Birth plan template

Page one is the one that gets read

Mine ran to two pages of prose and I watched a midwife’s eyes travel down it. A midwife meeting you for the first time in a busy unit has minutes rather than an afternoon. So the front page of this template is a single side: your name, where you’re giving birth, who is with you, the things that matter most to you in your own words, and the tick boxes that answer the questions staff will otherwise have to ask.

The five pages behind it are for the detail, and for whoever has time to read further. If you only print one sheet, print the first.

Fill in what matters and leave the rest

There’s no prize for completing every box. A plan with four sections you feel strongly about is more useful than six pages filled in out of duty, because the strength of feeling is exactly the information you’re trying to communicate.

Write the “things that matter most” box in your own words rather than ticking around it. “I panic when I don’t know what’s happening, please keep telling me” tells a midwife more than any list of preferences.

The sections people skip, and shouldn’t

The induction and caesarean pages. They feel like tempting fate, so they get left blank, and they’re the ones that earn their place.

Those are the moments when things move quickly and you’re least able to explain what you want. A few lines written calmly at 34 weeks does the explaining for you. Something as simple as “if I need a caesarean I would still like skin to skin as soon as it’s safe” takes ten seconds to write and is genuinely hard to say for the first time in theatre.

Talk it through with your midwife

The plan itself is the smaller half of this. The larger half is the conversation it prompts at an antenatal appointment, where you find out what your unit actually offers, what your history means for your options, and what usually happens in practice where you’re giving birth.

Ask for it to go into your maternity notes once you have discussed it. Take the second copy in your hospital bag, because notes and bags have a habit of arriving separately.

Nothing in it is binding, and you can’t fail it

Birth has never once read the paperwork. Plans change, often for very good reasons, and a day that went nothing like the plan is still a day that went fine.

What doesn’t change is that nothing happens to you without your consent, and that you can ask at any point what the benefits are, what the risks are, what else you could do, and what happens if you wait.

If you want the longer version of all this before you start filling anything in, the guide on how to write a birth plan walks through the four decisions that shape everything else.