HypnoBirthing allows a new state of mind to be a new state of labor

“Vaginal tearing” isn’t exactly something a girl wants to hear.

Neither is “mucous plug” or “bloody show.”  Even worse, things like “complication” or “emergency C-section.”

No wonder mommies-to-be are terrified of the delivery room.

“When I was pregnant, I was totally freaked out about having to give birth,” said Carol Yeh-Garner, licensed clinical social worker turned local HypnoBirthing instructor.  After two relatively easy births of her own and a 40-hour training through the HypnoBirthing Institute, she now teaches classes to help women overcome their fears and take control of their births-naturally.  Since she began teaching in 2007, Yeh-Garner has taught the method to 300 expecting San Diego couples.

The Mongan Method of HypnoBirthing is a childbirth education series that focuses on hypnosis-not as we anecdotally know it, with a man in a turban and a watch on a chain-but rather, a self-hypnosis its creators relate to a feeling of daydreaming or staring into a fire.

Using this method, mothers are allowed to be fully relaxed, but completely awake, involved and in control at the same time.  In this self-confident state, they are able to eliminate the fear and tension that often ignites labor discomfort.  In addition, the program suggests that HypnoBirthing mothers will greatly reduce their need for painkillers, shorten their labor times and conquer fatigue.

According to the HypnoBirthing Institute, the concept started when Marie “Mickey” Mongan gave birth to her four children in the 1950s and 1960s without medical intervention.  She did so by following the theories of Dr. Jonathan Dye and Dr. Grantley Dick-Read, who wrote about childbirth free of fear-and therefore, pain-around the turn of the 20^th century.

“It’s really about empowering moms and their partners to go into their birth educated and informed so that no matter what happens, they still feel like they’re in control of their birth,” Yeh-Garner said.

After a three-day, medically-managed and complication-heavy first birth, a close call on the second and now a month from welcoming her third boy in December, Christina Holt welcomed Yeh-Garner’s change of pace.

Twenty-eight weeks into her first pregnancy in 2002, Holt began experiencing pre-term labor.  At 32 weeks, she was prescribed Terbutaline-a drug used to relax the uterine muscles-and by 36 weeks, she was advised to stop taking it and let nature take over.  Within hours of going off the drug, Holt said, she began experiencing contractions.  After laboring at home for six hours, she was taken to the hospital and told she was progressing.

“I was really, really tense,” she said.  “Every contraction, I would tense up.”

After receiving an epidural, Holt said her contractions slowed.  The nurses started her on Pitocin-a synthetic form of the natural hormone oxytocin, which speeds up contractions and the labor process-and little by little, increased her dosage.

“They just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it,” Holt said.  Then, her doctor broke the water bag.

“There was no turning back at that point, and they had to keep going,” she said.  “Looking back, lucky for me, I didn’t have to have a C-section.”

A few hours later, her first son, Hunter, was born.

Related story:  Doctors, doulas will work together at new birth center

After a similar experience with her second child, Holt now believes that her pre-term labor was false labor and that she was induced too soon.

“I shouldn’t have been admitted,” she said.  “I shouldn’t have had him that early.  I think all that could have been avoided.”

Holt said that her first two birth experiences have pushed her into looking into other options.  Since she found HypnoBirthing, she said, her attitude toward the process has gone through a complete transformation.

“My husband is blown away by the difference,” she said.  “Things get put in your head and you listen to them.  It just takes knowing that there are other options and other ways to do it.”

According to Yeh-Garner, most women factor pain into their births as an inevitable given.

She estimates that about nine out of 10 women who go to the hospital plan on getting an epidural at some point in time because they are convinced that birth is painful and they don’t want to feel any type of pain.

She also said that the possibility of needing an epidural is more likely in a medically-managed birth, especially if the mother is already put on medication, such as Pitocin.

“Generally, depending on the hospital you go to, if your labor is not progressing the way that the hospital wants you to be progressing, they are going to suggest having some Pitocin, which helps to speed up labor, but also makes contractions a lot more uncomfortable, therefore almost guaranteeing that you are going to have to have an epidural even if you didn’t want to have an epidural.”

“I felt like I was running a marathon and being told what to do instead of just doing it,” said Holt of her drug-fueled induction.

Additionally, Yeh-Garner said, most mediated births lead to longer labors and can also cause babies to go into stress, therefore upping the likelihood of an emergency C-section.

But Dr. Nick Capetanakis, a local obstetrician who took Yeh-Garner’s class with his wife, Angie, earlier this year, disagreed.

“For the record, I don’t think necessarily those have been linked,” he said.  “I think that’s one of the greatest debates in medicine.  Even just being an ob-gyn and doing hundreds of deliveries, I can’t say that I think that those interventions increase my rate of C-sections.  I don’t want people to think that those are bad things.”

Even so, one must consider that, as Yeh-Garner said, birthing has also become a huge money-making industry.

“The hospital gets more money if there’s Pitocin, if there’s an epidural, if there’s a C-section,” she said.

While she does not believe that hospitals are pushing those kinds of interventions onto their patients in a malevolent manner, she does acknowledge that hospital staff can get hasty, often needlessly.

