Best Way to Create Your Birth Plan

To help you sort out what you would prefer for your baby’s delivery, we suggest as one tool a “birth plan”—a plan of birth preparation that has become popular in the last few years. The idea is to plan how you would like your pregnancy and childbirth to go. In a birth plan’s barest sense, this means knowing where, with whom, and how you would like to go through labor and delivery—the birth of your baby.

On most journeys, you want to get from point A to point B. On a pregnancy journey, you will first need to decide what you want point B to be. Point B is where you want to have the baby and how. Point A is what health care professional can provide that type of delivery. Knowing where you want to deliver may seem like putting the cart before the horse, especially when you aren’t even pregnant yet. How­ever, the “where and with whom” of your birth options may be con­strained by the kind of insurance you carry, the hospitals or birthing centers located in your area, the availability of medical choices from your OB provider, and by your health status.

During your preconceptual visit you should find out your insurance options for prenatal care and delivery. Ideally, you want a health insur­ance policy that offers a preconceptual visit, genetic testing, prenatal care, ultrasound, infertility diagnosis and treatment, postpartum care, and a choice of:

•  Doctor or midwife
•  Hospital, birthing center, or home delivery
•  Birthing room or a standard delivery room
•  Medication-free birth or use of pain medications

Your birth plan can be as brief as deciding where to have the baby and with whom. Or it can be as detailed as choosing everything you would like to happen during your pregnancy and delivery. You may feel that for now you have no idea how to make these decisions about what you prefer. We’ll explain all of these preferences. We call them “pref­erences” because they are what you would prefer given a complication-free pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Keep in mind that doctors and midwives reserve the right to override the wishes of the couple if you or your baby’s health is at risk.