Writing Your Birth Plan
There are many out there who think either: a birth plan is essential and you should NEVER go into labor without one and you should write EVERYTHING you desire (and don’t desire) in that document. OR you can’t “plan” birth, and people who try to are setting themselves up for disappointment (or at least conflict) and, as a result, care providers often don’t pay much attention to them. As you might imagine, I believe there is, at least, a third way to look at the concept of a birth plan and that the process of writing it is as valuable as the document itself. For some context, let’s look at the history of birth plans. In 1980, Penny Simkin and Carla Reinke presented the birth plan as part of...
