Why Didn’t it Work?

By: Gail Tully
May 11, 2022
Community Updates, Monthly Update

Why didn’t it work? Many birthing parents come to us with this question. In this month’s newsletter, we are looking at that in-depth with an exploration of the Models of Birth and Spectrum of Ease.

You might notice that at Spinning Babies® our name implies we begin with the baby. We get pregnant and birthing parents’ attention by promising the baby ease in positioning. To help the baby we empower the mother or birthing person with knowledge of their body and what to do for and with their baby. Two bodies dance in gestation and birthing. Let’s provide for both no matter what their philosophy or setting they give birth in.

We offer The Three Balances SM as a starting point. We offer Daily Essentials, a video of daily movement, to develop suppleness and range of motion. Top, bottom, front, back, and side-to-side, our recommended activities and body balancing favorites are ways to bring more bodies to balance for birthing.

Awareness that your body may need, allows you, the owner of your body, to start with your body and do more than one activity. You may add a bodyworker like an Aware Practitioner to help overcome the effects of over-exercising, sitting for work or accidents, etc. Many will get savvy about birth through classes with a childbirth educator or choose a Certified Parent Educator to learn how to use the Spinning Babies® approach for an easier birth.

With options,
Gail Tully

Models of Birth

The one big request coming to our help desk can be summarized something like this, “What should I do to ensure I’m doing the one best thing to have the birth I want?” (The words “the birth I want” could be substituted with “the safest birth”, “healthiest birth”, “a vaginal birth”, “a pain-free birth”, or ”one with less time and pain than my first” and “with the situation I have”)?

Advertising teaches us to seek one thing (their thing) to answer our needs. If there were one thing I could do for a vaginal birth?…. Yet birth needs are physical, emotional, spiritual, and conceptual. Conceptual means, how do I make sense of this information? What can motivate me to take action? Give me a reason and make it easy to relate to. Once the person has the storyline, the basic request is, “What do I do and when do I do it?”

And then, it better work.

Spinning Babies® offers you a third perspective to meet your desire for an easier birth. What does this mean? When entering the professional world of childbirth (education and care) pregnant parents find two seemingly opposite philosophies when they seek what’s best for them. These two points of view could be labeled as Natural Childbirth on the one end, and Technological Advancement on the other end.

We set the standard for physiological birth preparation. Spinning Babies® empowers your choices in childbirth.

Any model isn’t fully accurate to what a person may experience while going through pregnancy and birth care. The model is just a way to talk about values held while making choices.

Trust the body and trust birth or turn yourself over to policies and procedures. Let nature take its course or do everything we can to assure a live baby. These words are charged with value. We can reduce judgment by choosing more neutral descriptions. There is a value to both body-led physiology and the management of bodies. Both meet real needs. Both actually have benefits. When both bodies in birth function pretty well, technological and pharmaceutical interventions are not likely to improve outcomes and may statistically decrease optimal outcomes of birth and bonding. When the body (or body-mind) hasn’t been supported and isn’t functioning ok, then interventions can be lifesavers, appreciated support, or, at least, relative support. Bodies can correct themselves but sometimes time for optimizing physiology isn’t available under the conditions at hand.

Both birth polarities have value within their context. A polarity becomes polarization only when we try to suppress the opposite value. Conflict and poor outcomes can increase with the suppression of human needs. For several decades, resistance to the overuse of technology at the expense of personhood has been reactive. In that reaction, emotions rise and people get judged. Parents sometimes find they are picking sides just to get birth care. Emotional bonds then make the ideology stronger – and options for care more limited.

Polarity really means we have needs in multiple directions. We need security yet we need choice. We need support yet we need to direct our own lives. We need to connect with professionals for advice and expertise yet we need to experience and trust our own bodies to secure a relationship with ourselves.

Nobody likes to be limited to one way of relating to important and complex human experiences like birth. People’s needs also aren’t met completely in one single model, even though one can relate more comfortably within a single point of view. In the 1980’s the conversation about polarities in birth compared midwives and doctors, then midwifery and medicine, or natural birth vs. technological birth. We moved from judging people and professions to getting closer to the relevant points of a polarized dualism.

A third perspective gets us off the polarity ping pong game of raging ideologies. Imagine the benefit for birth when there is no more polarization. We unite the talents and gifts of all. Our third perspective is physiology. Physiological birth increases the intelligence of “natural birth” practices and puts technological interventions in their optimal rate of use (seldom). For twenty years Spinning Babies® has sought to improve our understanding of physiological birth techniques.

The Spectrum of Ease

The Spectrum of Ease is a spectrum from easy to challenging for birth. Our body may start closer to ease or way over at OMG. Wherever we start, we want to match our strategy to our body’s need for balance.

For instance, if really tight muscles along the sides of our spine and lower back pull our pelvis out of place we may need to release that chronic tension to realign our pelvis so the baby can find room to turn. In that case, a Side-lying Release might not work without Dip the Hip or a rapid rub of the right rump. That’s why we say, address anatomy all around the womb, above and below, in front and in back, and along the sides. Make room for baby.

Some bodies have movement, suppleness, and a full range of motion. Other bodies have stiffness, reduced range of motion, and low thyroid or blood sugar effects on motivation and energy. Sometimes our time or opportunity isn’t more than our doubts or creative problem-solving. Hey, it’s not our fault. We’re just living here on Earth… in gravity, being pulled into inertia. Maybe we’ve fallen, been in an accident and twisted our pelvic and hip muscles, or overexercised our pelvic floor to be a steel vault. No way that baby is getting through in one night of contractions.

A few moves a day and a body balancing date each week, you can grow supple, savvy, and smart about birth. Much is available to you for a less painful, probably shorter, and perhaps more spontaneous birth.

The spectrum of ease invites awareness of how little or how much to do without being ridiculous or exhausting to ourselves (which would increase the stress that causes tension).

When a person with years of tension or even torsion in their body seeks a spontaneous, “natural” birth the outcome is not the same as for someone whose pelvis and uterus are aligned for ease. The labor might be long and painful or the baby, uterus and pelvis may not line up together for the baby to come out with contractions. In this instance, a technological birth saves them from suffering or harm. If the birth is premature and the uterus isn’t receptive to induction, or the entire body might be ill, natural birth doesn’t match the circumstances and the birth is started and finished with the advanced skills and technology for complicated births. Thankfully Obstetrics has options to save lives. And also thankfully, Spinning Babies® offers a path of preliminary body balancing and range of motion for the pelvis to let the baby turn through the pelvis and come down in the beautiful choreography of bodies in birth.