I was recently thinking about my uncle. He was my grandmother's first child and he was born at home. I didn't know this fact until I went to tell my grandmother that we were considering giving birth at home for our second baby. I thought that it would be a hard sell for her. When she told me I was shocked, she'd never said anything about having him born at home.
My mother was her second child, born only four years after my uncle. I was surprised that my grandmother had not only a hospital birth but a c-section. I questioned grandma for years. Why did she go to the hospital the second time? Who attended her birth at home with my uncle? Why did she have a c-section?
Grandma didn't have a lot of answers. She had her baby at home with a doctor the first time simply because that's the way it was done. The second time, that home birth doctor sent her to the hospital towards the end of her pregnancy. The hospital doctor said that she was about to go into labor and the baby needed to be born via cesarean. (I've always speculated that it was a placenta previa.)
The amazing thing is, no drama over having her baby at home. No drama over needing to go to the hospital to have a baby in the event of a medical crisis. No quibbling between the two attendants, just two groups working together to provide good honest health care for laboring women. How has it changed so quickly?
Related:
As a practicing CNM/homebirth midwife, I’m always amazed that the first thing people ask me is ,”But aren’t you afraid something might go wrong?” What about the things that go wrong every day in the hospital?
I’ve had dozens of experiences when working in the hospital, where the emergency was caused by unnecessary interventions. Inductions for purely elective reasons, c-sections done without giving the mother a fair chance to birth her baby, and continous fetal monitoring have all been shown to increase the risk of complications in a low-risk woman.
Many physicians, nurses, and even midwives are afraid of birth out of the hospital only because they have not taken the time to educate themselves about normal birth and the fact that being in a hospital does not guarantee protection against complications, nor can it promise a good outcome when those complications do occur.