Book Review by Trudi Dawson
The AIMS Guide to Safety In Childbirth by Gemma McKenzie, Emma Ashworth, Shane Ridley and Virginia Hatton is available from AIMS and costs £8.
I have been a doula for 15 years now, initially training with Nurturing Birth back in 2007. I read ALL the birthy books I could get my hands on in the beginning. Later becoming just as obsessed with books around postnatal care and breastfeeding.
However, as my work as a doula (and number of my own children) has grown, I have so much less time to read all those books. Furthermore, I just want to cut to the new information. It’s not that I have stopped learning (we never stop learning, right?!), but I don’t want to spend the precious time I don’t really have reading something that I have already absorbed elsewhere. Show me the new info and show me it quick!
This is where AIMS often comes in and has been a stalwart of my reading lists for the last 15 years. Short, punchy and up-to-the-minute, even before Pinter and Martin bought out their wonderful shorter reads around birth and the postnatal phase. Ironically, they used to be more like long leaflets, so they have grown longer over the years, not shorter, but they are still a handy ‘pocket sized’ read. Don’t be fooled though, what AIMS material lacks in size, it makes up for in quality information.
The other wonderful thing about AIMS is they are not afraid of offending anyone. These books are honest, bold and straight down the line. Always staying on the right side of outright radical, but also with arguments thoroughly shored up by heaps of research (and I do love a statistic to waft around an antenatal session!).
I’ve never read an AIMS book I didn’t like or learn from, so if you’re short of time, long on learning, but still know that you need to keep your knowledge sharp, AIMS is the place to go.
This latest offering is no exception and I really enjoyed reading it. I’ve earmarked so many pages that I know I’ll come back to time and again, particularly when I know the information in my head or heart, but I want to relay it to a client more eloquently than my addled perimenopausal brain will allow.
Somehow, in just 100 pages AIMS manages to cover such hefty topics such as The Baby’s Legal Rights, Who Decides what is ‘safe’?, a delve into the biomedical model of birth and, my favourite chapter heading – Physiological Birth or Medicalised Birth: which is safest?
I really love the explanation of the different types of research and hierarchy of evidence. This booklet overlays this with historical hospital policies and even the reasons why we might have arrived at various practices within medical care (for example why women are encouraged to give birth on their backs, despite robust evidence to suggest giving birth in just about any other position will result in quicker labour, less intervention and better outcomes for mum and baby).
Another fabulous take-away for my own practise is the ability to be able to unpick for my clients’ absolute risk versus relative risk. It’s really easy to try and reassure a parent-to-be that, although his/her consultant has bandied a risk factor in her already-worried face when she is 40+1, how effective this is with the backdrop of the hospital room and the consultant is always a worry to me. Reading the AIMS chapter on Understanding Risk has given me the tools to help my clients unpick the concern from a statistical point of view, make it personal to their own body/circumstance and then make their OWN decision. And that’s empowering for all concerned (except maybe the consultant!).
The AIMS Guide to Safety in Childbirth offers a really in-depth answer to the question of safety by focusing on supporting the reader to interpret all the issues surrounding birth research, evidence-based medicine, statistics, risks, harm and trauma. It helps to robustly challenge general myths and mis-information in a way that supports choices, rather than takes them away. This is not a book promoting unmedicated birth or lost practises, but a book about empowering us all to support parents, make our own birth choices and feel bold enough to ask really tough questions in the face of medical pressure.
If you regularly find yourself trying desperately to support parents to make their own decisions based on up-to-the-minute latest research, but often worry you come across as a birth radical without a well-formulated and unbiased argument (as I often worry I do!) this is the book for you. And at just £8 it is worth every penny.
Trudi Dawson is a Nurturing Birth doula, breastfeeding consultant and yoga instructor. You can find Trudi through her social media, email or Nurturing Birth Directory listing:
www.facebook.com/motheringmojo1www.instagram.com/trudi_motheringmojo
https://nurturingbirthdirectory.com/doulas/united-kingdom/east-sussex/wealden/trudi-dawson/