Moms Talk: Would you consider a home birth?

I’ll answer my own question right away with an emphatic no, I never, ever considered having either of my two kids at home, away from all the 21st century medical technology – and pain medication – available at the hospital, which in my case was Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

But apparently more and more women – and not just celebrities like Ricki Lake or Gisele Bündchen – have not only considered giving birth at home; they’ve actually done it. Women in America seem to be giving birth at home in greater numbers in the recent past: The New York Times reports that “the number of home births nationwide rose 20 percent from 2004 through 2008,” according to a new study by the National Center for Health Statistics. The study was published by the journal “Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care.”

The Times story says that home births among non-Hispanic white women were up 28 percent during that four-year window, and that’s a rate that is up to six percent higher than all other ethnic groups. The article also notes that most of the at-home deliveries were planned and did not occur as a result of misfortune or because the mothers were taken by surprise at how quickly their labors progressed.

My understanding of the home-birth movement is that women who choose it are trying to avoid an intensely medical experience in a hospital for an event that has been happening naturally since the beginning of human history without medical intervention, from an epidural to a Caesarian section. I can appreciate that stance even if it wasn’t a concern of mine the first time around – my feeling was that even if women have been giving birth for ages, I personally had never done it before and wanted doctors and nurses there to help me through it or, God forbid, to help my baby if something went wrong.

Although the New York Times story doesn’t specify how successful these home deliveries were, I personally think home births are a poor choice. It seems to me that because so much can go wrong so quickly during labor and delivery, that choosing to have your child outside of a hospital is a potentially dangerous act of parenting.

At the very least, setting aside all the possible complications that can occur, a delivery can happen faster than you think it will, as it did when my son was born a year ago. We didn’t come close to giving birth in our living room or on the side of I-83, although with contractions at four minutes apart on the way there, it felt like a distinct possibility at the time. Basically, we hung out around the house a little too long before getting in the car and heading to GBMC. So even with a routine birth at home, if it happens suddenly as some labors do, parents could be caught unprepared, or the midwife or doula might not arrive in time to help.

It seems to me that hospitals offer options that meet parents half-way between an at-home birth with no medical back-up and a full-on medical approach in the hospital. For instance, I know that GBMC offers the “Doula Touch” program, which compliments the traditional medical approach to labor and delivery with extra support and advocacy for how the parents, particularly the mother, want to bring a baby into the world.