Home Births Are More Than Choice

14 August 2008

Does Choosing A Home Birth Guarantee You’ll Have A Home Birth?


The last thing you want to hear is that your chosen home birth might not be the birth you wanted or hoped for. In fact you might end up transferring to that hated and dreaded hospital. It’s SOOOOO politically incorrect to talk about the lack of success of home births or even how to make home birth success more likely.

Most people assume that ‘choosing’ a home birth is all you need to do. Birth Plans are very much like a wish list or a menu choice. After all we are living in a world where: ‘I know my rights to choose’, ‘I want it now’, ‘If I fail someone else is to blame’ and ‘I’m the victim to the medical community.’

Home births are assumed to be the perfect, ideal and best birth. For those families where a home birth has been absolutely ideal, they have extreme difficulty in imagining the huge sense of failure experienced by many families who had hoped for a home birth and a great birth.

Birth is much more than a choice. There is no way you can know what your birth will be like. What happens at all births is much more connected to how the woman takes the journey of this extraordinary activity. In fact, birth is less a ‘choice’ then an activity and that activity is often connected to the hard work of coping with the naturally occurring pain of labour.

But then it’s SOOOO politically incorrect to even talk about birth pain. Now the words: rush, wave, intensity etc are the preferred words. However, pain it is unless you are one of the very fortunate few who actually experience little or no pain. But home births can be as painful as those in hospital. A great deal of the woman’s job is to cope or manage the pain rather than get lost, feel out of control and overwhelmed.

Because you are choosing a home birth you have a much greater responsibility in a political climate that may not support your choice. If you live in a country that does support your choice then you still have a higher responsibility to safely birth at home so that home births remain a viable option for other families.

The responsibility has to do with preparing our pregnant body for birth so this very large object (our baby) can come out easily and safely. Since birth is an activity, preparing our pregnant body for this activity is very real. Since there’s no way to know what your birth will be like, you need to prepare your body to stay open, mobile and relaxed.