Edited by Eugenio Ciuccetti, Obstetrician
Taking part in an accompanying course at birth and a post-natal course means taking care of your psycho-physical well-being - and that of your child - in the most unique and extraordinary moment of your life.
Pregnancy, as a rule, is an absolutely natural and physiological event and every woman possesses within herself all the skills necessary to "make it" brilliantly alone.
Moreover, the nine months of gestation involve a series of important anatomical, hormonal and emotional modifications for the pregnant woman, her body and her mind. Positive and functional changes to a good pregnancy, but such as to involve delicate moments of rupture and reconstruction, redefining oneself, one's image, one's needs and expectations. Every human transformation, every evolution, even the most positive, necessarily passes through paths of articulated intensity. Becoming a mother, from this point of view, is no exception. The deepest strings of one's identity and experience are touched, stimulated and amplified. All personal resources are involved. We move on to a new phase of our existence.
Again, the woman does not need someone to "teach" her how to do it. A figure of this kind, on the other hand, could not exist. Every woman is different from another. Each pregnancy is different from another. There are no absolute and generalizable rules for all, unless we want to reduce the experience of birth to a cold technical event, in which the woman renounces her own skills and centrality, to be reduced to a mere work tool in the hands of doctor and various operators.
What can instead be useful - perhaps indispensable - to the future mother is someone who accompanies her, assists her, supports her and contains her on her personal journey towards motherhood. Someone who knows how to listen to it first. Know how to understand its times and its modalities. Someone who knows how to design and carry out all the stages of this wonderful adventure with her.
There are currently several types of accompanying childbirth courses. Usually they start at the fourth or sixth month of pregnancy; very difficult in the first quarter. The choice of the course in which to participate naturally depends on a careful analysis and evaluation of the organizer, his experience and competence, his nature, his approach, his basic philosophy, his program and his target audience.
Traditionally, it is above all hospitals and health centers that offer this type of service, even if over time, various private associations and structures (including gyms and swimming pools) have emerged throughout the national territory, geared precisely to the organization and alternative offer of this type of activity. .
This is why not all pre-natal courses can be considered equal or interchangeable; and this is why before any final choice, the user should now evaluate and carefully define their real needs and expectations and then compare them with the wide and articulated range of proposals now available on the market.
The advantage of following a pre-birth course in the hospital is generally linked to the possibility of getting to know better the atmosphere, the protocols and the operators of the facility in which you intend to give birth. As well as the presence within the same structure of the doctor or midwife from whom one is followed during pregnancy and from which one would also like to be assisted at the time of delivery.
