Donne

A ten moons journey: Women groups and birth support

Abstract

Today women are more and more exposed to a stressed way of managing their pregnancy and to a cultural contest dominated by birth fear and by the expectations for the newborn health.
These fears dominate many pregnant women’s brain and emotions causing a rising in the stress hormone production.
This causes a chronic stress that is rarely recognized and that can even provoke pregnancy pathologies (like an intrauterine growth retardation) so that the woman will be catalogued as pathological and so more and more stressed.
Women, and couple, groups during pregnancy are an occasion to prevent distress and are a great moment for meeting and sharing fears and doubts between pairs, as a precious occasion to get correct and empowering information about the choices that the parents can do about how to give birth and the first days with the newborn.

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