ABSTRACT
Education for labour and birth should include discussion of how the hormones of labour – oxytocin, adrenalin and prolactin – work with or against each other in the different stages of labour, to facilitate or impede its progress. Educators may be nervous of spending time covering interventions for fear that doing so risks normalising them and implies that making choices about interventions will be part and parcel of the experience of labour. Educators need to keep the women’s chosen birth companions at the centre of sessions. Parents feel supported when the educator gives positive feedback about what they are doing and makes frequent links between the skills they are practising and how and when they might be employed in labour. The educator can initiate a discussion on the significance of women having a safe space in which to labour and give birth.
