The most important thing about birth is to remember that it is not us, as the providers, who are the key players. We are the observers. We know a lot about problems but we really know little about the whole mechanism of pregnancy and birth. We know little pieces of the whole childbearing phenomenon. We need to be very respectful of what a woman can do on her own with very little help from anyone else. We should not become so involved in our own knowledge base that we become arrogant or controlling about the process of pregnancy and birth. We must keep remembering who really is giving birth - the mother. We need to respect her enormously for what she can do. We cannot do for a baby what the average woman can do while she is walking around not even thinking about it - which is to grow a perfectly lovely happy healthy baby. It is really the exception to have something go wrong and not the norm. The norm is that most pregnancies, in fact, go along just fine and all of our knowledge and expertise really don't add a whole lot to what the mother can do on her own.
Our biggest role as health care providers is in teaching and listening to women. We really need to hear what they have to say. Whatever their concerns are - they should be our concerns. Whatever their educational needs are - that is where we need to start. We can't start from A and go to Z. People don't function that way. People have a lot of knowledge about some things and very little knowledge about others and you have to start where the mother needs to learn, not where we want to teach as providers.
We must also trust in birth. Birth has been around forever. We should have a very good reason for intervening, interfering and managing birth. We should make the mother feel safe. We should make her feel confident. We should encourage her and be a support person and do very little else unless it's really called for.
Remember to give credit back to the mother all the time. No matter what you did, even if you feel like you personally delivered the baby yourself, it's the mother who did it. Even though you've been up all night sweating, it's the mother who did it. If we keep this foremost in our minds we will be doing women a great service.