​"After a difficult start to our parenthood journey, including three consecutive miscarriages, when I fell pregnant with our rainbow baby, Charlie, I found myself feeling almost constantly anxious and worried. My sister-in-law told me about something called hypnobirthing, which she said had helped her with anxiety during her pregnancies. At first, I didn’t like the sound of it. Hypno sounded pretty strange, and as a Christian, I didn’t want to do anything that went against my faith. After looking into it, I became more relaxed when I found out it had nothing to do with a man on stage waving a pocket watch in front of someone’s face or any kind of mind control, and was simply a relaxation practice for birth using positive words and imagery, combined with antenatal education. There were times, though, when I was listening to some of the relaxation tracks, that I would find myself having to change certain words, like the universe or inner goddess, to make them fit with my personal beliefs, so I decided to google “Christian Hypnobirthing” and was disappointed to find that it didn’t exist.

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A little later in my pregnancy, I came across a Christian book, which, while helpful in some ways, was quite discouraging of natural birthing methods and instead suggested that just by having enough faith, birth could be pain-free. Unfortunately, because of this, I stopped using hypnobirthing techniques to prepare for my birth and decided that I would just have faith, like the book said. One of the major downsides to the idea of a pain-free birth being the result of having enough faith is that if you are experiencing pain, you start blaming yourself. It puts the responsibility solely on the mother and doesn’t take into account the environment she’s in, how supported she feels by those around her, whether she’s able to labor in an upright position, the position of the baby, and the many other factors that massively impact the level of comfort a woman feels during childbirth.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​