We had our son at home with two experienced midwives, each with several hundred births notched. A major hospital is down the street if any problems developed.
So what happens in an emergency? Chilbirth in humans is much more difficult in humans than for birth in other mammals due to the size of the baby's head. Sure traditionally most births happened in the home, but there were also high death rates for both the baby and the mother.
911?
If you’re a low risk pregnancy, as my wife was, with proper available medical facilities nearby and experienced midwives there’s no more to worry about than a hospital birth.
Home births aren’t just something from the past. They’re very prevalent in modern societies today — for instance Japan and The Netherlands have high rates of home births, and their infant mortality stats are very low.
Midwives are well-trained. They know their limits. For the most part, a woman's body is surprisingly adept at birthing a baby (who'd have thunk it?) and she just needs to supervise and encourage the mother. If a real problem develops they go to a hospital.
I was initially against the idea, but now that I've learned more about it, I would have no issue doing a home birth with my wife.
This could be the best of both worlds.
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/07/16/0716midwife.html
High death rates from childbirth were often attributed to child bed fever. If you care to research that, it was spread by doctors and nurses who did not wash their hands sufficiently between treating patients.
A woman giving birth was safer NOT to be treated by a physician until the acceptance of the germ theory in medicine and the recognition of its cause as germ based. This was the cause for the high death rate.
See: http://householdphysician.com/chapter11.php?page=31
Legally mandating that people cannot make medical choices after being informed of the consequences (and need a state mandate forcing them to do something “good” for themselves) is not conservative in approach - IMHO.
Just sayin.
The women are seen prior to delivery. If any problem is detected that precludes a home birth, it doesn’t happen.
My mother was one of eleven kids, ten of the eleven were born at home with only my grandfather attending. One of those was born on the plains of Russia. The one that was not born at home was born in the hospital at Galveston when they landed. There was a smallpox quarantine of the ship so they took my grandmother to the hospital to have the baby, my Aunt Molly.
We have five children, young adults now, the youngest two were home births with me and a “granny” midwife there. In the first one the cord was around our daughter’s neck, the midwife slipped her finger under it and pulled it away from her neck and then immediately gave our daughter a little whiff of oxygen. She went from light blue to instantly pink. In the second the midwife was dozing on the couch between contractions so I let her sleep and had the pleasure of totally delivering our youngest daughter. I woke her up after the baby was nursing, the cord cut, the placenta delivered and my wife was dozing. She chewed me out some, but since we are friends she knew that I would have hollered if things started to go bad.
After both deliveries we called our family MD who came by the house, checked the babies over, had a cup of tea and told us that was the way babies were supposed to be delivered. I always figured that if my grandparents could do it then I also could.
Although we didn't have our two sons at home, we did use midwives.
In the case of my older son, we were at the stand-alone birthing center, and, indeed, problems arose after some hours of labor. We put my wife into the car and drove her a few miles to the hospital. As her OB/GYN had been alerted when she'd gone into labor, he met us at the hospital.
The rest of labor was a little tricky, but birth went fine, my son did fine.
My second son, no problems arose, so he was born in the birthing center - a house in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
Women who decide to have their baby at home or at a stand-alone birthing center are not women who have pregnancies and births unmarked by care of and coordination with OB/GYNs, but rather, have nurse midwives as their primary caregivers, and only make use of high-end technology in case of high risks or emergencies.
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