Birth With Confidence: Savvy choices for normal birth by Rhea Dempsey

Rhea Dempsey

$30.00

Australia’s birth intervention rates are well above those recommended by the World Health Organisation and climbing. In Birth with Confidence, one of Australia’s foremost thinkers on the subject of childbirth explains why normal birth is almost impossible in our current birth culture—and what women can do to beat the odds.

In this accessible, straightforward book, Rhea Dempsey draws on over thirty years’ experience to show how a woman’s choice of caregivers, support team and birthplace, as well as her life experience and personal attitudes to pain, will affect her birth outcomes. Featuring real-life stories, the latest Australian statistics and opportunities for guided personal reflection, Birth with Confidence provides the knowledge and practical advice that women need for the best chance of normal birth in today’s birth culture.

Birth With Confidence will:

• Outline the benefits for mothers and babies of a normal physiological birth
• Help you understand how our current birth culture can undermine your attempts at normal birth and the steps you can take to make sure it doesn’t
• Explain how the various ‘circles of influence’ around you — from your friends and family to the wider culture — can support or sabotage your birthing potential
• Help you identify your own attitude to pain — your ‘pain type’ — and what it will mean for your birth
• Provide practical and emotional steps you can take to raise your pain tolerance level
• Give you a framework for deciding on the best caregivers and support people to help you work through any ‘crisis of confidence’ during labour

Available Now

We are thrilled that this book is making available Rhea’s extensive experience and profound perspective on birth in the “labour by-pass era”. Her work has been highly influential to the practice of our specialist practitioners in their understanding of normal birth. Most importantly Rhea has inspired a heartfelt understanding of the challenges facing the birthing woman and the kind and degree of support they will require in this transformative life stage. As a trainer of birth attendants, Rhea’s work is amply represented by our team of practitioners, most of which have undertaken some component of her work, and many work in the community providing essential support to families in health and birth.

Rhea reclaims the language of birth and women’s experiences: reinstating pain, birth and women’s bodies as normal physiological, spiritual and human experiences, rather than a ‘faulty design’ to be avoided, fixed, manipulated. With normal birth under threat from a culture of fear and medicalization, this work is an inspiring investigation of the complex psychological, physical and societal pressures coming to bare on a process we have been successfully experiencing for eons: birth! Rhea’s capacity to shed light on the complex physiological and psychological factors that influence birth is unique, insightful and transformative.

Her second book Beyond The Birth Plan is an equally essential read for anyone thinking about giving birth or supporting women in birth settings.

Book an appointment with Rhea Dempsey for a birth debriefing or counselling Telehealth session at Fertile Ground Health Group.