Why should you have your next baby at home?

  The safety of home birth, which is something I have always believed on an intuitive level, is explainable through statistical data. I have been looking for years for some way to explain that special edge which home birth mothers have over their hospital birth counterparts.
    The answer came one Sunday afternoon, while I was watching a football game on television.  The commentator said the home team will win because they have the “Home Court Advantage”.
    I had heard this expression many times and all of a sudden I said, “that’s right! Home birth has the home court advantage!”
    The expression “home birth advantage” puts into words something I have struggled for years to explain about my home birth practice. Through twenty seven years and 14,000 home deliveries, one of the most recurring questions asked of me continues to be, “What makes home birth safe?”
    I donÌ“t think the poor hospital statistics mean we have incompetent doctors and nurses in our hospitals. In fact, we have some of the finest doctors in the world.  However, our doctors and nurses working in the  hospitals lose one very strong advantage — the home court advantage.

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    Could the hospital be changed and somehow become as safe as home for laboring women? The answer is “No.” There is something about just walking into a hospital that changes the dynamics of labor. The length of labor is significantly increased in the hospital. If you put any woman in the hospital, her labor will slow down or stop because her hormonal balance changes. Her energies have to go into dealing with her strange surroundings, not into the birth itself.
    When the mother has been in labor for a “reasonable” amount of time at the hospital without delivering, the doctors believe they must now “actively manage” the labor. They do not realize that the hospital setting is the cause of this problem.  They will not believe that this wouldn’t have happened at home.
    Many “routine interventions” such as drugs, intravenous fluids, electronic monitoring and forceps occur during the hours of labor that wouldn’t have existed at home. Hospitals that allow you to labor naturally for the first 10 hours wonÌ“t allow you to labor naturally for the next 10 hours. At home these next 10 are spent getting to know the already delivered baby, not trying to push the baby out. In other words, the hospital environment creates many of the problems of labor and then obstetricians have to try to solve them.     Home births occur before the miserable second half of hospital labor has a chance to start. Home births occur before problems happen. If women knew that most of them could have half as much labor and no complications, they would all be choosing home birth!     Prior to this century, birth always took place in the comfort of home with close friends and family surrounding the mother. Giving birth requires privacy and intimacy.  Birth is a very sexual and personal experience. A warm, intimate and supportive environment allows us to function as we were intended.