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:
“TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)
“It’s sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child’s nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.”
—Joyce Maynard (20th century)
““So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)