I fully agree, and would hold myself responsible. I would never forgive myself.
I notice the trend of posters who support the home birth idea all had a negative experience with it, but “support it 100%”. Kind of, “it’s not for me, but if you do it and succeed, more power to you.”.
That is my attitude as well... more power to you if you succeed. But that is a risk I cannot take. I can’t even bear the thought of forcing my wife to be in labor any longer than absolutely necessary, just to satisfy some ideological convictions.
We are 34 weeks pregant with our first child at the moment and will be in a hospital equipped with state of the art NICU and the best, trusted doctor who came recommended... and an epidural (maybe valium for me, hehehe... just kidding).
There will be no horror stories from us to tell our children in the future.
Sorry for the double post. I removed one line at the end which I thought would address some other posts in this thread, but decided against it since I don’t want to even think of the possibility of something going wrong... do not want to put it out there. So this is officially my removal of the last sentence from my first post from the universe.
“There will be no horror stories from us to tell our children in the future.”
You seem pretty confident that nothing bad ever happens in the hospital. When I said that we had to transfer after my first home birth, I have no regrets about making that decision to birth at home.
My son gestated for 45 weeks and weighed eleven pounds at birth. I was able to have a spontaneous, painless birth in my bedroom.
If I had been working with a doctor or a midwife, I would have been induced three weeks before and only god knows what may have happened while artificially trying to get that huge baby out before he was ready to be born.
I was able to give birth standing up and it only took four pushes to get him born.
Sometimes big babes are slow to breathe and we could not get him going. The EMT’s really helped and he was in the NICU for three days of observation and tests. I also bled quite a bit and had to have a bag of blood.
Our fifth childs birth was awesome - at home - and I did my own prenatal care. No Problems. It was very empowering to finally have everything go right. My biggest complaint about our four previous births was the fact that I could not keep my babies with me right after the birth. For one reason or another each of them was taken away.
At home, no one is able to “steal” the baby away for tests and observation. And my husband and I just reveled in being able to hold our son without anyone bugging us.
Here is my unassisted childbirth video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXuZs1PvkB0
Good luck with your birth, any way the baby is born, it is always a happy time when a new child joins a Family.
For me, I just prefer to be at home. (And would appreciate the researchers NOT fudging the data)
Jen