Home Birth -The Positive Experience You’re Looking for
Written by Guest Author Sarah Seymour
Picture the scene, you are an expectant mother. You’re dreaming of a home birth, and have contracted with a midwife to assist your baby’s birth at home. You meet with her numerous times during your pregnancy and discuss your pregnancy, preparations for your birth and beyond. You and your midwife feel relaxed with each other, almost like friends and when the time comes for your birthing, she is the first person you call. Once your labor is established, your midwife comes to your home and lays out her equipment, while at the same time your partner sets up the birthing pool, prepares towels and nutritious snacks and puts clean sheets on the bed for afterwards. Candles are lit, your favorite music is playing, you wear your most comforting clothing and prepare to meet your baby.
Sounds idyllic? It can be.This is how labor looks for the hundreds of women who choose home birth each year. Let’s look at this intimate event a little more closely…
Your birthing room will be calm and quiet with few people and no strangers – you control who enters your birth scene, because it is your home.
You move around your home finding the best position for each contraction – finding comfort on your sofa, kneeling on the floor, going in and out of your shower.
Internal exams are kept to a minimum, and those will be performed with the utmost care and respect.
You will be encouraged to eat and drink to keep your energy up instead of having an IV placed.
Your baby’s well-being will be assessed by intermittent listening-in with a handheld doppler, in whichever position or place you are comfortable with at the time, instead of continuous and restrictive fetal heart rate monitoring.
Decisions are jointly made with your midwife whether to intervene in your labor, and routine procedures are not carried out unnecessarily.
You will be able to deliver in a birthing pool which is not reliably available in a hospital setting.
Birth is a normal physiological event that can occur safely without medical intervention in most cases. Midwives trust the mother’s body to do its work without the interference of machinery and the limitations of hospital rules.
Home births are seen to be quicker and smoother than hospital births as their natural state and hormonal flow are not disrupted by the stressful hospital environment. Women feel more relaxed in their own home environment. They are not told what to do and where to go and therefore feel a measure of control over how they handle their labor. This allows the labor to unfold naturally and easily in most cases. Another factor for many women is having confidence in their care provider instead of having to trust complete strangers to deliver their baby.
Home birth feels more ‘organic’ to life, there is no need to leave the home to give birth and it is very comforting to prepare the birth space at home beforehand for maximal spiritual and emotional satisfaction. Overall, home birth experiences are very positive, which is why home birthers nearly always go the same route for any subsequent births.
Here’s a selection of quotes I have received from women about their home birth:
“It was the most beautiful, most spiritual experience of my life”
“No lights, no personnel… just calm, quiet, peaceful”
“My own space and one-on-one attention”
“I need to trust the person who attends the birth and have nurtured a comfortable relationship”
“I don’t have to play by the hospital rules”
“I love the freedom of movement that happens at home”
“I couldn’t believe it was possible to enjoy birth until I had a home birth”
We can contrast an empowering birth scene with that of a standard hospital birth which will typically include many of the following scenarios:
- Traveling in a car to the hospital during painful contractions, waiting to be seen by a midwife and a doctor who may or may not be in a friendly mood.
- Dependence on the whims of the hospital staff as to whether a mother is allowed into a labor room or if she must pace the halls and wait for her labor to progress in an uncomfortable environment, all the while coping with contractions.
- Being asked tons of questions, numerous times, whilst in the throes of labor because the hospital staff don’t know the woman or her medical history.
- Having an IV placed upon admittance, ‘just in case it’s needed’ even if the birth is imminent and the mother can’t bear any interference at that point.
- Repeated internal exams from midwives and doctors, sometimes one after the other, often from male doctors and regularly performed roughly without due care and patience.
- Continuous fetal heart monitoring; the mother is strapped to a machine with tight belts on the abdomen for long periods of time, restricting movement and often forcing her to lie in the bed.
- Multiple strangers (medical and support staff) coming in and out of the labor room as they please, turning on lights and making noise even amid pushing.
- Being pressured to have the waters broken and/or to start a Pitocin drip, just because the labor is going slowly! If there is no real medical need, then women often have to argue and insist on their rights to refuse consent to these procedures.
