News:
Our sister site BirthChoices.co.uk is now up & running, so please check it out for loads more useful information about pregnancy & birth for mothers & health professionals. It's a great resource, plus you'll find a free directory of local pregnancy & birth services in your area. Bear with us - we're still building the 'villages', but hope to have them all in place very soon.
See you there, Jayne.

WELCOME!

If you believe that giving birth is a normal function of the female body & not a medical event, then you've come to the right place. Alternatively, if you believe that Drs are gods and are always the safest bet to help you give birth - then please take a good look around, come back to me later & we'll have a chat.

Your Baby Your Body is a website that aims to give you comprehensive access to factual research & information about your birth & your pregnancy that the medical profession may be slow in offering (either because they don't know the facts or they don't want you to know them) so that you can make an informed choice about your maternity care.

Feel free to browse, but I recommend that if you do nothing else today, please visit these 4 vital sites that are packed full of extremely useful information:

www.aims.org.uk - Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services - An invaluable library of research-based articles on maternity care & an organisation that's full of brilliant advice & support should you need it.

www.homebirth.org.uk - even if you don't want a home birth, this site offers you fantastic information on most aspects of pregnancy & birth.

Fish Can't See Water - an article that will open your eyes as to where the medical profession is going wrong.

One Mother One Midwife - a campaign to get the Independent Midwives Assoc.'s Community Midwifery Model launched. If you want to make birth better for all women in the UK, please go straight to this site for more info & to sign the petition - do it now, quick before you forget.

The key to a successful birth is woman-centred, midwifery-led continuity of care, where the mother retains full autonomy over her body & is able to make fully informed decisions as her labour progresses. By giving you access to all this information, I hope you will go on to have a positive birth experience & not an out-of-control, drugged-to-the-eyeballs nasty business that has unfortunately become the norm in our hospitals today.

STOP THE HORROR STORIES

In the UK most women, especially first time mothers, are being cheated out of a good birth experience because the current system is so heavily biased towards medical opinion (not medical fact) & a factory production line mentality. The result? Cascades of intervention - which are not only damaging to your body & your psyche but also to your baby. Think about it - how many women do you know who have given birth in hospital & do not have a horror story to tell?

Only when you know the full picture can you make informed decisions about your care. This website collates links to reliable sources of information based on research to help you make those crucial decisions connected with your pregnancy & birth. It's pretty hard to believe, but most Drs base their opinions on anecdotal evidence NOT hard research, which explains why their advice is often skewed & biased as opposed to being sound, objective & founded on factual information.

Don't get me wrong - I believe that hospital Obstetricians can do an amazing job. They are experts in abnormal birth & lifesavers when things go wrong. However, their routine use of interventions in perfectly normal labours - such as induction, epidural, syntocinon, forceps, episiotomies etc - are actually CAUSING more problems than they currently remedy.

Obstetricians should act as an emergency service. In an ideal world, they'd hang around like a Firefighter, playing pool & watching Sky until the alarm is activated, signalling that a difficult labour needs their incredible expertise.

Instead, they make it their business to go about interferring with perfectly normal labours & create unnecessary problems in order to train Junior Doctors, 'speed up' the women in their care, empty beds & keep the factory production-line moving.

Sticking with the Firefighting theme, just imagine if every Firefighter, as soon as they had clocked on for a shift, ran around town starting small fires - only to return to each fire later on in the shift to put out their escalating infernos. Well, that's virtually what hospital Obstetricians get up to - instead of only turning up if an emergency crops up, they're actually wandering about like pyromaniac firestarters, performing routine inductions, for example, which invariably lead to further complications.

But to understand that, you have to go through a paradigm shift in mindset.

The majority of births - that is at least 80% - need no intervention whatsoever. The medicalisation of birth during the last century has led women to believe their useless bodies are incapable of producing & expelling a baby without medical help. But what makes Doctors believe that they know better than millions of years of evolution? Why do they have such a deep-rooted mistrust of nature? And, come to think of it, why do they have to be so bloody rude with it, arrogantly talking down to you like you're a total imbecile?

Now I've said all that, one final word - although all the research suggests that the least amount of intervention means better outcomes for mothers & babies, there are times when a labour doesn't go according to plan & intervention becomes necessary. However, if you do have to enter into the care of firestarters obstetricians at some point, I hope this website has helped you to ask the right questions of the medics so you can make much better informed choices & retain ownership of your birth.

Fundamentally, Your Baby Your Body is about old-fashioned common sense. And by the way, Doctors aren't gods - they're human beings, often with feelings, who make mistakes too.