To be fed up of the "home birth is risky" misinformation?

I'm British in NL, where women are nearly as old and fat as in the UK, and more prone to heart attacks and I think with higher rates of smoking. Possibly slightly less likely to be non-white. Much better prenatal care helps reduce those risks though. Pain killers are less automatic, but most definitely available without judgement. I know far more traumatised British mothers than Dutch

That is brilliant. And your point about stress is so important in the whole discussion. In the uk birth is treated as a highly dangerous medical event. Anxiety is generally high as demonstrated in threads like this, which is ultimately bad for babies and birthing mums. I’d love a cultural shift for us but hard to imagine how to get there.

Just seen the thread so obviously the conversation has been had, but I am unsurprised by the YABU overall vote. MN is very, very negative about HB, to the extent I have previously warned women starting threads about it that this is not the place to discuss it. On here, and as I found in RL when planning HBs, people are inclined to project all their anxiety on to you and present that as fact. Second time we had to conceal from MIL that a HB was planned as she was so incredibly anxious about it and made it all about her and her thoughts. Exactly what a pregnant woman does not need.

If wouldn’t be deemed as safe to be in a birth centre, then home birth isn’t going to be safe either. Thats my view anyway.

This mother was traumatised by the first birth and clearly wasn’t thinking straight at all.

Home birth inherently carries more risks but is clearly ok for low risk pregnancies.

Nordic women are healthier, younger and slimmer.

My child would have died in that 5 minutes. Home birth is riskier.

Quite. UK maternity care is in dire straits.

But lots of expats of my acquaintance hated giving birth in the Nordic countries. The post natal care was seemingly excellent yes, but they wanted pain relief and hated the focus on natural birth at all costs. We’re not all the same.

I had one of my children at home. It felt perfectly safe because I was young, fit, healthy, had had an uncomplicated pregnancy, had given birth successfully in hospital before, knew I'd have an excellent NHS midwife and that if either she or I felt that I needed hospital care, we would be sensible about transferring. I am very pleased it worked out, but I wasn't wedded to it. Safety first.

Although, I should also add that we have a hybrid public private health system, and one of the reasons that home birth is common, besides good outcomes, is that it's way way cheaper! So it's idiocy not to make it feasible in the UK

That's again dependent on being in a well funded health care. I said in my previous post that I'm not UK but in country where home birth is normal, complety safe and where we have much better outcomes than the UK. I was explaining how and why you can make them safe, although I suppose it mostly boils down to having a safe healthcare system, which the UK doesn't. Home births are not fundamentally dangerous despite English & US media trying to make out that they are, but lack of funding is

@Paaseitjes
For birth emergencies, the ambulance is there within 5 mins and the midwives phone the ambulance before it gets to an emergency so there's normaly plenty of time.

This sentence is so dangerous & misleading. You join the same queue as everyone else calling an ambulance & getting a Cat1 response. If the wait time is 15/25/45 mins, then that you will wait. Control will also consider that the parent has a healthcare professional with them on scene, vs someone who is Cat 1 and does not.

Really not. Obviously you need caveats like distance to hospital and maternal/baby risk factors, which can mean home birth isn't advised. It takes a few minutes for a theatre to be set up, and here they do that while the mother is in the ambulance if something has gone wrong at home. For birth emergencies, the ambulance is there within 5 mins and the midwives phone the ambulance before it gets to an emergency so there's normaly plenty of time. If there's any question of problems, there's a paedeatric ambulance standing outside the house which will get the baby to a neonatal unit as fast as from a hospital. Keeping simple cases out of hospitals means that the hospital midwives are really specialised in difficult cases and can provide much more intensive care because their time isn't divided. It means better care and less stress for the mother because they have the sole attention of one midwife in the calm of their own home, massively reducing the need for intervention. That's partly because with undivided attention, any problems are identified well before they become an emergency. As a result, our c-section rate is less than half of the UK, forceps are no longer used and considered mediaeval and we have far fewer deaths. BUT it requires enough midwives so that there can be a midwife at home with you rather than herding women into cattle pens.

A certain percentage of all births will result in complications that require immediate medical attention. If all births were to take place at home there would undoubtedly be worse outcomes in the event of an emergency, meaning there would be more avoidable deaths and disabilities overall.

Nope, not with proper staffing. Many EU counties do this and we have far better outcomes than the UK

There would be a lot more deaths and injuries.

However little mess is leftover I still preferred getting a shower in a nice big wet room and all that blood being swilled away and not caring about wrecked towels or sheets.

Someone asked earlier why I was so scared of blood. I'm not, I'm not even particularly squeamish about it. It was just part of my preference for wanting a hospital to have all that separate from my home. Very much a secondary concern ro the safety aspect but it does make a homebirth undesirable on every level to me.

I do often wonder what the reaction would be, if it were decreed by the NHS that in future, unless there were already contra-indications, all births should take place at home.

Both of my babies needed obstetric help to get them out, and yet no difficulties were expected either time. I have always been so grateful for being in a hospital with expert help available when it was needed.

It was all I cared about. 🤷🏼‍♀️

We’re just going round in circles. We don’t know whether this lady could’ve even been saved in hospital although it probably would’ve given her the best chance possible given the emergencies that ensued. It seems very likely she would’ve ended up with another forceps delivery or C-section however, and then she would’ve been left with a second bad experience.

Sadly there has been another

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/health/article-15207837/amp/Stacey-Hatfield-natural-spoonfuls-death-melbourne.html