What do you think of home birth?

I think home births are a great idea especially given all that we have variously discussed in questions like these. There are certain times when a woman would be ill-advised to have her baby at home, given her situation but those times are rarer than people think. We have been (wrongully) taught to fear how natural and self-propelling labor is and I wish more of us grew up confident in our own bodies and birthing experiences. I wish more midwives and doulas were covered by insurance. I’d love to give birth at home.

I only think it’s unsafe on the level that is something serious goes wrong, you’re not in the right hands with the right equipment (I wouldn’t think, anyhow) to correct the situation and keep mom and baby safe while doing so. That would be my worry. But it’s my understanding that a lot of birthing things we do in the modern world nowaday are not the best way to do things. Laying down? That is not the way women were intended to give birth. And if you think about it, it doesn’t even make sense. Gravity and stuff, you know. Anyhow, all the drugs and stuff can’t be great either. But most women I don’t think care that much and would rather just have it be easier for them. You can’t blame them. I think it’s really admirable that women are willing to try and do it at home, sometimes even naturally! It’s amazing.

I personally wouldn’t want to do a home birth, but that’s because I’ve had complications with both of my pregnancies at the end of them. I know several woman that have had home births and they love it. I think that, for woman with uncomplicated pregnancies, home births are a great option if that is what they want.

I feel about as positively about it as I do about a home root canal.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir : I agree that midwives should be covered by insurance. My oldest child was delivered by 2 midwives in a hospital (San Francisco General Hospital). I’m glad we were in a hospital. There were some concerns, and a doctor was there to give assistance if needed.

I understand the reasons for the movement. However, there are so many things that can go wrong, with such horrible consequences, I’d really rather the movement focus on reforming hospital births and being able to do things as you would at home (with a doula or midwife if you’d like), but then have doctors just seconds away if need be.

People hesitate to treat pregnancy as a form of illness and I understand that.

There is a reason, however, why labor death rates are so much lower than they used to be.

@Mariah Yet, we have an absolutely abysmal maternal mortality rate for a developed country.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir True, and a problem, but are you linking it to women giving birth in hospitals instead of at home, or just pointing out an unrelated issue?

I would be too terrified… but I would let my partner decide.

@Aethelflaed It is a related issue. Maternal deaths are down in the U.S. but not as much as in other developed countries which are, btw, spending less and profiting less off each labor. So, the movement into hospitals didn’t do something right and we need to figure out who they’ve screwed over.

It seems to be happening more and more, along with a mid-wife or whatever they are called these days. I would want to be very close to a hospital just in the unlikely event…

If the labor is routine and there are no special circumstances, it’s pretty awesome. Home births were the norm before the Medical Industry™ became the sole proprietorship of male doctors educated at male medical schools. The fact that we don’t have more home births is the legacy of sexism, not danger.

I have a couple friends that are studying to be midwives, and I know a passel of kids born at home. They all turned out fine.

Note: I know there are female doctors now, but it was a long journey to get to that point.

I’m all for it.

Check out the documentary The Business of Being Born.

My first child was an emergency c-section after a prolonged labor. I was only 21, in great health, and had no complications during my pregnancy. I delivered my second child vaginally with no complications at the age of 23. When I was 33 and went into labor with our 3rd child, both my daughter and I had life threatening complications at the very last minute. It was terribly scary for my husband to watch both my daughter and I in a situation like that.

Home birth sounds like a great idea, but you never know what could happen at the very last minute. Even the healthiest person is not immune to an emergency.

I am a huge proponent of home birth and water birth, too. If the mom and child are healthy, it’s the only way to go….I think, anyway.

I was set for a homebirth, but my child insisted on coming early and was in a bit of distress because of it. While I was not able to do that, I still was able to give birth in a room at the hospital that looked like a bedroom (and not a hospital room) with reduced lighting, I had my own music (Vivaldi and Mozart) and it was a lovely birth anyway.

I think you need to be prepared emotionally and spiritually to do this sort of birth. If you are worried, nervous and filled with fear…a homebirth is not for you. I wanted as little interference by a doctor as possible and found an ob/gyn who was all for my idea. (She was really progressive for back then.)

