Birth, Every Home Should Have One

By Suzanne Arms and Jennifer Margulis

(See their bios at the end.)

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Babies are most often conceived out of lovemaking, a wonderful and fun activity (as long as it’s mutually consensual) that may take place at home, in a hotel room, or in a private corner off the trail at Mount Overlook in Inverness, California.

We humans don’t make love in the hospital.

Even the idea, except for those nurse-doctor late-night supply room trysts, is absurd.

Lovemaking is not something for which we need medication or supervision.

But, in America, as well as most countries across the world today, the majority of pregnant women—over 98 percent in the U.S.—now give birth to the fruit of that love in a hospital.

We’re told over and over again that a hospital is the safest place for a baby to be born. In a highly sanitized windowless room surrounded by a bevy of strangers and a highly trained medical doctor that a woman and her partner may or may not have met before.

We disagree.

We believe that the best, safest, and most empowering place to have a baby is at home.

Hospitals are for sick people

Hospitals are places where people who are sick or require emergency care or surgery go.

They are full of germs and infections, to say nothing of hospital-acquired illnesses, which affect 1 out of every 31 hospitalized patients.

Instead of protecting birth as a normal, natural, healthy, loving activity, obstetrician-led birth is categorized by machines, bright lights, unnecessary interventions, and all things plastic and metal.

Hospital birth is dangerous in America

According to the World Health Organization, the United States has one of the highest—if not the highest—maternal mortality rate of any country in the industrialized world.

Hospitals in America are largely unregulated, profit-driven institutions whose bottom lines include money, convenience, and liability risk reduction. Doctors are in charge, though nurses provide the vast majority of patient care.

Indeed, the entire system of medicalized birth is categorized by outdated, illogical, and unscientific practices that, for the most part are both unnecessary and unsafe.

These include such seemingly harmless practices as limiting freedom of movement and restricting a woman’s intake of food and drink during labor; limiting who she is allowed to have with her; and hooking her and her baby up to continuous fetal monitoring, which studies in the United States and other countries, has proven to result in increases rates of cesarean birth without improving the outcomes for moms or their babies.

Another still-routine practice in most U.S hospitals is to encourage or even require women to labor and birth on their backs.

Labor when lying on your back lengthens the duration of contractions, cause contractions to be more painful, and makes contractions less effective.

With her legs spread apart and her feet up in stirrups, a woman becomes a stranded beetle, positioned so that her body works against gravity as she and her baby are doing their best to birth.

Perhaps the worst intervention is the routine separation of most mothers and their babies in the first critical hours after birth. This has been shown to hinder both breastfeeding and bonding, making it much more difficult for the baby to feel safe, protected, and loved.

Less intervention a safer, more scientific way to birth

The most scientific birth is the least technological, as medical historian Alice Dreger so eloquently put it in an article for The Atlantic that explored the backward birthing practices in American hospitals.

Indeed, in countries with the best birth outcomes, midwives attend the majority of births, whether these births take place in a hospital, a stand-alone birth center, or at home.

Women in these countries are treated with respect, kindness and patience, encouraged to move around during labor, given water and food when requested, and helped to have unmedicated vaginal births.

In Japan, a country with among the best birth outcomes in the world, over 75 percent of births are attended by midwives.

Midwife-assisted birth in Nordic countries, including Iceland, Sweden, Holland, and Norway, has been shown to be the main reason why these countries are among the safest places in the world to give birth, where c-section rates remain low and birthing women are able to avoid the use of painful, dangerous, and often unnecessary drugs and other interventions, according to researchers.

When birthing women are in an environment where they are able to labor undisturbed, guided by the natural rhythm of their body and the baby, as we know from the outstanding birth outcomes tabulated by homebirth midwife Ina May Gaskin, there are rarely complications requiring medical interventions like drugs or surgery.

Only 2 percent of the births attended by Gaskin resulted in a C-section, despite her attending women deemed “high-risk” by the medical establishment, including women carried twins and moms of so-called “advanced maternal age.”

About the Authors

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is a science writer, homebirth mom, and the award-winning author of the 2015 Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family.

Suzanne Arms is an internationally known birth activist and the author of the 1975 bestseller Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth in America.