At The Queer Parenting Partnership, we believe that informed consent and autonomy should be at the heart of your care.
During pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period, you may be asked to make decisions at times when you’re tired, uncomfortable, anxious or processing a lot of information at once. You may also find it difficult to ask questions or challenge a recommendation when you’re speaking with a healthcare professional.
The BRAINS tool is a simple framework that can help you work through your options, ask useful questions and feel more involved in decisions about your care.
What Does BRAINS Stand For?
Benefits
What are the benefits of making this decision?
Ask what the procedure, intervention or recommendation is intended to achieve and how it could benefit you or your baby.
Risks
What are the risks involved?
Ask about the potential risks, disadvantages or side effects associated with the option you’re considering.
Alternatives
What are the alternatives?
There may be other options available. Asking about alternatives can help you understand the different possibilities before deciding what feels right for you.
Intuition
What does your gut say?
Information and professional expertise matter, but your feelings, priorities and previous experiences matter too. Give yourself an opportunity to consider how you feel about the options you’ve been given.
Nothing
What will happen if you do nothing?
What happens if you decide not to go ahead? What might happen if you wait?
Asking this can help you understand whether a decision needs to be made immediately or whether you have time to consider your options further.
Stop/Slow
Can you stop or slow down the procedure once it has started?
Before agreeing to a procedure or intervention, you may want to understand what happens if you change your mind.
Can the procedure be paused? Can it be stopped altogether? At what point, if any, would that no longer be possible?
Knowing this beforehand can help you make a more informed decision about whether you want to proceed.
Using Your BRAINS
You don’t necessarily need to work through every letter every time you’re offered something.
BRAINS is simply a tool you can return to when you want to better understand a recommendation or need some structure for the questions you’d like to ask.
You might use it during an antenatal appointment, when discussing your birth preferences or during labour if you’re offered an intervention you hadn’t previously considered.
You can also share BRAINS with your partner, co-parent, doula or another support person. If you’re finding it difficult to process information or advocate for yourself in the moment, they can help remind you of the questions you wanted to ask.
When Making Decisions Feels Difficult
It isn’t always easy to advocate for yourself in a healthcare environment.
You might feel anxious or overwhelmed, be trying to process unfamiliar terminology or feel uncomfortable questioning someone you see as an authority. Previous experiences of discrimination, misgendering, trauma, or not being listened to can also affect how comfortable you feel speaking up.
For LGBTQ+ people, healthcare conversations can sometimes involve the additional work of correcting assumptions or explaining your identity, relationships or family before you even get to the reason you’re there.
Having something simple like BRAINS available on your phone or in your pocket can give you a practical prompt to return to when you’re not sure what to ask.
BRAINS and Informed Consent
Being offered a treatment, examination or intervention doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions about it.
Informed consent involves having the information you need to make a voluntary decision about your care. You should have an opportunity to understand what is being proposed and ask questions about the potential benefits, risks and alternatives.
BRAINS can help you start those conversations.
Save Our Free BRAINS Resource
Our BRAINS resource is completely free to use.
Save the image to your phone so you have the questions with you when you need them, or use the contact form below to ask about our small BRAINS cards.
There is no charge for accessing our downloadable resources. We want them to be available to anybody who may find them useful.
The Queer Parenting Partnership is a community interest company and isn’t funded by any external organisations. If you’ve found this resource useful and you’re willing and able to make a donation, your contribution helps us continue creating free resources and providing inclusive, affirming education for LGBTQ+ families.
If donating isn’t accessible to you, please use the resource anyway. That’s exactly what it’s here for.