In this video parents and a midwife talk about physical and emotional changes in the third trimester of pregnancy. Mums will often have indigestion and back pain and need more rest. Check-ups are more frequent and baby will be moving around more. One mum says she became less scared of the birth and more excited about meeting her baby.
Physical changes:
Professor Hannah Dahlen: So in the last trimester women will often, again, feel a bit more tired. They’ll be more likely to get things like aching back, indigestion is more common in the last trimester, cramps in the calves, for example, are more common, and generally women will be moving slower and needing a little bit more rest.
The movement of the baby is really important, and we now know that the mother’s the best judge of that. So if your baby has been moving fantastically and then suddenly it’s moving a lot less and you’re worried, never ignore it; always ask a health professional, because your baby’s movements are the best indicator that baby is well.
Emotional and thinking changes:
Professor Hannah Dahlen: A lot of the thoughts in the third trimester around the birth, winding up work; you’ve been a working woman perhaps all your life and now suddenly that identity is changing, that can be very confronting for some women and they really go through a sense of grief and what will their identity be in the future? I’ll often say that the largest organ involving childbirth is the brain, so we have to address it a lot and we have to support women a lot.
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