Realistic Childbirth Education Classes
An authentic childbirth preparation class opens the mind and instills a hopeful attitude and a sense of proportion…impart dignity and a sense of awe toward the birth process, the life a woman is carrying, and the woman herself. They should enlarge a woman’s – and a couple’s – vision about the significance of what they are undertaking in bringing a baby into the world, and what the baby – and the mother – will need, emotionally and physically, in order to thrive.
Many women looking ahead to labor worry that childbirth pain will prove too much for them and that they will somehow ‘give way’ and reveal their true selves. The implication is that our ‘real’ selves are nastier than the images we ordinarily present to the world – and that we require a sort of mask to hide the unpleasantness of our inner natures.
Giving birth is painful, and it takes a tremendous physical effort for most women, especially a first birth. Women don’t benefit from being lied to about the reality of childbirth, but they also don’t benefit from childbirth classes that reinforce abnormality, romanticize birth technology, or support practices that are likely to hurt women and babies and their families.
We need approaches in childbirth classes that are fluid enough to adapt to different women’s personalities and the varied choices they make; also giving a woman the best opportunity to adjust to any sort of labor.
What is Needed, Birthing Classes Los Angeles
In one sense, a childbirth preparation class is medical, involving knowledge about physiological changes and common practices; in another sense, a childbirth preparation class is working through feelings and adjustments to a phase of life, a different image of the self, and a different social role.
Information is power. Not knowing about [these] things means that she is rendered powerless in childbirth. Without information, a woman is merely at the receiving end of whatever is done to her and whatever trivial choices she is “permitted” to make.

Childbirth education classes must not be about something which simply happens to a woman, in which the question of how to cope with pain is paramount, but about a process of emotional awakening – an expression of herself.
Her first task is to empty her mind of expectations and judgments that narrow the possibilities for coping with pain, surprises, and the hard work of labor. Being “empty” will allow her to receive, moment-by-moment, the messages conveyed by her body, mind, and heart.
Giving Birth is Important
We have discovered the long-term destructive effects of treating women with disrespect and violence in childbirth. This sort of experience is not easily forgotten. It can shatter a woman’s self-confidence, make her doubt her ability to mother her baby, destroy joy in the expression of her sexuality, and attack her very sense of self. It is psychologically devastating. The woman begins the life phase of caring for an infant with her own needs unacknowledged.
Everything that happens after delivery is the outcome of preceding events. Women need to find support for what their instinct is telling them: labor is valuable, productive, and transformative work, and should not be avoided.
In the act of birth, society is changed irrevocably…when a woman pushes one small, screaming baby out into the world, she is in that moment transforming her relationships with her partner, mother, and father, other children, sisters and brothers, and grandparents, friends, and colleagues – and her partner’s relationship with all these people, too.
Adapted from writings by Suzanne Arms, Sheila Kitzinger, Pam England
https://birthingfromwithin.com/
For birthing classes Los Angeles, try Supported Birth – a birthing class for your new life.