@jonsblond…Most midwives who help birth at home (that I know) have a contigency plan for emergencies.

Someone please enlighten me because I am quite ignorant on many of the details of a home birth. If a midwife is assisting you, what kind of supplies does s/he have on hand to help in case of an emergency? Or do they try and rush the mother and/or baby to a hospital in that situation?

I’m not sure I would be okay with a home birth but I would definitely look into a birthing center. I don’t agree with a lot of the things doctors do, especially all those things they give the mother to expedite the process. I had never heard of home births until I saw The business of being born. It gives good insight to what goes on in a home birth.

Really depends on how the pregnancy was and what the ultra sounds said was the health of the baby. It would be something I would consider because the stress to the baby is less due to the mother being in her home enviroment and less stressed. I have watched a lot on the topic and in other countries it is quite normal to have a healthy outcome for both baby and mom in other countries as long as mom and baby are both healthy then doctors would encourage a hospital birth. This is not 3rd world countries I am talking about, I think sometimes the US make too clinical of an approach where it is viewed as a sickness rather than a natural occurance. Sure we could have a doctor attend but let them attend at the families home rather than a hospital like they used to do. We have better transportation in these times than the olden days anyways.

@creative1 But in many cases, it’s not so much the doctor around as all the equipment and supplies they have in hospitals. If we’re doing home visits, then midwives are fine; the big concern is being away from all the things hospitals have, not just doctors.

Also, this question is relevant.

Ok this is weird it showed up twice and when edited the first disappeared hmmmm

@Aethelflaed Do your research look at places like the Netherlands where homebirths are the norm and they only go the the hospital if they forsee an issue with the birth. Here is an article to start you off.

@creative1 No, what I’m saying is, if you are worried that something will go wrong at the last minute, and are concerned about being away from a hospital should something go wrong, then having a doctor on hand wouldn’t assuage your fears. The doctor can diagnose what went wrong, do a few things with a small kit, but they aren’t carrying around all the larger or more expensive equipment that can be vital in worse-case scenarios. That 5–30 minute drive to the hospital can be a very long in emergencies; the difference between life or death. I’m not sure the idea of having a doctor do home births really stands up, because either you’re going to be fine with a midwife (who can pretty much do what the doctor can in a home), or a doctor isn’t going to be enough to convert you, because they don’t bring the hospital with them. Also, please don’t assume that just because I don’t agree with you I haven’t done research; the attitude is really not called for.

@Aethelflaed no attitude is meant here you can have whatever opion you want and I certainly can have mine. What I meant by having a doctor is that there are some coutries where the doctor actually goes to deliver the baby rather than having a midwife. I liked that idea a little better knowing the baby would be examed right after birth by a real md not just a midwife its not that I think they need the equipment of the hospital in any way.

@creative1 Oh, see, I’m fine with midwives doing it for the uncomplicated pregnancies; it’s that I want both doctors and hospitals there should something go wrong at the last minute. I quite like the idea of birth centers as a compromise, though. And midwives can examine the newborns right then, and then they can be seen by a pediatrician at their one week appointment.

Basically…this “fear” of home births has been drummed into women through the last decades. It is interesting to me that the more rights women were given and the louder women got…the less power they seemed to have over their own health and bodies. If the patriarchy cannot control our minds, it will try to control our bodies. And one way to do this is to program a woman with fear of birth without a doctor or medicine. Something that used to be very natural is now not allowed to take place without “intervention”. Women knew (intuitively) how to cure things, how to use herbs, how to best go through labour (quietly and in a squatting position) not attached to fetal monitors and with harsh lighting.

Take that and place it with the idea that hospital births are big profit makers..and you have a big business.

I think birth centers are fine, too. It’s not a home birth, but at least you have some control over how the baby is brought into the world. What I don’t like is a total unconscious birth…where the mother is driven by fear, starts screaming for an epidural as soon as the contractions start, the mother-in-law is in there taking photos (and the mother can’t stand her) and the whole family is in there, too, with loud children running around and the TV is on with re-runs of “Rambo”. It’s hideous. What a horrible way to come into the world for a baby after being in the womb. By the time you are ready for an epidural, most of the hard stuff is over, anyway. But no one tells you that.

