This is your birth - reasons to create a birth plan.

A birth plan can encompass so many different ideas.

By researching, talking about and making one you will be asking yourself the following questions:

Where do I want to give birth?

Who do I want to support me?

What are my beliefs about birth?

Do I have the skills to remain calm and confident in labour and birth?

Have I considered the many paths that my labour and birth may take?

It will be these core questions that will then help you to work through the details such as post-dates birth, unplanned interventions, the ability to change plans if need be and how you wish to feel, move and behave during labour.

This isn't anyone else's experience.
Nobody but you will own this birth.
It is so easy for us to be twisted and turned by other people's expectations of us, whether that be our friends and family or our care-givers. A hospital protocol may feel like a brick wall. But it isn't. Everything is open for debate.

You can shape, move, alter and learn. And it is worth it to do so. A birth plan (or proposal if you prefer) stops you from going in blind, or at the whim of others. It doesn't need to be set in stone but can act as a learning experience, a guide or a steel beam to your beliefs and hopes around the birth you wish to have.

So have a think. Read a broad spectrum of books (Sara Wickham, Ina May Gaskin, Natalie Meddings, Rachel Reed, Milli Hill, AIMS, BIRTHRIGHTS). Get in over your head. Then become the knowledge.

Do this before you go into labour. Don't wing it. Prepare yourself....you will be so glad that you did.

This is your birth. See, sense, feel and imagine what you would like it to be like.