“Gentle Birth Method celebrates pregnancy and makes women birth fit”

Aruna Raghuram interviewed Dr Gowri Motha, a London-based obstetrician, well-known childbirth pioneer, and founder of the Gentle Birth Method. Excerpts:   London-based celebrity medical practitioner of Indian origin, Dr. Gowri Motha graduated in medicine from the well-reputed St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, and practised as an obstetrician in Bengaluru and Chennai in the 1970s. However, she recalls not “quite fitting into the medical system in India at that time”. In 1980, she moved to the UK and began working with the country’s world-renowned National Health Service (NHS). Six years later, in 1986, she became the first medical practitioner to offer water births in a London NHS hospital and founded the Gentle Birth Method (GBM) — “a practical and effective week-by-week, mind-body programme to celebrate pregnancy and make mothers birth fit.” Since then, Dr Motha has enabled over 10,000 women to deliver infants naturally through a preparation programme that leads to “comfortable, calm and confident births”. Among the mothers enabled by her are celebrities like supermodels Kate Moss and Elle Macpherson; fashion designer Stella McCartney, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, Sophie Hunter Cumberbatch, and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. Indian mothers enabled by her include Bollywood star Sonam Kapoor Ahuja and entrepreneur Eiesha Bharti Pasricha. Dr Motha is also author of Gentle Birth Method (2004) and Gentle First Year (2006). What motivated you to develop the Gentle Birth Method? My interest in water births was my primary motivation, as I deeply wanted mothers to have a gentler experience of childbirth. The birthing options offered to women in hospitals at that time were highly interventional. While working in an NHS hospital in London in the 1980s, I set up a birthing pool in one of the labour rooms and asked women who were in labour to immerse themselves in warm water. I was initially very disappointed that none of the first few mothers gave birth in the water. I concluded that water on its own was not enough. I kept asking myself: What can I do to make this experience better? Believing that self-hypnosis and visualization with deep muscle relaxation would provide some answers, I trained as a hypnotherapist and taught couples classes introducing self-hypnosis and visualisation techniques for gentle birth. During deep relaxation many helpful suggestions are made. One of them being that birthing is a natural phenomenon and ‘your body knows how to expand, relax and give birth’ Today, I talk couples through a hypnotic birth rehearsal, detailing how the mother’s body will respond to birthing and allow smooth and gentle birth. Another suggestion would be that ‘every surge (contraction) they experience will lead to a progressive opening of their cervix. Most importantly avoid using the word ‘pain’. Ideally, I want a minimally invasive and needle-free delivery of babies. In my practice, around 90 percent of women who follow the GBM principles have intervention free natural births in hospital or at home. What are the main highlights of the Gentle Birth Method? GBM enables a woman to have an…