Fearless labor and delivery. My review

I’m telling you about Labor and I leave without fear by Emanuela Rocca, mother of three children and freelance midwife in Genoa.

This is a book that every woman should read. Every woman trying to get pregnant, every woman expecting a baby, every woman who has already given birth.

Had I had it in my hands in the last months of pregnancy I would have felt less lost in my anxieties and fears, which I hardly expressed but which traveled subtly in my every thought as a mother in the making.

This book will take you through the mechanisms that cause the pain of childbirth and all the possibilities that we women and mothers of today have available to experience it and manage it in respect of the naturalness of the event and well-being, ours and that of the child.

It’s not a book against the epidural, it’s not a book that wants to ignite controversy.

It is the awareness that pain can be faced without necessarily resorting to medical intervention, it is the guided search towards a strength that on certain occasions (such as labor and childbirth) we doubt we have, we think we do not have and we do not know how to manage or channel . Strength that sometimes makes us succumb.

Or at least I read it in this key.

The book uses technical terms, explained simply and immediately understandable.

Chapter 3 addresses the intensity, duration, and frequency of contractions during labor. With the intervention of a neurosurgeon and acupuncturist, the Theory of the gate  is explained, applied to the pains of childbirth, to the prodromal and dilating periods .
It is explained how the perception of pain is “guided” and controlled by hormones, continuously at play in our lives.

During the reading you will meet brief testimonies of mothers grappling with the story of the stages of childbirth, according to their direct experiences.

We talk about the purpose of pain during childbirth. Very interesting reflection that I regret not having done during my pregnancy. We think of pain only in an extremely negative way, without stopping to think that during labor that pain is “constructive” and projects us towards magic .
Pain is analyzed in three keys:
– as an endocrine stimulator
– as a protector and guide of mother and child
– the pain that matures the woman and prepares her to be a parent.

Chapter 5 talks about epidural analgesia , the correct medical procedure, the ideal conditions for carrying it out, its chemical composition.
It is explained how it can not be performed in all cases and that it can involve risks and complications.

The epidural is a method that is well known in use, but often not well known in its entirety and complexity.

Chapter 6 talks about alternative analgesia , a set of alternative techniques to pharmacological methods with the aim of relieving the pains of childbirth: free movement and change of position, dance and the use of particular positions (static, erect moving, sitting, on all fours…), touch and massage, aromatherapy, reflexology and many others that I had the pleasure of discovering while reading this book which managed to put me at peace with many of my experiences of a difficult birth. Almost a cure, just in reading it.
I won’t dwell on this chapter because my every word would be reductive and not very explanatory. They are techniques and “remedies” on which I regret not having informed myself before, certainly one cannot know everything but I consider it useful to learn about alternatives to the known and “popular”. But this is my thought.

In the last chapter the word is left to the new mothers. Touching, emotional and funny stories. A drop of positivity that is always good.

I’d like to tell you another 1000 things about this little booklet so full of content, but my head is full of personal reflections and I don’t think it’s time to bore you.
This happened to me, I lingered on some pages and I was moved. A birth leaves trails of indelible memories. A child is born and with him another new woman, a mother and with her many responsibilities and awareness. What happens on this path of birth leads us to an encounter with pain, perhaps the strongest we’ve ever experienced.

The perception of this pain changes us. How we deal with this pain can change the perception of the same, for the better.