With these evidence-based resources, Childbirth Connection aims to help you make informed decisions and receive care that is in line with your values and preferences. You will also find the resources below referenced throughout the website.
Taking Charge of Your Maternity Care
- The Rights of Childbearing Women outlines a set of basic maternity rights that apply to all childbearing women.
- The Listening to Mothers survey findings capture real-life perspectives on women’s attitudes, beliefs, preferences and knowledge, as well as maternity care practices and family and employment life.
Having a Healthy Pregnancy
- Illustrations of your changing body throughout pregnancy
- Tools to help you choose a maternity care provider or labor support specialist:
- What to Ask … A Doula Who May Provide Continuous Labor Support
- What to Ask … A Midwife Who May Provide Your Maternity Care
- What to Ask … A Physician Who May Provide Your Maternity Care
- What to Ask … A Midwife or Other Care Provider Who May Attend Your Home Birth
- Tools to help you choose a birth setting:
- What to Ask … When Visiting a Hospital Maternity Area
- What to Ask … When Visiting a Birth Center
- What to Ask … A Midwife or Other Care Provider Who May Attend Your Home Birth
- This infographic on 5 Ways to Encourage a Healthy, Satisfying Pregnancy and Birth
Planning to Give Birth
- Pathway to a Healthy Birth: How to Help Your Hormones Do Their Wonderful Work explains how your hormones support you and your baby throughout birth and breastfeeding — and how to avoid interventions that can interfere with your body’s natural processes.
- Also available en Español: Camino Hacia un Parto Saludable
- Check out and share this infographic (also available in Japanese)
- Download and print a poster version
- What Every Pregnant Woman Needs To Know About Cesarean Section is based on a thorough review of evidence on C-section and addresses common questions and concerns about cesarean birth.
- New Professional Recommendations to Limit Labor and Birth Interventions: What Pregnant Women Need to Know summarizes 2017 recommednations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on how to restrict use of many common labor and birth interventions that offer limited or uncertain benefit to low-risk women.
- Cesarean Prevention Recommendations from Obstetric Leaders: What Pregnant Women Need to Know summarizes 2014 recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine that emphasize ensuring that your body is ready for labor, being patient with labor and having good support during labor to prevent unnecessary C-section.
- Why is the C-section Rate So High? explains the underlying reasons for the high cesarean birth rate in the United States and addresses some common myths.
- Cesarean Section Trends in the United States: 1989-2014 details rates for all C-section, primary C-section and vaginal birth after C-section (VBAC).
- Comfort in Labor: How You Can Help Yourself to a Normal Satisfying Childbirth, by expert Penny Simkin, offers information and direction for using comfort measures to cope with labor pain.
- This infographic explains the benefits of doula care for women and the health care system.
- This infographic that shares five ways to encourage a healthy, satisfying pregnancy and birth.
- This fact sheet of tables that summarize labor pain relief options.
Resources for Advocates and Professionals
- Overdue: Medicaid and Private Insurance Coverage of Doula Care to Strengthen Maternal and Infant Health (2016) outlines the health and cost benefits of doula care and details federal, state and local strategies to increase insurance coverage.
- Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care (2015) synthesizes scientific research on how hormone systems function from late pregnancy through the early postpartum period and concludes that commonly used maternity interventions can disturb hormonal processes and interfere with the benefits they offer.
- Maternity Care and Liability: Pressing Problems, Substantive Solutions (2013) summarizes the best available research about the impact of the health care liability system on maternity care and policy strategies to improve functioning of the liability system in maternity care.
- The Cost of Having a Baby in the United States (2013) analyzes costs related to maternity care across a number of variables.
- Cochrane Review: Continuous Support for Women during Childbirth (2017 review), a systematic review of the research literature, concludes that all women should have continuous support during labor.
- Vaginal or Cesarean Birth: What Is at Stake for Women and Babies? A Best Evidence Review (2012) focuses on adverse consequences of cesarean and adverse outcomes that may be intrinsic to labor or vaginal birth.
- The Transforming Maternity Care project engaged more than 100 health care leaders in developing two direction-setting reports in 2010, 2020 Vision for a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System and Blueprint for Action: Steps Toward a High-Quality, High-Value Maternity Care System. They focus on collective efforts to reverse troubling trends and achieving high-quality, high-value maternity care. These and related materials are available here.
- Evidence-based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It Can Achieve (2008) cites an extensive body of evidence to make the case that, despite high costs, women in the United States do not receive the best maternity care. It is a comprehensive review of how maternity care is delivered, financed and experienced by mothers, families and health care payers. It concludes that maternity care can be significantly improved using evidence-based care.
