Be Comfortable with Those Who Give You Care

Most important in choosing a physician, midwife, or group practice for your maternity care is that you be comfortable with the thought of working with this person or group. You must have confidence in the individual or individuals, and this in itself is a good reason for looking into their qualifications and attitudes before making a commitment to them for example, you have strong feelings that you wish to breast-feed, it is not good for you to get your care from someone who is cool to the idea.The same goes for the conduct of labor. If you have attitudes about or experience with fetal monitoring, you should find out whether it is practice where you intend to deliver to require it or to individualize its use. If you have had a previous birth by cesarean and wish a vaginal birth, you should find out the attitudes toward such care on the part of those you choose to assist you in labor. What do you want your main source of pain relief to be? If you want to use relaxation, breathing, support. massage, and other nonpharmacologic remedies as much as possible, make sure your physician or midwife is comfortable with these options and won’t pressure you into medications or epidural anesthesia. If you want an episiotomy only on indication and not routinely, make sure that your obstetrician or midwife doesn’t believe in routine episitomy. If you want rooming-in with your baby 24 hours a day, but the hospital where your physician or midwife delivers does not provide for that you might think about switching providers. If you want an intravenous (IV) feeding tube only if you are dehydrated or need it for labor augmentation or medication, but the hospital at which your physician or midwife attends births insists on routine IVs, then you might want to find a provider at another facility, or consider a birthing center-or compromimise and have an IV

The fact that you have gone to a provider or facility does not mean that you are contracted to stay with it, if it turns out in the course of prenatal care that you are not at ease. If necessary, discuss this candidly with the people who have been providing your care so some resolution of the problem can be worked out amicably. Most of us who provide maternity care consider prenatal care as a commitment to follow through. We are often aware of the women who are uncomfortable in our care and are quite accepting when such women transfer themselves elsewhere. Of course, care will not be refused when you don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with your practitioners. Try to continue to raise your concerns and come to compromise solutions if you have no choice, as when you live in a small town and there are no alternative providers.

If you have trouble raising your concerns, something is a miss. You should never feel silly asking any question, you should not feel rushed, you should never feel that your concerns are made to seem trivial. It’s an old cliche, but the only silly question is the one you didn’t ask.

If you discover at the end of pregnancy that you are unhappy with what your practitioner is offering for labor and birth, you can certainly switch providers even at that late date, although some practitioners and birthing centers will not accept a woman late in pregnancy.