Home Birth Opinions

I have a few friends who are serious home birth people. I also have a mother-in-law who had her babies at home by choice. I'm going to be honest here and say that I kind of think this is nuts. Having had four babies I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to an opinion on the subject but I do not believe I have the "right" opinion on it as having a baby is a pretty crummy experience and if it makes them happy then good for them.

I have had to change my opinion of home birthing in a few ways lately and since I've been thinking about it some I thought I'd blog about it.

I have a degree in history and with the research I've done I have a pretty good idea of how many women and children died during birth back in the day. I thought this had something to do with hospitals and the availability of hospital care for delivery. After reading a few medical studies published in reputable journals of medicine I've found out a few things. There are actually three factors that are much more important to the positive outcome of a delivery; trained persons assisting, antibiotics being available, and limits on interference in labor.

I thought this was really interesting.

One study showed that trained midwives at home births had statistics just as good as doctors in a hospital, even in the last few decades and their numbers during the era of putting women in labor to sleep were much better than hospital numbers. They have records for midwives in Europe back a hundred or so years that clearly showed that it was the training that made the most difference. The antibiotics part was clear with the statistics as well, as soon as they were available the mortality rates dropped sharply and as they became available in other countries they made a big difference there. The non-interference thing was kind of proving a negative as one of the studies showed that the not so smart idea of putting mothers to sleep and then using forceps for the delivery caused higher rates for complications and mortality but some of this was from anesthesia so I didn't get a clear picture of how that related. They could prove that during the same time women who gave birth at home with a trained person assisting did a heck of a lot better in the process.

It does still concern me that of the women who have their babies at home that I am personally acquainted with, the majority have children with problems like learning disabilities or autism, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with damage to his brain from being deprived of oxygen during birth but since I (gratefully) wasn't there I don't know if having hospital facilities available would have changed this. The others I don't know if it's related and hospital babies have autism too so it's mostly just a strange and disturbing coincidence I guess, but it still concerns me.

If nothing else, having a baby is messy and if I did it at home I'm pretty sure I'd end up having to clean up afterwards.