Birth Education & Antenatal Classes

You can read every book and still arrive at labour feeling like you studied for the wrong exam.

Birth education at Origia is led by Vanessa Salerno, a birth and postpartum doula who has been present at more than two hundred births. Sessions run privately or in small groups, in the rooms at Collingwood.

The aim isn't to sell you a particular kind of birth. It's to make sure that nothing which happens in the room is a surprise.

What we cover

Sessions are built around what you actually need and move at the pace of the people in the room. Across a private course or a small group, we work through:

• The stages of labour, what each one tends to feel like, and how long they typically take
• Signs that labour is starting, and how early labour differs from the real thing
• Comfort and coping: breathing, movement and positions, heat, water, massage, TENS, and the mental side of contractions
• Every pain relief option, from nitrous oxide through to epidural, described properly
• Assisted birth with vacuum or forceps, and what a caesarean actually involves, planned or unplanned
• Induction of labour: why it's offered, how it's done, and what it changes about the experience
• The first hours: skin-to-skin, the placenta, stitches, and the first feed
• Feeding basics, and how to get skilled help quickly when it isn't working
• The fourth trimester: bleeding, healing, sleep, mood, and what is genuinely normal

Pain relief and preferences

Most antenatal education either undersells epidurals or oversells them. We'll tell you what each option does, when in labour it can be given, how it affects your mobility, what the common side effects are, and what it means for your baby. Then the decision is yours to make in the moment, with the information repeated to you at the time if you need it. Nobody is asked to commit in advance to how much pain they'll accept.

A birth plan implies a degree of control nobody has. Birth preferences are different: a short, clear statement of what matters most to you, in order, so that if the situation changes your care team still knows what you would choose. We'll help you write one a midwife can read in fifteen seconds, and we'll talk about how to keep making decisions when things move away from the version you'd imagined.

Partners have a job

Support people often arrive expecting to be spectators. They leave with something concrete to do: how to time contractions, what to say and what to stop saying, how to set up a room, when to advocate and how to do it without antagonising anyone, what to expect if you end up in theatre, and how to look after themselves through a long night. Continuous support in labour makes a real difference to how women experience it.

No ideology

Vanessa has attended births that were unmedicated in water and births that were emergency caesareans under general anaesthetic. Neither is a better story. There's no script here about the right way to birth, no disapproval if you want an epidural on arrival, and no suggestion that a caesarean is a failure of nerve or effort.

What we teach is evidence-based, current with Australian practice, and delivered by someone who has stood in the room many times. You'll ask questions you'd be embarrassed to ask anyone else, and you'll get a straight answer.

Sessions can be booked at any stage, though many people find weeks 28 to 34 works well: early enough to absorb it, late enough that it feels real.