More than home births (which I advocate, I really do) it would just be a great stride for women to come back into their centers and have a conscious birth naturally without drugs wherever they decide to do it. Stop asking for the drugs! You think you are the only “groggy” one? Think what that does to your baby. You don’t need those drugs. Learn to connect with your body so that it just does what it is supposed to do organically.

And if you say, “Well DR, that’s easy for you to say with your ‘natural this and that’...” My mother had all of her children Cesarean. I heard her (over and over and over) tell me that I could not have a natural birth. It just was “not” going to happen. That I was “crazy” for thinking that I could. My mom just wanted to be knocked out completely and removed from the whole situation. (Lots of women were simply railroaded into that choice and I think it is happening again.) I almost felt that she was attempting to will me to go through what she did. I was determined to have my baby naturally. And I did. She was gobsmacked that I did it. Guess what? It was not that hard. I did all my homework. I read, I just spent hours talking to that baby and connecting with it. We knew we were in this together. And even when she came early, I still was not going to cave and take the “easy” (which it really isn’t easy, not on the baby) way out. Sometimes, you need to just be informed and have some moxie about it all.

And please have that baby surrounded by quiet and love and no TV and only people that aren’t in conflict in the room. It makes a huge difference in the emotional makeup of the child in the future. A peaceful birth usually presents later as a more peaceful baby/child.

(And of course…before anyone charges me with “but drugs are needed”...yes, they are…if you or the baby are in danger…but normal births can be done…even if you have to fight for one.)

“Something that used to be very natural is now not allowed to take place without ‘intervention.’”

And given the much higher survival rates for moms and babies these days than the distant past, it seems we have benefited from that.

Can you support your statements that the situation of a baby’s birth will significantly affect the child’s emotional stability in the future?

@DarlingRhadamanthus This is where the home birth movement looses me; the idea that birth is natural and thus not a big deal. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you, or that things can’t go wrong, or that it’s easy. When people say that women’s bodies were designed for giving birth, it sounds like they’re saying that’s it’s no big thing, like the pelvic bone doesn’t break when pushing out a child and that there’s no risk of infection (and it’s extremely strange coming from people who don’t believe in intelligent design). Women didn’t intuitively know how to cure things with herbs, for one thing, intuition implies that it’s somehow coded into our DNA, which it isn’t. For another, those herbs often did not actually work. And even more, there are all these texts throughout history explaining to midwives which herbs and procedures should be used to treat various aliments and conditions, thus proving that this knowledge was all learned (and not only learned, but still held by an elite group, just a different elite group than it is today). It is important to note that before the last century or so, the mortality rate for birth was 50% (mother and/or child), so we can’t just go back to how things were because how things were had a ton of death.

I also wanted to add that to all who think that the drop in maternal mortality was due to this shift from home birth to interventionist births…the decline was mostly due to general improvements in public health and sanitation overall…just like the birth of antibiotics wasn’t responsible for dramatic decline in overall mortality, so was this movement not responsible for the dramatic decline in maternal mortality. Read here.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir….Thank you very, very much for that answer…that was exactly what I was going to say. The improvement in hygiene is what has helped the most in raising the infant survival rates more than the intervention of a doctor. It has been improved sanitation that has led to the higher incidents of survival.

@Aethelflaed…I am tired of arguing for natural means with opposing forces. It’s like arguing politics or religion. The brainwashing by society today is quite deep. Of course, things can go wrong. You can drive to the store “and things can go wrong.” What you are saying is that birth “is not natural”. What?? Birth is a natural process__ along with death. It happens. Once again, if a problem is imminent, of course you need to have someone “intervene”. But if left alone, most women do know what to do. The instinctual nature of women used to be stronger, granted _before so much fear was instilled in arguments similar to yours: “it’s not natural, the pelvic bone might break, herbs don’t work, infection, etc” Yes, those things might happen. A person who lives in highrise in New York and doesn’t ever connect with nature is not going to have the same inner presence as someone in the mountains of Colorado. It is the fear-mongering and the denial that a woman does not have the instinct to know what to do (even if simply guided by a conscious MD or midwife) that I find out of line with your argument. What do women in Africa do? Or in South America? Where are the doctors there? There aren’t any. Do you think anyone says to them, “Oh, sorry….you don’t know what to do you need a doctor?” No, because they know what to do. They have observed it in nature. cut off from nature probably would not know what to do you are right. But if left to simply reconnect with herself, a woman can do it with less intervention from outside forces. It’s not black and white here and you trying to paint me with that is ridiculous. I am just advocating a return to a more natural birth with less intervention. I am not advocating that a woman living in a highrise who has no desire to give a natural birth to simply squat in her living room and have at it. She would not be ready or know what to do. She is not in tune with the rhythms of her body unless she made a wild effort to do so.

