Flowing with Your Birth Hormones

Birth hormones are in charge of making your labor flow, establishing breastfeeding and helping you bond with your baby. Supporting your hormones can lead to a healthier and smoother birth. How can you encourage them? What should you avoid? Sarah Buckley has answers.

What we talked about:

• How is birth designed to unfold?
• Does your baby really start labor?
• How can you help your hormones flow?
• How your hormones protect your baby during birth
• Is the initiation of breastfeeding still part of the birth?
• Stress: the hormone buster!
• Your hormones during an induction
• The difference between your body’s oxytocin and synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin)
• Helping your hormones flow when interventions are necessary

Related links*:

• Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing report, by Sarah for Childbirth Connection
• Pain in Labour: Your hormones are your helpers, by Sarah Buckley
• The Role of Hormones in Childbirth, Childbirth Connection
• Sarah Buckley’s “Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care” A Review for Birth Educators and Doulas, by Penny Simkin
• Orgasmic Birth and the shorter adaptation Organic Birth: Birth is Natural!, from Debra Pascali-Bonaro
• Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: A Doctor’s Guide to Natural Childbirth and Gentle Early Parenting Choices, by Sarah Buckley

Related Birthful episodes:

• The Baby’s Birth Experience
• Pleasure in Birth
• Your Baby, The Mammal
• Third Stage of Labor
• [Postpartum] Hormones After Birth

Image description: Sarah Buckley, a white woman with wavy ash blonde hair, is wearing a black blazer, blue-green necklace and eyeshadow, and is smiling broadly

About Dr. Sarah Buckley

Sarah J Buckley is a New-Zealand-trained GP/family physician with qualifications in GP-obstetrics and family planning. She is the mother of four home-born children, and currently combines motherhood with her work as a writer on pregnancy, birth, and parenting. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, where her research is focused on the hormone systems of labour and birth and the impacts of interventions.

Dr Buckley’s work critiques current practices in pregnancy, birth, and parenting from the widest possible perspectives, including scientific, anthropological, cross-cultural, psychological, and personal. Sarah has been sharing her unique blend of science and wisdom with parents and birth professionals internationally since 2005.

Her bestselling book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: A Doctor’s Guide to Natural Childbirth and Gentle Early Parenting Choices, published by Celestial Arts/PenguinRandomHouse (US, 2009), builds on her acclaimed first edition, published in Australia as Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: The Wisdom and Science of Gentle Choices in Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting (One Moon Press, Brisbane, 2005).

Dr Buckley has an ongoing interest in the hormones of labour and birth, and this has culminated in her groundbreaking report Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing, published in January 2015

Sarah encourages us to be fully informed in our decision-making; to listen to our hearts and our intuition; and to claim our rightful role as the real experts in our bodies and our children.

She lives with her family on the semi-rural outskirts of Brisbane, Australia.

For more about Sarah and her work see sarahbuckley.com and her membership website gentlenaturalbirth.com