Birth Preparation and Prenatal Care
With respect to medical prenatal care, two broad categories are recognized by unassisted childbirth proponents:
Assisted: Many women who are planning an unassisted birth choose to have professional prenatal care as part of their birth preparation. This may include regular prenatal visits with a doctor or monitoring by a midwife. Seeking the assistance of a doctor or midwife may allow for discovering risk factors that might make an unassisted birth inadvisable, such as placenta praevia. Professional prenatal care may also help identify risk factors that could be managed so that the unassisted birth can continue as planned. Rather than keep to a traditional prenatal care schedule, some women may also selectively choose prenatal care.
Unassisted: Some women who choose UC also choose to have a medically unassisted pregnancy; i.e. they do not visit a doctor or other birth professional for prenatal care. There are potentially life-threatening consequences of having no medical follow-up in case there are complications.
Read more about this topic: Unassisted Childbirth
Famous quotes containing the words birth, preparation and/or care:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Living each day as a preparation for the next is an exciting way to live. Looking forward to something is much more fun than looking back at something—and much more constructive. If we can prepare ourselves so that we never have to think, “Oh, if I had only known, if I had only been ready,” our lives can really be the great adventure we so passionately want them to be.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Have a care over my people. You have my people—do you that which I ought to do. They are my people.... See unto them—see unto them, for they are my charge.... I care not for myself; my life is not dear to me. My care is for my people. I pray God, whoever succeedeth me, be as careful of them as I am.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)