Herbs don’t work?!! What do you think most medicines are derived from? And then they are simply made chemically (which means more profits for Big Pharma.) Women’s bodies are designed for giving birth . What are they designed for? Decoration? That’s what the ovaries and womb are for…oh wait, Big Pharma is replicating life in a petri dish as we speak. So, don’t worry, that will be out of a woman’s league soon, too. And Big Pharma will be debuting “designer babies”...you can choose eye color, hair color and everything else too.

Herbs held by the ELITE? Are you kidding?! Tell that to all the witches that were burned at the stake because they held “the oral knowledge” that was passed down for centuries? Tell that to my grandmother who did not have an education, but would go into her garden to pick what she needed for every ailment possible. (Elite? Hardly.) That is a ridiculous argument that does not hold water. Sure, Culpepper put it into a book eventually, but it all came from “tradition”....NOT book learning. You said “midwives through the centuries” had this in BOOKS? The press was not invented until 1400’s. What did they go before then? Midwives (even after the invention of the press) continued to apprentice to each other, passing on knowledge through “doing” . Not from books. That’s common knowledge.

Thank you so much for proving how women are still regarded as “helpless idiots” when it comes to their bodies. They aren’t. They are powerful beings who are still being kept from their own power.

@Aethelflaed I read recently that when we evolved to walk on two feet, it became much harder for women to give birth. The pelvis had to be much sturdier than it was when we were quadripeds, and the birth canal much narrower therefore. Thus less room for a baby to come out of. But we’re still animals, and animals don’t make evolutionary adjustments that are going to kill off their species. I really don’t think birth is any easier for any given animal….goats, cows, cats, dogs, sheep, etc etc. They just aren’t to the point where they can complain and cry about it and call the doctor like us. I’m not trying to make birth sound like not a big deal—it is a huge deal. But I’m saying all this shit that most women do when they give birth….being induced, generally for no reason other than that it makes it easier for the doctor to keep a schedule….come on, doesn’t that seem funky? Why have we been made to think that laying down is how mom should deliver the baby when it fact it’s pretty much the most unnatural position to be in? Why are women drugged out of their minds while doing so? It just doesn’t seem right exactly. In fact it seems completely unnatural.

But here in America, if I didn’t have some hippie friends, I feel like I wouldn’t even know these facts, because they’re kept away from everyone unless you choose to pry a little. The hospital industry is a HUGE one. They want our money….I recently read in Freakonomics that in areas where the birth rate was declining, it was shown that doctors suggested C-sections way more often, since they’re more expensive and would make more money off of doing one of those than a regular birth. What! That’s not the type of person I want helping me deliver my kid.

Also, bacteria is good, and we try to rid it from our lives by having our children born into a completely sterile environment, like a hospital. I’m not saying to throw your child in a mud puddle when it’s born but exposure helps build up immunity which is something not many people have today and I’m sure the two are related but no one wants to admit it.

Just my thoughts.

@DarlingRhadamanthus Please, these slippery slope arguments are ridiculous. Just because I want backup available when I’m giving birth doesn’t mean I’m dying to genetically modify my baby.
Being in a hospital is not useful in many birthing situations, the ones that go routinely. But since some don’t go routinely, and there’s often no way to know if that will happen, and the help and supplies available at a hospital could help me in that situation, and I really can’t think of any major downsides to being at a hospital (because of course you can simply withhold consent to any treatment options that you don’t want or don’t trust), I feel it’s better safe than sorry. And I don’t feel that way because I’m brainwashed, thanks.

