Sima Alizada
Background: Pregnancy and childbirth is a special grace of God who has entrusted the preservation of the human race since the beginning of human creation. Studies show that one out of every five pregnant women experiences fear of childbirth. Fear of childbirth has been associated with increased labor pain, prolonged labor, and unpleasant labor experience. The most common reason for the request of primiparous women to perform a cesarean section is the fear of childbirth. One of the ways to reduce the fear and rate of cesarean section is to educate pregnant women and prepare them for natural delivery. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of childbirth preparation classes on reducing fear of natural childbirth. Research materials and methods: In this study, a review of the impact of birth preparation classes on reducing the fear of natural childbirth from reference and related books and articles related to the research topic from scientific databases such as WHO, Google scholar, Mag Iran, pubmed, SIDs from 2000 to now were searched and included in the research based on the relevance to the subject of this study. And also in this research, the researcher conducted research for two months in hospitals and examined houses and directly interviewed and consulted women, which led to a reduction in their fear of natural childbirth.
Findings: By reviewing 40 English and Farsi articles, it was found that there is a direct relationship between the level of awareness and attitude towards natural childbirth, and it is possible to encourage women to choose the natural childbirth method by increasing the level of awareness and as a result changing the attitude of women. Women stated their main reason for choosing a cesarean section was the fear of childbirth pains, and also women consider natural childbirth more scary and tiring, and that their knowledge about childbirth is low, and these women have been given little education about childbirth pain.
Conclusion: It seems that participating in childbirth preparation classes is effective in empowering pregnant mothers and has also reduced mothers' anxiety and fear of childbirth, so it is recommended to encourage mothers to actively participate in these classes.
Keywords: childbirth, childbirth preparation classes, fear of childbirth