I chose to give birth at home to children #'s 4 and 5 after doctors almost killed #1 and #3, and almost killed me on #2.
I was warned about how dangerous it was, how I was putting my babies at risk, what a careless parent I was being...I think the doctors were only concerned with their income.
Home birth went very well. I was up walking and going to church within 4 hours of delivery. I haven't been to a doctor since - and that was 17 years ago. I am just lucky (or blessed) I guess.
We had Babies 2 and 3 of 4 at home; both 1 and 4 were similarly injured by the Pitocin, but 1 was much more lightly affected and is doing very, very well now. There were similar odd things during their growing up years; the difference was in degree -- which is everything. #4 is essentially disabled for life and #1 is MORE than successful. #2 had the cord around his neck and one bad fall at age 1, with some later effects from both I think, but DMAE-H3 eventually helped him (as it did with #4 -- it's a neural toner, liquid drops in a dark bottle, by TwinLabs) and #3 had his vaccinations RIGHT ON TIME from infancy in 1974 and has some overfocus problems (!) but is otherwise okay. They weren't vaccinating as aggressively then, which probably saved us. Interestingly, both #2 and #4 were not vaccinated early, #1 and #3 were, so that rules out the impact of vaccinations on our autistic symptom base in this family and points right directly to the Pitocin. In addition, we had the privilege of speaking about our experience with SI with our son, and of meeting one of the other speakers and an autism researcher, Dr. Pangsepp, at a Sensory Integration International conference in San Diego in 1995, and he was doing research on the oxytocin system of the brain -- which is directly impacted by Pitocin -- and his research in the laboratory was directly supporting what we had seen in our own "family lab" with only our own observations and incidental note-comparing with other parents. It was around that same time we learned that the JARD (Journal of Autism and Related Disorders -- hope I got that right) had published an article on the epidemic of autism facing the country, and the Newsweek article quoting Dr. Hollander as saying that about 2/3rds of his autistic study population have Pitocin deliveries in their histories.
Our son was also written up as part of a composite patient in an article that interviews Dr. Len Ochs on his electromagnetic stimulation therapy, in JARD or a similar magazine, in the late winter/early spring of 1997, pseudonym "Tom."
The reason I keep challenging posters on this thread who don't have any personal experience with autism is because it took my laboratory of ALL four kids before I was able to make the connections I made: observation is the FIRST tool of research, and if you don't have your own lab to observe in, you're full of hot air.