I’ll share again that my best friend is preggers with her 4th child and seriously considering a home birth as her last labour was just over 2 hours and she just barely made it to hospital (where a nurse midwife delivered her). She’s been reading stats like crazy because she wants to know that she’s making a safe decision. What she has shared with me is that infant mortality rates are similar whether you have your child at home or in the hospital. The babies (and mothers) just tend to die from different things. In the hospital it is usually infection.

When I was pregnant with my first child my friend was too. She delivered at the same hospital I did only three days earlier than me. Her baby died during delivery. Was the news called? No because, although terribly sad, the hospital knows that they will just lose some babies. They don’t tell you that though. Contrast that to when a baby dies if it is delivered at home with a midwife. That usually makes the evening news.

If anyone wants the articles my friend has been researching I can ask her for them. I’d rather not because she is really busy with her kids and she’s very pregnant.

I’m completely for home birth.

And one more thought before I go to bed:

How many people here asked their doctors what their infant mortality rate was? Did you ask what the hospital’s infant mortality rate was?

I know I didn’t and I probably should have.

‘Nite all.

I support any woman who chooses home birth. The thing about it is if something goes wrong, a horrible thing, I would be afraid of never being able to sleep again. I guess any time a baby dies at birth, or suffers injury, it is hard to accept, and one wonders if everything was done, but I would think not having a full hospital available, might mean questioning the decision to a point that would create incredible anxiety for me. However, there is so much medical technology now evaluating the mother and the fetus, I would assume less and less often there are major surprises during labor and delivery. Anyway, this has more to do with my personality than anything, and that things tend to go wrong for me with medical procedures. I actualy would have to have a c-section, but before that was the case, I never was afraid of labor and delivery, and always thought I would have my babies that way without drugs. But, I still think I would have wanted to do it in a hospital.

Everyone I know who has done a home birth were very happy they did.

About complications going down and whether giving birth is natural, I actually am very annoyed with the message out there that it is the most natural thing in the world. Pregnancy, labor, and birth come with risks. The pro-lifers especially put out this message of peace, tranquility, love and blessings regarding the process, and I agree babies are an amazing thing, but the truth is many women have all sorts of complications from minor to major creating these new lives. I personally know a woman who almost bled to death, and her life was saved only because she was making rounds in the hospital when she began to hemorage. If she had been anywhere else she would have been dead. I know a woman who wound up in a wheelchair after she delivered, can only take a few steps at a time. I know many women who were incontinent afterwards, although most recovered their control. I know two women who had gestational diabetes. I have a relative the baby could not fit through her pelvis. None of these things mean people should not have home births in my opinion, but I do want women to get some credit that they have another life, which in some ways taking from their own body, their own nutrients, it is a strain on the kidneys, added weight puts more burden on the heart, organs get pushed around a little. Many women sail through, but many women don’t. Nature allows death and illness all the time.

@deni The only flaw I see in your thoughts is the hospital probably has more deadly germs than most people’s homes.

I’m all for home birth as long as there is a qualified and experienced midwife on hand and neither the mother nor the midwife is so obsessed with or ideologically impaired by the idea of home birth above all else that they won’t call 911 at the first sign of trouble. My father and aunt were both born at home. They and my grandmother came through it fine. I was common practice then though.

@DarlingRhadamanthus Ok, if you’re going to quote me, actually quote me, don’t just put various bits I said together in one set of quotation marks. I never said birth wasn’t natural, I said that just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s safe or risk-free or will totally kill you. That argument goes for all things, not just giving birth; poisonous mushrooms and berries occur naturally, and it’s a bad idea to eat anything that grows. The argument that “it’s natural and therefore good” is so laden with fallacies that I think it’s where a lot of otherwise good ideas loose many, many followers.

No, this knowledge of how to detect problems and give birth isn’t instinctual. There’s very little that’s instinctual. Passed along commonly and at a young age is not the same as encoded into DNA. The argument that people instinctively know what to do when experts aren’t around tends to fall apart when things don’t work out for the best, as they so often do.

