Gemma’s Birth Story

Baby Aleksandar
Born 6.36am 21/11/22 on his due date
3.48kg and 50cm

I had such an empowering positive birth with my beautiful son. After having early labour signs on Saturday afternoon, I then moved into established labour at 10pm on Sunday evening and active labour around 2.30am Monday morning.
I laboured at home until 4.30am thanks to the Katie Kempsters hypnobirthing classes I attended with my partner Jonathan. I had the hypnobirthing tracks playing, focused on my breathing, and used my exercise ball until my surges started becoming more intense.

Our doula came over at 4am and helped my partner prepare everything to get ready to go to the hospital as I was nearing active labour. We made our way to the hospital as the sun was just beginning to rise on the horizon and the moon was spectacular in the sky. It was baby time.

After arriving at the hospital at 5am, I immediately got in the bath to try and relieve the pain from my surges. Unfortunately the water didn’t relieve but ramped up my surges and an hour an a half later my baby was born (I was hoping for a water birth but my body had other plans!)

As I began feeling pressure, I went to the toilet however, found that the squatting position over the toilet was the most comfortable for me during that time – there were also rails on either side of the toilet which helped a lot when I was bearing down.
My birth was completely unmedicated with no intervention and thankfully we had a midwife who just stood back and allowed me and my body to go through the process of birthing naturally which is what it is designed to do.

The whole experience was intense and surreal and I am so grateful for my support and practices leading up to this point in time and know that if we had not attended the hypnobirthing classes, that my birth experience would have been completely different as we had no education around birthing at all from interventions to how it should be a natural physiological process.

I had also changed care providers at 36 weeks as we were with a private OB and going private. After raising my birthing preferences with this OB, he immediately started bringing up all the worst case scenarios and used coercive/incorrect language around my preferences. That afternoon we cancelled him and chose to go public and the care from the midwives was much better as they are in support of natural unmedicated births. Changing was one of the best decisions we made during the pregnancy as well. I can’t stress enough to mums that it is okay to change your care provider if you are not 100% happy no matter how far into your pregnancy you are it is your body and everything is your choice.