- Being separated from newborns, often for hours at a time, due to hospital policies or other various “reasons”.
It does not sound like the kind of experience most women are hoping for. There are numerous ways in which the mother’s birth experience is controlled and managed by hospital policies. These policies are designed to handle workflow and keep everyone in place, but they do not serve the low-risk mother.
As a society we have become dependent on these practices and insist they are necessary for the mother and child’s safety. But robust research has shown that this is simply not the case. Undisturbed birth is how we have been bringing children into the world since the beginning of time and it is only the ‘at risk’ women or the complicated cases that need hospital supervision.
Many women will put up with medical intrusions, because they prefer to have a full medical team on standby in case of emergency. Giving birth in a hospital can be a great experience if you get the right staff. As a hospital-based midwife for many years, I did my best to facilitate the best birth experiences possible within the constraints of hospital policies.
However, for many women, birthing in the hospital is a scary and intimidating experience that needs to be ‘endured’. The routine impositions placed upon healthy women during
labor are unnecessarily distressing and distracting for what is, in these cases, a natural and straightforward process. Women expend valuable energy insisting on their rights to refuse intervention or to have more freedom. Sometimes they are bullied into submitting to procedures they are reluctant about and therefore it is common amongst mothers to hire an experienced doula for their hospital births to ‘advocate’ for them and to ensure they get the most suitable treatment. I am not against hospitals as they have an important role to play in caring for complicated births, and are needed for those wanting epidural pain relief, for instance, but I am against applying blanket routines to all women who do not benefit from them.
Childbirth is a rare lifetime event which leaves an indelible mark on the psyche of the birthing mother and has many long-term repercussions. At its best, birth can be transcendental; the mother experiences a state of euphoria which is unique to childbearing. Furthermore, a great birth experience empowers the new mother, boosting her self-confidence and her ability to mother her child. A miserable birth experience, by contrast, often leaves the mother feeling defeated, weakening her self-belief and her functioning as a new parent. Sometimes it can take years to recover from a traumatic birth (which is usually characterized by feelings of disempowerment and not necessarily due to a complicated birth).
Mothers who delivered their first baby in hospital, and felt let down by the experience, have a different option. Home births are indeed the perfect opportunity for second-time mothers to create a healing experience after a difficult or traumatic first birth.
Home birth is wonderful, but sometimes we do experience complications or emergencies. All midwives carry suitable medical equipment and are trained in dealing with emergencies. Women with straightforward pregnancies with healthy babies having a planned home birth have a very slim chance of complications. However, a small percentage of women are transferred to the hospital before, during or after labor. It is the midwife’s job to identify these complications and ensure a timely transfer as the mother and baby’s safety is paramount. However, overall outcomes for planned home births are extremely favorable and safety statistics are comparable with those hospital births (see The Lancet article linked above for a meta-analysis of half-a-million home births worldwide). It is important to add that home birth is endorsed as a preferred option for low-risk women in many countries, including Canada, the UK and The Netherlands.
If you are interested in home birth, it is important to do your own research and speak to as many people as you need before you make your final decision. All potential clients are carefully screened for suitability for home birth and are counseled extensively before embarking on that route. In home birth, the mother herself takes responsibility for her labor and birth and does not hand over her body to the hospital staff to ‘take care of’. She realizes that it’s her body, her baby, her birth and that her physical and mental preparations are essential in helping her get through the hard work of childbearing. When done with commitment and in cooperation with her trusted midwife, birth can be a truly transformative experience.
Birth is a normal physiological event that can occur safely without medical intervention in most cases.
Sarah Seymour is a UK and Israel qualified Orthodox midwife with over 20 years’ experience caring for mothers and babies in hospitals and at home. She practices Classic Midwifery, which delivers evidence-based care focusing on the emotional, social and spiritual aspects of pregnancy and birth, as well as ensuring the health of the mother and her baby. When acceptable to the birthing family, she recognizes Hashem’s presence in the birthing room for maximal spiritual awareness.
Sarah can be contacted through her website https://sarahthemidwife.com