“Herbs don’t work”. Actually, I never said that. What I said was that it was not uncommon for the herbs they were using for that particular ailment to not work. I know that many a medicine is derived from herbs, that’s not the same as medieval midwives having the same accuracy with their remedies as we do today. Much of what they used was ineffective or actively harmful. That’s not to say that some of it didn’t work, but much of it didn’t.

“Women’s bodies are designed for giving birth”. Well, for starters, I don’t believe in intelligent design, so I don’t believe women’s bodies were designed for anything. I believe that Thomas Lewis said it best when he said “Evolution is a wandering process wherein multiple simultaneous influences, including chance and circumstance, shape biological structures over eons. A more capricious designer than any committee, evolution is a story full of starts, setbacks, compromises, and blind alleys.” Things go wrong, and human bodies aren’t perfect. Just because a woman’s body can give birth doesn’t mean it’ll be a smooth ride. I also think that “Big Pharma” is just as responsible for life saving penicillin and making it possible for infertile women to have children as it is for restless leg syndrome, and I don’t paint it with the good vs evil brush.

Herbs held by the ELITE? Are you kidding?! Tell that to all the witches that were burned at the stake because they held “the oral knowledge” that was passed down for centuries? Tell that to my grandmother who did not have an education, but would go into her garden to pick what she needed for every ailment possible. No. Again, not what I said. I said the knowledge was held by the elite, same as it is now. As of 2002, there 850,000 doctors total in the US, over 36,000 of those are OB/GYNs. This is not a small number; doctors are everywhere. When you add in all the people, from doctors to nurses to admins, who work in health care, 1 in 11 people is part of that elite. No, it isn’t everyone, no, it isn’t half the population, yes, it’s extremely easy to find a doctor. Similarly, yes, midwives were common, but no, they were not every mother. So if doctors are currently “the elite”, then by the same logic, so were midwives. And for the most part, the witches burned at the stake were Catholics being burned by Protestants for being Catholic, and Protestants being burned at the stake by Catholics for being Protestant; while it’s true that cunning folk were burned, it was a relatively low amount of the burned population.

“You said “midwives through the centuries” had this in BOOKS? The press was not invented until 1400’s. What did they go before then? Midwives (even after the invention of the press) continued to apprentice to each other, passing on knowledge through “doing” . Not from books. That’s common knowledge. Again, didn’t actually say this. You might be less outraged by what I said if you didn’t twist it. What I said was that we have various medical tracts on gynecology throughout the ages (yes, before Culpeper, some of them written by midwives), and this is proof that this knowledge is not instinctual. If it were instinctual, no one would ever think to write it down, especially in a day and age when books were rare. I realize that it was passed down orally, and never argued otherwise; I did argue that it was learned instead of instinctual.

I’m not trying to force women into having hospital births. I’m not saying that doctors are the be-all end-all of baby delivering. I think the way we deliver babies needs to be reformed, and am in favor of many of the reforms, starting with not lying down when delivering if you can. I also think that the home birth movement can espouse certain fallacious arguments that make people dismiss it, from the naturalness (and therefore risk-free goodness) of child birth to painting medieval and early modern times as some kind of Golden Age of Baby Delivering, glossing over things like bloodletting and using mercury as an abortifacient. But I think the biggest downfall of the home birth movement is to treat women just as horribly as medical establishment they buck does; any woman who doesn’t agree is a) uninformed, as if she knew what we knew, she would never choose otherwise and b) a sheeple who’s too spinelessly scared of the patriarchy to cast off her brainwashing and choose to be empowered. I have no interest in replacing a patriarchal medical society that bullies me if I choose differently than they advise during my pregnancy with a matriarchal home birthing society that bullies me if I choose differently than they advise during my pregnancy.

The research I did before giving birth seemed to say that for normal pregnancies, giving birth at home or in hospital has the same rates of positive outcomes. Maybe I was biased as I wanted a home birth but it convinced my husband. I’ve had two home births and both in water also. Wouldn’t do it any other way. It felt that I was in charge and the midwives were there to help me not tell me what to do. I would recommend:-)