wanted a pool, dim lighting, quiet environment, etc. and I got those things without having to discuss them while in the throes of labour. I think, for this reason, a preferences document has a valuable part to play... I certainly wouldn't have wanted to answer multiple questions at the time!

It is definitely always good to be mindful that what you plan/want might change. My birth plans stated that I would probably be fine with just gas and air (I was pretty certain of this by the time it came to baby number two) but was open to all options if/when necessary! I'm pretty sure I would have wanted more than gas and air with my first baby if the pool hadn't been available for me to use.

I was a 'hippy woo hypnobirthing mother' and I was lucky to get the births I'd wished for (pool, gas and air, felt pretty relaxed considering I was giving birth) but I tell everyone who asks that you have to just go with the flow and listen to your body... you won't know how you handle giving birth until you're actually doing it and if you need an epidural there's no point in making yourself miserable, you're not going to earn a medal for having no pain relief (and gas and air is a wonderful thing)!

I didn't have a birth plan with my first. I didn't really research and didn't knw what I wanted, but was happy to have all the drugs. Baby had different plan and there was no time.

My birth plan for my second was very simple. I don't want to labour on my back, and I wanted to see the sex of the baby myself rather than be told. That was it.

I wrote nothing at all on the birth plan pages of my maternity notes. I couldn't see the point of trying to plan the unpredictable, so I didn't. That was a good thing because I tended towards complicated births in all three cases, despite reasonably straightforward pregnancies. So any plan would have gone straight out of the window.

Nobody looked on those pages anyway. Not that I can recall, and not that I cared much either.

Oh do fuck off. Birth plans are so women can make informed choices. We know full well we will likely need to deviate.

I had an appointment for the 10th of the month DD was born to discuss a birth plan. However, I was admitted 2 weeks prior to this for induction and I was never once asked if I had a birth plan prior to delivery. When the induction ramped up I was told by my consultant "any plans you had will need to go out the window as baby is coming NOW and we need to get her out"

I'm with Babdoc mostly.

Nice to think about how you might react to some situations but I wouldn't spend too long on it. I wrote down that I absolutely did not want to be at home, that I would like to not have an epidural but wasn't dismissing it out of hand, that water sounded like something nice to consider if it was available at the time. That was about it, nothing like three pages long.

Proud happy woo woo hypnobirthing mother over here who delivered baby with nothing and made no such statement as what you're saying.

My natural birth was incredible.

Perhaps try not to generalise quite so much.

This!