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- A healthy pregnant woman should be birthing at home. I don’t understand the response “I just feel safer in the hospital”. When your chances of a hospital cesarean are closing in on 35% in this country. One of the highest cesarean rates of civilized countries. The homebirth cesarean rate is lower than 2%. What most people don’t realize is that midwives are trained professionals, and they have a more optimistic outlook on your birth.
My first pregnancy we chose to only see a midwife. We did not see an OB until I was at 39 weeks. For my second pregnancy I had full health insurance, and although we were choosing homebirth again, I wanted to have a better relationship with an OB because I was going to have a VBAC. Either at home or in the hospital. I was not going to be persuaded toward an elective cesarean, but I wished to have a relationship with an OB just in case I needed to change my plans last minuet like my first birthing experience. My point is that most women feel they need to be in the hospital to be safe. But the fact of the matter is, if you are healthy and your baby is healthy, there is no reason you shouldn’t birth at home.
A homebirth is defined as any birth which does not take place in a facility, such as a birth center or hospital. It doesn’t actually have to be your home, it could be your parents’ or your best friend’s.
Natural Parenting Toolbox: Reasons to Have a Homebirth
A homebirth is defined as any birth which does not take place in a facility, such as a birth center or hospital. It doesn’t actually have to be your home, it could be your parents’ or your best friend’s.
Reasons To Choose Homebirth
- It is the birthing environment you will have the most control over. In your own home you have the best shot at deciding what visual elements, sounds, smells and faces will surround you when your baby is born. You can lower the lights, play Reggae music, or invite anyone you want to have around you to attend, if you like. Women who give birth at home do report a greater sense of control over the experience and this sense of control generally contributes to greater overall satisfaction with the birthing experience.
- At home you avoid unnecessary medical interventions such as episiotomy or constant fetal monitoring. A carefully conducted study compared the cesarean section rates between patients who used midwifery services for their homebirths from The Farm, a well-respected birth center in Tennessee, to physician-attended hospital births. The hospital c-section rates were 16.46 percent of all the births. The Farm had a c-section rate of only 1.46 percent! Many other studies have confirmed the markedly lower c-section rates in homebirths. With homebirth, your baby’s birth will proceed gently and naturally unless a real emergency occurs. If you are transported to a hospital during a homebirth, statistics indicate that you and your baby are just as likely to have a good outcome as if you had started out in a hospital setting.
- Many experts believe that you, and your baby, will have a reduced chance of getting an infection if you are not in a hospital. Hospitals are notorious for spreading staph, and other infections, around to patients. You are already used to the bacteria present in your home and have probably developed some immunity to them.
The person that wrote this website is so unbelievably misinformed and dangerous. I hope no pregnant women base their decision on where to have a baby, in a hospital or home, on her limited near sighted experience. I think she should open her eyes and see the real world of hospital medicine instead of burying it in her delusion that the choice on where to deliver should be based on “deciding what visual elements, sounds, smells and faces will surround you when your baby is born”. How ridiculous. If the majority of women took her advice you would see a rise in serious permanent birth injury that is lifelong. How dare you disseminate false propaganda against delivering under the compassion and care of a trained specialized birthing team in a hospital whose primary purpose is to ensure a healthy mom and baby at the end of the day. You obviously do not know anything about pre-eclampsia, shoulder dystocia, chorioamnionitis, or post partum hemorrhage. How many women would have to die for people to see your recommendations are highly biased because of your poor opinion of state of the art healthcare. How many babies would have to live a life of permanent birth injury for hypoxia that occured at delivery. You are pathetic. You know nothing of having a safe delivery.
Regis,
I appreciate your opinion and want you to know that having a safe birth is always foremost on our minds. The midwifery based birth model is predominant even in the hospitals in Europe, where interventions are much lower than they are here. Midwives are trained to give top prenatal care and screen for issues, like those you mentioned. Midwives have dealt with all of the issues above and are ready to handle, transport, or refer to the hospital when appropriate.
The point is that there are many interventions that happen unnecessarily and can create problems that weren’t there.