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Ever heard the phrase Rome was not build in a day? Or to see the view from the mountain top you must first climb one step at a time?

Pregnancy is your ‘Rome’ or your ‘mountain’ and some days the climb is going to be difficult and the building slow. As a Physio I want to urge you to be more prepared for this.

If you’re pregnant and trawling Instagram for inspiration, you can’t have escaped the photos of the beaming woman in the birth pool, her partner behind her, their newborn in their arms, the fairy lights twinkling in the background. Even celebrities are getting in on the act, most recently, Hilary Duff shared this beautiful image of her second home water birth.

In Part III of our six-part video series with Dr Sarah Buckley, we discuss ways to close the hormonal gaps created by caesarean birth.

Around the world caesareans are becoming epidemic today – often spurred on by unneeded interventions. Caesareans can be life-saving, but the reduction in unneeded caesareans is the first step in reducing the impacts on Motherbaby. While pre-labour caesarean birth can lead to hormone gaps for MotherBaby, beginning labour before the caesarean birth can limit these effects. This allows hormones such as catecholamine to surge and ready the baby to exit the womb. Skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding are post-labour ways to bridge the hormone gap as well.

The word doula is derived from ancient Greek, and it means a “woman caregiver of another woman.” Dana Raphael first used the term to mean someone who supports a breastfeeding mother in her 1973 book, The Tender Gift.

Today, the word doula signifies a woman, hired by the expectant mother and her partner, to “mother the mother.” Specifically, a doula is a trained professional who provides continuous physical, emotional and informational support to a mother during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period.

Among infants born preterm or at low birthweight, previous research has shown that kangaroo mother care (KMC) reduces infant deaths by as much as 40%, hypothermia by more than 70%, and severe infections by 65%.

Waiting for the arrival of a new member of the family is an exciting time, but growing your family can put great strain on your finances. Fortunately, according to Anel Coetzee, Financial Planner at Sanlam, if you approach your finances together as parents and consider them carefully, such difficulties can be avoided. The key is to take control of your financial future and call in the help of a professional.

Think giving birth is scary? Think again. Milli Hill meets the women who loved every minute.

If ever a PR firm needed a challenge, they could do a lot worse than this: make giving birth sound appealing. This simple act of mother nature has been the subject of such a smear campaign over the past few decades that I doubt even the team who persuaded McDonalds to start selling salads could do anything with it.

Every time birth is on the television, it’s the same old story: panicking woman in agony is rescued by team of medics. Pregnant women could be forgiven for being absolutely terrified, and for saying, “Sign me up for every drug in the book, and get it over with.” Birth is just something we have to endure, a rather gruesome price to pay for the wonderful reward of our babies, right? Surely nobody, anywhere, could possibly enjoy it?

In this edition of the Evidence Based Birth® COVID-19 Newsletter, we provide key details from new research on COVID-19 and pregnancy. We’ll be discussing findings from the v-safe COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry, evidence on the COVID-19 vaccine response in pregnant and lactating people, the first update of the Allotey et al. “living systematic review,” a systematic review of guidelines on COVID-19 and pregnancy, and links to other interesting research that has come out over the last few weeks.

Today’s questions include:

• I plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine even though I am currently lactating. Will I need to pump and dump for a while after getting the vaccine?
• How does access to COVID-19 vaccination vary across the world?
• Could you share more info on the 1-shot COVID-19 vaccine?