What Is Birth Provider Bias and How Does It Affect Your Choices?
In our social and in our work lives we tend to exist in our own little bubbles. These bubbles are informed by our own lived experiences and our day to day interactions.
Sometimes, especially when we are talking about Facebook and Instagram, they are described as echo chambers. This is because our own beliefs are echoed back to us as we remain within our own particular living and working bubbles. This tends to then reinforce our beliefs about what we feel to be true.
When we look at our birth options such as place of birth and who we choose to accompany and support us on our pregnancy and birth journey, it is important to understand the bubbles that we are entering.
I like to think of your birth options as a huge supermarket of choice. It is all there if you are just willing to put the legwork in and look for it. Or ask for directions.
Provider bias is the shiny stuff placed all around the tills. But also the way the entire store has been laid out.
The unspoken message that says “Why walk all that way? Why keep on looking? We have all you need just here… and it’s shiny and good too!”
Now, if you and your providers are aligned in beliefs and wants perhaps you will choose not to go hunting down the other aisles.
But perhaps you should be a little bit curious as to what you may find down there. Right at the back. Maybe it will actually be relevant or interesting to you even if it isn’t what you were first looking for? It never ceases to amaze me how women and the birth partners just say ‘yes’ to anything that they are being told or offered. Now, don’t misunderstand me - you may be offered the perfect thing for you and your baby. However, this may be a wholly inappropriate thing to be offered at this point in your pregnancy or labour. Remarkably enough, just because you may have triggered a hospital protocol it might not be the correct offering for you as an individual, with your own hopes, wishes, complexities, health issues or life-style. It might not even be evidence based.
Home birth, free birth, post dates birth, water birth, obstetric led birth, midwife unit birth, doula supported birth, hypnobirth. Yes to prophylactic antibiotics, no to prophylactic antibiotics, scans or no scans, glucose or not, active or physiological. Big baby or small baby, is it parent size or simply scan inaccuracies?… all of this… it’s all down there, on another aisle just waiting for you to go and explore.
It’s all there if you just go and look.