i cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you should ideally give birth in a fully equipped and staffed medical facility or if you insist on giving birth through an alternative method you should be within minutes of a hospital and i mean under 5 minutes if you’d like me to be really fucking frank
like i can get on board with so much feminist theory and stuff, truly, and i do acknowledge that obstetrics and gynaecology as a field holds blind spots that are egregious (e.g. infant and maternal mortality in the black community) but there is no empowerment in risky birthing practices that our foremothers, and i’m not mincing words, often suffered through. birthing is natural, but it is not “easy” or even “innate”, it is best practiced guided and witnessed by those that know what to do in an emergency. you are not reconnecting to any innate feminine nature by practicing dangerous birthing practices—you are recreating a time when the bodies and lives of women barely mattered and it was expected that death would/could occur at insane and tragic rates.
this is a hill i will spend the rest of my days fighting on because while i am not interested in birthing children myself, i have an incredible passion and interest in the field of labour and delivery. it’s been one of my greatest joys to play even a small part in delivering neonates. i do not want anyone to risk their babies over a deeply, deeply misguided idea of free birth being “the natural way” when natural is not always synonymous with the safest way.
So many people think it's either midwife or doctor. It's not. Have your midwife or doula in the hospital room with you, I promise the doctors don't give a shit. Hell, you can have her do the delivery itself and just have the doctors there as emergency backup! But for the love of your baby, go to the fucking hospital.
yup. a lot of hospitals are willing to work with you to realize your birthing plan as much as they can within safe limits and parameters. my hospital is closely and highly allied with midwives all up and down the coast, with the explicit instruction to call the midwife when we know a labouring patient is about to deliver so we can respect their plan. genuinely, you can have almost any kind of birth you want—just make sure that there are qualified professionals in attendance, and it’s not just midwives or OBGYNS you need. you have no idea when you’ll need a respiratory therapist on call, you have no idea when you will need a blood transfusion within minutes or risk certain death, L&D nurses do not have the same training as NICU nurses if a baby declines rapidly. it’s a literal thousand things that can go wrong and you should be in the best place for them to go wrong.
People do not realize just HOW FAST things can go sideways in childbirth. My own experience under the cut:
My firstborn came out after a textbook delivery and right as we were basking in those first few minutes of meeting, I started to feel Bad and Weird out of nowhere. The medical team jumped into action so quickly that I had no idea what was happening until it was over. They never specified the amount of blood that I lost, but I the look on my husband's face told me it was a lot.
If I hadn't given birth in a hospital, I would have hemorrhaged to death before even getting to give my child a name. If my secondborn had not been a c-section, my OB/GYN did not mince words when she said there was a real possibility of one or both of us having major complications or dying. I survived giving birth twice. My babies are now big, healthy kids. I don't take that for granted.
Nature wants the species to continue. It does not give a shit about you specifically.
The growing popularity of home births in the US in particular have everything to do with... systemic antiblackness and racism in American hospitals.
If you want people to return to the hospital, you need to make hospitals less racist.
