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| Watch it, it's a good show. Bring tissues. |
When you're preparing for a baby, people love to give advice and ask personal questions. Most mean well, and they are really just trying to gauge what kind of person you are by your birth/child related choices. Others are downright pushy. But this post is about the surprising variation in what people expect based on certain bits of information, and conclusions they jump to when you mention you're planning a home birth. A few categories:
The skeptics
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| "What do I do?" "Nothing dear, you're not qualified." |
Advancement in TV medical drama has produced a hospital-based birth expectation among people that grew up watching American-style TV. There is an expectation of a birth "emergency", but childbirth is usually a slow, steady process with predictable success. I've been asked a few standard questions from this side.
"What if something goes wrong?"
My wife is a rock star. For our first child, she was in labor for ~63 hours, when our midwife recommended we move her to a hospital when she failed to progress half-way through the second night of labor. An epidural and a few hours sleep allowed her to recharge and have a successful natural birth of our 11 lbs baby. Yes, 11 lbs. It was the right choice to move to the hospital, there were very simple complications. However, we will be laboring at home for a planned home birth again. It is very likely we will be successful at home this time. We are dedicated to creating an environment of non-intervention until it's clear that medical intervention will be needed to avoid a crisis situation. Hospitals are built for crisis, and doctors get impatient when you go off their textbook timetables. Home birth is the right choice for us because there is no reason to believe that we are in more danger birthing at home than in a hospital.
"Is this a hippie thing?"
No, we are not doing a home birth out of a counter-culture rejection of modern medicine. We love modern medicine. But medicine is for when something is wrong. Most births are completely normal and require very little help from anyone. If things start going sideways, there is usually plenty of time to transfer to a hospital when intervention becomes necessary. Until then, we plan on being at home for the duration of labor and delivery.
"Do people still do that?"
Yes, in fact we know several people who have, including my own mother with all four of her children. Home birth has never been totally off the radar, and is just as safe for normal "low risk" pregnancies as hospital birth.
The naturopaths
I love our birthing community; the midwives and doulas in our area do amazing work. At the extreme end of this birthing spectrum are some folks who are really, really into home birth. They also tend to be into home everything. Backyard gardens, homemade clothes, home-brewed beer. They are dedicated to green and natural living, and that is wonderful. However, some of them also believe in a few odd things that lead to other questions:
"Are you going to eat/encapsulate the placenta?"
No. My lifelong goal of not willfully consuming human flesh prohibits me from eating placenta, no matter what dubious claims of nutrition are reported, or magical powers it may bestow. We may bank the cord blood because that is breaking science that could save lives someday, including our own.
"Will you be vaccinating?"
Yes, most certainly. Vaccination has saved thousand of lives, and countless millions of dol... no wait, they did count it up. $395 Billion dollars saved, and that's just because of the last 20 years of vaccination. "Polio cases have decreased by over 99% since 1988, from an estimated 350 000 cases then, to 406 reported cases in 2013. The reduction is the result of the global effort to eradicate the disease."
It's a proven science. Do you know what has been disproved? The link to autism.
The religious
They might have opinions about home birth, but this group is mainly concerned about rituals and rites, and so these questions only make sense in a religious context. I was raised in the church, but some people can be more than a little pushy. I'm only including them because these questions have come up more often than I expected.
"Will you be circumcising?"
I understand that there are some religious and ethnic traditions that continue to be observed, even when there is no good reason for mutilating an infant's genitals. As for my sons, they will be left as they are, just like the girls. The more I think about it, the more strange it becomes to even consider it.
"When will they be baptized?"
If all goes well, we might just bless the birthing tub water and consider it done. Otherwise, I'm sure it will come up at some point later and they can decide for themselves if baptism is for them.
3 comments:
I respect any choice you make and your choice is yours and yours alone. My only comment is that, personally, I'm thankful that we made the choice to go with modern medicine as with our first child it seems like everything that could go wrong - did.
I suppose, if supervised by a competent midwife/doula, those complications would have been caught at an early enough stage that we would have been able to transfer and it would not have been a problem. That's what a midwife is trained to do, right? (I ask as I truly never considered this an option - I knew that I was going into this as drugged up as I could humanly be at any stage of the process - I had been in active labor since about 22 weeks and was tired and in pain).
Whatever choice you make is your own. Those who feel the need to tell you what to do - well, I'd tell them what they can do :) But it's nice that you open up the conversation.
Our midwife is a Certified Professional Midwife, and is a licensed OB nurse with years of experience with hundreds of births. She specializes in providing safe home births for people that want them. If you had been having complications as early as 22 weeks that threatened the pregnancy, she would have transferred your care to a doctor, no question. Just like I said, medicine is for when things go wrong.
That is why it's essential that midwives be medically trained and certified. People need a qualified person to determine if home birth is a good option for each pregnancy. Most of the time it is, sometimes it's not. In our experience, it was a series of minor setbacks during labor that lead to the hospital transfer, and that was our midwife acting out of an abundance of caution.
Thanks for commenting!
Funny, wonderful, exciting, and informative. Best wishes on your home birth! Had my 2 with nurse midwives in Chicago (though they were required to work in a hospital setting). Prepared myself by reading the beautiful book Spiritual Midwifery.
Midwife pals!
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