Is HypnoBirthing for You?

A comical scene from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” depicts a doctor about to help a mother deliver a baby. In a room full of machines that go “ping” he says to the patient, “Don’t you worry. Leave it all to us. You’ll never know what hit you.” The mother then asks, “What do I do?” to which the doctor replies, “Nothing, dear, you’re not qualified.”

Whether it’s Monty Python’s wickedly satirical but all-too-familiar condescending delivery room doctors, or Amy Poehler’s frantic labor screams in the movie “Baby Mama,” Hollywood’s dramatized and comedic depictions of childbirth in a hospital setting are enough to give prospective mothers pause.

Whether good or bad, in the United States, there is a strong tendency toward medical intervention during childbirth. Here are some statistics:

• Cesarean births remain high: Since 1985, the World Health Organization (WHO) has considered the ideal rate for cesarean or C-section births to be between 10%-15%. However, in 2019, U.S. births by C-section were 31.7%, more than double WHO’s recommendation.  Even the low-risk cesarean delivery rate was 25.9% in 2020.
• Epidurals are the norm: 68.1% of all women received epidural/spinal anesthesia when giving birth for the first time.
• Induced labor is relatively common for vaginal births: 31% of mothers birthing vaginally were given Pitocin to speed up their labors.
• Unrequested episiotomies (cutting to widen the birth canal): According to a 2013 survey of 2,400 first-time moms who gave birth in hospitals in the U.S., over one in five had an episiotomy. 59% of them were not asked if they wanted it.

Despite these statistics, there are still many women and pregnant people in the U.S., and especially in the Pacific Northwest region, who desire and plan to have a “natural childbirth,” meaning a vaginal delivery without pain medication or medication to start or speed up labor. “An innate knowingness that natural childbirth has to be simpler than medicalization” drives couples with a trepidation of hospitals and medication to contact Phyllis Moses. Vancouver-based Moses refers to herself as a health educator and is a certified HypnoBirthing®* childbirth educator (CHBE), certified yoga therapist through International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT) and a certified Hypnotherapist (CHT). Her career path followed her own pregnancy and natural childbirth, based largely on one of the only books available when she gave birth: “Spiritual Midwifery” (Book Publishing Company, 1975), now in its fourth edition, by Ina May Gaskin, whose work in the field of midwifery is legendary.

As a prenatal yoga instructor, Moses’s students’ difficult labor stories concerned her. Then one of her students told her about listening to a HypnoBirthing tape, half-asleep after twelve hours of hard labor. Within an hour and a half, her student’s dilation shifted from three to ten centimeters. Intrigued, Moses followed up with other HypnoBirthers and midwives who said they’d never seen anything like it. Similar to prenatal yoga and her own delivery, HypnoBirthing focused on breathing, centering and relaxing, with the addition of more experiential, educational program elements.

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