I hear women say all the time,
“I want to be in the hospital in case something happens” or
“I want to have my first baby in the hospital and if it goes well I will maybe try a home birth next time” or
“If I were at home I would have died!” or or or ……….. it goes on and on.
The problem with this thinking is that it is all backwards.
The rate of intervention and c-sections in the hospitals is not conducive to any of these lines of thought. The reality is you have a much better chance of having a great birth if you do it at home with a skilled attendant! Women are dying because of all the routine interventions and because they are not getting the individual personal care every single women deserves!
You see the midwife model of care is so vastly different from the medical model of caring for pregnant and laboring women they cannot even begin to be compared! In the hospital there are so many rules, regulations, restrictions and policies that hinder a healthy women from having an all natural birth. The environment itself is a huge issue and you have all these people in and out. You have cultivated a relationship with a Dr over your pregnancy and the chances of actually getting that Dr are slim to none, unless you schedule your delivery which leads to a whole host of other huge issues that cause interventions that cause bad outcomes. It cascades into a mess and then you arrive at home a few days later wondering how your actual experience veered so far off track and how you ended up with so much that you never wanted and you may even have some type of trauma just because so much happened to you and it happened so fast that you were not able to wrap your head around it at the moment.
You see……the deal is most healthy women do not need that! This does not have to happen to you! Most healthy women do just fine and have beautiful healthy babies and have an experience they will cherish forever, even first time moms!
You have choices and you can have a beautiful, empowering, respectful home birth with a caring attendant who will include you in every decision made and you will cherish the memory!
As a midwife I have a deep relationship with my birthing clients and am vested in the very best outcome for them and their babies!! I monitor you very closely and will get you to a medical facility right away if you or your baby need to be there.
What has got me on this topic?………Just in the last week I have come across so many articles where women are being severely overlooked with severe health issues during labor or in the immediate postpartum period and they are dying or coming very close to it. NPR is doing a huge ongoing investigation to the death rate of women because these things are not being tracked and no one is being held accountable for them. These things are not happening in homes this is all happening in big respected hospitals. It is very scary. Many of those situations that women come out of saying, “I would have died if I were at home” are often brought on because of unnecessary interventions that never should have happened to begin with that actually put them in danger. Those things will not happen at home, at least with me as your midwife!!
I do not want you to read this and be afraid of birth. I want you to read this and realize that you are not necessarily safer if you choose to birth in the hospital. It is just a different place with many more restrictions on you that make a natural birth more difficult. Yes, if something really bad were to happen you are where needed interventions can take place but those real emergencies are literally only about a 1% occurrence in normal birth.
You are POWERFUL.
You are STRONGER THAN YOU REALIZE.
You have the POWER to birth your baby safely at home!
I would love to answer specific questions if you are wondering if home birth can be an option for you!