Pregnant in Germany

Now that I am finally an “Inter­na­tional Mama,” and not just a soon-to-be-mama, I finally feel qual­i­fied to add my 2 cents to the blog! Our girl arrived almost five weeks ago and is already won­der­ing where her sausage and beer are (or at least, that’s how I inter­pret her crying).

Hav­ing never been preg­nant before, I was pretty much clue­less about how health­care works for preg­nancy. I could have guessed quite a few things about the care in the U.S. based on the expe­ri­ences of friends, but I had absolutely no idea how things worked in Ger­many. I thought it might be infor­ma­tive for some of you to know how things are done over here just for a com­par­i­son to your own sys­tems. I am not the first inter­na­tional mama on this blog to give birth in Ger­many. You can read about Christina’s expe­ri­ences in this series of posts and Maria’s here and here.

Health Care providers — One impor­tant thing to real­ize here is that your O.B. will not be deliv­er­ing your baby in most cases. You chose a doc­tor for pre­na­tal care, but a mid­wife will most likely be han­dling the deliv­ery whether you deliver at home or in the hos­pi­tal. Should you require med­ical inter­ven­tion, there is a doc­tor on call at the hos­pi­tal who will care for you.

I chose my doc­tor by doing a search for Eng­lish speak­ing mid­wives in my town. I con­tacted her via email, and she explained that she works in a doctor’s office and gave me the names of a few doc­tors in the area. Look­ing back, I also should have inquired with local friends and acquain­tances who recently had babies here. In my case, I wasn’t happy with my first doc, and so I switched by the end of the 1st trimester to one I felt more com­fort­able with.

Since my OB would not be deliv­er­ing the baby, we also had to decide where we would deliver, and since my hus­band was ter­ri­fied of the home birth option, we talked with friends and cowork­ers about the qual­ity of care at the hos­pi­tals they used. The con­sen­sus that we got from friends and based on some inter­net searches and info from my doc­tor, was that St. Hed­wig was the best choice for us. They have a “Ger­burt und Rund­herum Team”, which is a group of four mid­wives who work very closely with the moms to help pre­pare them for the birth (giv­ing advice on prepar­ing the body, offer­ing acupunc­ture, and other alter­na­tive prepa­ra­tion treat­ments). One of the four will attend the birth to give a sense of con­stancy, and they have a very holis­tic approach to birth. Our team at St. Hed­wig is awe­some! Other friends have gone with the other mid­wives at St. Hed­wig and also had pos­i­tive experiences.

Mut­ter­pass — A ‘Mut­ter­pass’ (mother pass) is a book­let given to women upon their first visit to the doc­tor. This book­let con­tains all of the med­ical infor­ma­tion rel­e­vant to the preg­nancy. The idea is that you always have it on hand in case it needs to be ref­er­enced by another med­ical pro­fes­sional. It makes switch­ing doc­tors much eas­ier as well as you carry your own med­ical records with you. Plus, it feels a bit like a ‘wel­come to the club’ kind of gift, which is excit­ing for a first-time mom.

Home Birth and birthing cen­ters — This works dif­fer­ently through­out Ger­many, but in Bavaria, home births are not that com­mon. There is only one mid­wife in my town who does them, and if you should decide to try for a home birth, she will also take over your pre­na­tal care. She will also rec­om­mend if you should call off the home­birth option due to com­pli­ca­tions and help arrange for a hos­pi­tal birth. My town does not have a birthing cen­ter, but they do exist here. They are sup­posed to be more Holis­tic and more com­fort­able than a hos­pi­tal.
Atti­tudes toward Birth — I can only make a com­par­i­son with what I have heard about atti­tudes toward birthing in the U.S., but it seems quite dif­fer­ent here. I sus­pect it has some­thing to do with the use of mid­wives. In our hos­pi­tal, c-section rates are a lit­tle over 20%, and they do not assume that a woman must have a c-section on a sec­ond birth is she had one the first time around. Women are strongly encour­aged to be active in their labor. Mid­wives encour­age them to walk if they can, and there is an array of props avail­able to help women find the opti­mal birthing posi­tion. Unless there are com­pli­ca­tions or you have an epidural, there is no assump­tion that you will be labor­ing in bed. This was some­thing impor­tant to me, and I have found this atti­tude very com­fort­ing. They expressed that the women have most of the power in the birthing process, and they are only there to help facil­i­tate the process. In the end of the day, the doc­tors are the ‘big boss’ in the deliv­ery ward, but I get the sense that the mid­wives do their best to help women have as nat­ural a birthing expe­ri­ence as pos­si­ble. Water birthing is avail­able in some hos­pi­tals as well. I my case, the baby was breech, but we were still able to have a nat­ural deliv­ery because the mid­wives at this hos­pi­tal have expe­ri­ence deliv­er­ing breech babies. They told me that in most other hos­pi­tals, they may have pushed for a c-section though, so I felt very lucky. Though admit­tedly, the expres­sion on my face while in labor indi­cates that I wasn’t fully aware of how lucky I was at the time…

You may also be interested in reading:

• Waiting for the Birth (5)
• Leo's Birth Story (9)
• When it's not just morning sickness: Living with Hyperemesis Gravidarum (17)
• What strollers are best for cobblestone streets? (7)
• Struggling with Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG): Week 33 Update (2)

Tagged as: Birthing, birthing center, cesarean section, childbirth, Germany, giving birth, home birth, hospital birth, medicine, midwife, Pregnancy, prenatal care, water birth