According to Breck Hawk, author of “Hey!  Who’s Having This Baby Anyway?” it is a fact that C-section rates in hospitals go up during the week and decrease over the weekend.  Those rates-as well as those of inductions, she said-can go up to as much as 70 percent of the hospital’s births on a typical Thursday.  C-sections are rarely scheduled on Saturdays or Sundays, she said.

Yeh-Garner added that the rates also tend to spike before three-day weekends, before dinnertime and before bedtime.

“The reality of it is that there are some doctors out there who really don’t want to be bothered at dinnertime and they want to be able to go home at the end of their day and not have to come back in the middle of the night.  They want to have their weekends free.”

Dr. Capetanakis, however, stressed that there are other factors involved as well.  Aside from preferential scheduling and complications, C-section rates can also be influenced by the possibility of legal action.

“The C-section rate is not only high because of babies’ complications and things like that; I mean, there are a lot of physicians who are afraid of litigation,” he said.

According to a release by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in September 2009, because of medical liability, ob-gyns across the U.S. are forced to make changes to their practice that ultimately hurt their patients.

ACOG’s 2009 Survey on Professional Liability stated that more than 63 percent of ob-gyns report making changes to their practice due to the risk or fear of liability claims or litigation and 60 percent have made changes to their practice because liability insurance is either unavailable or unaffordable.

Despite that, natural birthing is not without its risks.

“I sometimes worry about people who get too caught up in this and want to have a home delivery because they hear that having a baby is natural and it is what your body is meant to do,” said Angie Capetanakis, who birthed her baby without any interventions-but in the comfort of a hospital, just in case.  “While that is absolutely true, I think that most of us forget just how many women died in childbirth before the advent of modern medicine.”

Though it is not required-or even strongly suggested-that the parents in Yeh-Garner’s classes opt for a completely medication-free birth, a large portion of her class is focused on reversing the myth that interventions are necessary and that pain is always associated with labor.

“By the time [clients] have finished the five classes, they’ve learned the physiological reasons for pain in labor and why there does not have to be as much pain or pain at all,” she said.  “They’ve been able to kind of de-hypnotize themselves of the idea that birth has to be this traumatic, horrible, painful experience.”

They key is to employ the power of the mind.

To illustrate its strength in class, Yeh-Garner asked her students to stand and hold both arms in front of them while closing their eyes.

In the right hand, she asked them to imagine they were holding a bucket of sand.  In the left, they were to pretend to hold a giant bouquet of helium balloons.  When they opened their eyes moments later, each parent found their right arm lower than the left.

Next, Yeh-Garner introduced some new vocabulary.  Thanks to the media’s fascination with pregnancy, even kids are familiar with terms like “contractions” and “water breakage.”  And if they’ve ever seen a birth on TV or film, they know it means pain.

Mental connections such as those are not likely to go away as we get older.  Instead, Yeh-Garner said, they turn into fear.

If birth is supposed to feel painful in one’s mind, she said, the body will interpret any unfamiliar feelings-pressure, sensation, tightening-as pain.

That pain is then translated into tension, she said.

“If you tense up, your body tends to go into a fight or flight response, which then makes all the blood and oxygen go away from the uterine muscles, into the heart and lungs.  Then the uterus can’t do what it needs to do to birth the baby.”

By using an alternate, gentler language-substituting “contraction” for “surge,” for example-HypnoBirthing supporters like Yeh-Garner believe that mothers will be able to change the way they think about birth.

Laura Fairchild, co-owner of Babies by the Sea Boutique in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, was able to birth her son, Rion, naturally by thinking this way.

“Everything that is happening is supposed to be happening,” she said.  “Once you’re educated, you’re not as scared.”

While skeptics may say the HypnoBirthing method is suited for only a select few-those with an innate desire to birth sans intervention, or those with a knack for meditation, perhaps-Yeh Garner and Dr. Capetanakis argue that that is simply not true.

“Sometimes, some women put a lot of pressure on themselves to let things go without any pain medicine,” Dr. Capetanakis said.

The reality, he said, is that childbirth can be uncomfortable and there is nothing wrong with taking advantage of your options in terms of pain relief-even if you are HypnoBirthing.

As far as concentration is concerned, practice makes perfect, Yeh-Garner said.

In class with Dr. Cap (as he’s commonly known), Angie Capetanakis had a hard time getting focused.

“I’ve never been able to visualize,” she said.  “The class was difficult for me in that respect.  I would close my eyes and see black.”

Despite those hurdles, Angie was able to have a pain-free labor.  After only three pushes, she and her husband welcomed a baby girl named Yianna into the world.

“They put her on my chest and she was so tiny,” Angie said.

And that, Dr. Cap said, is really the bottom line.

“The whole process is a miracle and how you get there doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the end result.”

Jennifer Reed is SDNN’s heath and wellness editor.  She can be reached at jennifer.reed(at)sdnn.com.

Tags: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Angie Capetanakis, birth, Breck Hawk, C-section, Carol Yeh-Garner, childbirth, Christina Holt, Dr. Nick Capetanakis, epidural, HypnoBirthing, HypnoBirthing Institute, labor, Laura Fairchild, Marie Mongan, Mickey Mongan, natural birth, oxytocin, Pitocin, SDNN, Survey on Professional Liability, Terbutaline, The Mongan Method

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