Pregnancy & Baby 

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Birth plan? You're joking

In an ideal world it should all go swimmingly to plan. But, when it came to it, Fiona Gibson abandoned all hope of planning her baby’s arrival.

My baby was due in three weeks. ‘Have you made a birth plan?’ enquired a friend. If I had made one, I wouldn’t have told her. Share your birth plan and you’re opening a catering-sized can of worms. ‘Of course, so-and-so did it naturally,’ my friend continued. ‘No drugs. Not even gas and air. And the baby popped out like a pea.’

This didn’t seem the ideal moment to confess that I fancied the idea of a whopping dose of diamorphine. Hell, it’s one of those rare occasions when it’s perfectly acceptable to take drugs, and you don’t have to find your own way home afterwards.

But naturally, no one knows precisely which drugs they will require during childbirth. That’s the bizarre thing about birth plans: even if it’s your 11th child, you cannot be certain whether the baby will make a speedy Bird’s Eye exit or require the assistance of forceps. Yet you’re somehow expected to plan for this. A friend of mine insisted: ‘I want the baby delivered onto my stomach.’ Yet, when it actually happened, she said she would have preferred the child to be cleaned up while she enjoyed a nice cup of tea.

Birth plans have their uses, of course. They force you to think about what’s to come. You can waddle along fantasising that your baby will emerge fully attired in fleecy garments from Gap; figuring out your birth plan forces you to acknowledge that the process may be a teeny bit messy.

First time around, I gleefully joined the birth plan club. ‘I shall use this,’ said a serene redhead at our NCT group, wafting a bottle of Bach Rescue Remedy. Another woman was adamant about the birth pool option, until she witnessed a video showing an awful lot of thrashing about and little in the way of relaxed floating.

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