VBAC Birth Plan

[tigersmum]

I am looking for a birth plan for VBAC for a friend who is due to birth in the next month. Obviously she is going to hospital. I haven't had a c/sec so I have no idea of what she might need to be considering. However I think that she needs to be considering something more than her current plan which is..."I don't want any drugs, but if all else fails cut me open again"

I'm concerned that with this attitude she will really be setting herself up for another surgical birth whether she wants one or not.

So I was hoping that one of you wonderful women might be able to direct me to a birth plan for VBAC... I did do a search but couldn't find what I was looking for.

TIA

[Heartwood]

Here's a thread I started recently-

http://www.forums.naturalparenting.c...rth+plan+kathy

If she's planning on a hospital vbac, she really needs to research the hospital she's birthing in and also educate herself with vbac info.

[emd]

What Kathy said.

I had a birth plan for my VBAC (which ended up being another CS, but for a medically sound reason). The primary reason for having the VBAC birth plan was to ensure that my specific wishes were followed where there were conflicts with standard hospital policy.

Examples of hospital policies your friend might want to check for her VBAC:
* Time limit - will they push for interventions like AROM, syntocin, or CS after a set time in the delivery suite?
* Canula on arrival - some women prefer not to have a needle stuck in them as soon as they arrive.
* Monitoring - different hospitals have different standard policies, so it's worth checking out. Constant foetal monitoring can impede active labour, reducing her ability to birth the way she wants to.
* Eating and drinking - some hospitals don't allow this. A dehydrated, low-sugar mama will find it hard to get her body to do what comes naturally.

There's lots more but my brain is fried this arvo.

[south_oz_bella]

I have attached Word documents of my birth plans in Zip files for people to look at. I hope they work!

One piece of valuable advice i was given is to write your birth plan as "These are my cultural and social requirements..." so the hospital has to stick with them. You will be free to change things whenever, but if it is just your plan or preference then the hospital has no legal responsibility to adhere to any of it. (And i like the idea of printing the hospital copy on brightly coloured paper, no way that could be missed!)

This is on my midwife's blog, I thought it might be interesting:
I'm in charge - here's my birth plan | Homebirth: Midwife Mutiny in South Australia She's got some great technical advise on birth plans.

We didn't have a birth plan for #1 and really regretted it as some of my wishes just went out the window (i wanted to step up pain relief - gas then pethidine then epidural, but a midwife offered epi before i'd even asked for any drugs. And that led to a cascade of events which led to a caesar.)

So second time around, i wasn't gonna be caught dead without a birth plan. Because we had a planned homebirth, it is split into 2 plans - one for home (for our midwife, student and DD1's support person) and one for hospital which i posted to the hospital earlier to be put in my casenotes. We decided to write a birthplan for home even though we knew our midwife really well and she knew what our goals
were. It was to be really clear, and also to make sure DH and I had thought through what we actually wanted. It sounds like everything is set in stone, but that was just to give us options and keep us in the driver's seat (baggage from DD1's emerg caesar). We hadn't decided on a Lotus birth, but wanted delayed cord cutting, so we wrote it as if we wanted a lotus birth and then when the cord had finished pulsating and we were happy for the cord to be tied and cut we asked the midwife to do it. Also, we had been separated from DD1 for 2 hours after her birth so that was something we were *not* keen to go through again.

When formulating a birth plan, glean whatever you want out of other plans, work out what suits your family and leave the rest. Your birth, your goals and your baggage are very different from mine, so somethings will simply not apply to you. But definitely put in writing anything that is not negotiable for you. That way, everyone is clear.

Amy