Welcome to the My Essential Birth podcast. I'm Courtney and I'm Stephanie and we're professional

doulas, childbirth educators and the creators of My Essential Birth, the holistic, empowering,

online childbirth education course helping mothers everywhere confidently achieve their best

birth. So join us each week as we share tips and advice for all things pregnancy birth and beyond.

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you can be the first to get new content.

And head over to www.mysentialbirth.com for more information about our birth course

and to join a community of mamas just like you.

Hey friend, we have something special just for you. We are so excited to offer a free live birth training.

That's right. We will both be there and we want to see you there too.

So head to my essential birth.com slash register and we'll see you in the training.

All right. Let's talk about the one thing, one thing that's going to make all the difference in your birth, Stephanie. Okay, so Courtney's giving me a hard time for this because

I originally said, and what I say to everybody is like the one thing that's going to make

all the

difference is your provider, duh, right? You have got to have somebody on your team that is

supportive of what you're wanting to do all along the way to be able to get the birth that you want.

But I kind of disagreed a lot, maybe. I disagreed a lot that while I do think your provider is hugely influential,

I actually don't think that is the one thing that's going to make a huge difference in your birth.

And Courtney won the argument for the record. So you guys will see what our one thing's going to be.

But here's why this is important. In the United States alone, and we might have listeners tuning in from

all over the place, but in the United States alone, one third of women are going to find themselves

in a cesarean birth. And so that number isn't what it's supposed to be. Really, that number should be

closer to 10%, dare I say, 5%.

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