To wince at people who have homebirths?

[TheCatsMeow]

I never used to, I used to say that everyone should have the birth they want and mean it. But my birth went wrong and I ended up with a baby who would have died had it not been for NICU. If we had been at home, he wouldn't have survived and I may not have.

Every time I hear someone say they want a homebirth my head screams "YOU'RE BEING IRRESPONSIBLE". I get visions of myself and my son lying dead. It frightens me and every time I see a woman who is pregnant I think "I hope they both survive". I don't say any of this unless someone asks and then I just say that I ended up with complications so was greatful to not be at home.

But I feel like people are risking themselves and their babies and it makes me uncomfortable. I think IABU but don't know how to deal with my feelings on this. Please don't be harsh.

You did come over a bit badly in your OP, I must admit to getting annoyed by it! But I can see why and it does come down to your personal experience, which was not good.

My personal experience of birth, my first child and at home, was very positive. No pain relief, fast labour, no interventions and hands off midwives who could see I was doing fine by myself. I was relaxed and felt very much in control. That was my experience. I don't have any other personal experience of birth. I dearly wish that everyone had a good experience, its horrific what some women have to go through.

My sister had a traumatic birth, forceps, baby got stuck, she had five blood transfusions. She is very small and her baby was very big, no one saw that coming, despite her having a enormous bump! I feel so bad for her, and a little bit guilty that my birth was easy and hers wasn't. It didn't seem fair.

Yabu

My experience of a hospital birth was awful. Left on my own for hours on end (labour was over 2 days) and ended up in theatre with forceps delivery that has left me with lots of problems I am having to live with. If someone had just put their hands on me they would surely have realised the position my baby was in and why I was having difficulty!

My home birth was amazing with a brilliant experienced (they have to be to attend home births) midwife with me the whole time rather than the newly qualified one before who popped in every few hours and couldn't even insert a catheter. And yes I know they have to learn but her lack of supervision was ridiculous (understaffed)

Maybe research it cats?
I did. I was better informed than the consultant I eventually rejected care from.

Intervention can beget intervention. Pain in labour can be good. Intervention can add to stress leading to negative outcomes. Home birth can result in better, more continuous, but less stressful monitoring meaning issues are picked up on sooner.

And I really didn't want to be drawn in on defending myself but I'm less than ten minutes from hospital.

And my home birth was a drug free vbac. With no tearing. I bathed in my own bath two hours later having walked up the stairs alone.

Completely different to my other two hellish experiences.

I have an analogy. It may well be pants.

Your whole life everyone has always told you that Volvos are the safest car, and 98% of people you know buy a Volvo. Then hard data builds up that shows that, in fact, the mini has better safety outcomes. The data is robust and solid. Not only that, but the mini is cheaper and more comfortable. Crashes happen with both cars, obviously, and sometimes outcomes are very bad with both cars, but crashes happen slightly less often with minis, and when they do, the chance of bad outcomes is slightly less.
But most people continue buying Volvos regardless, either because it never occurs to them to consider a mini, or because even when they see the evidence, they can't overcome a lifetime of conditioning that Volvos MUST be safer, they're big, everyone buys them, it can't be true about minis.
All fine. Everyone chooses their own car freely.
Except every now and then a Volvo owner castigates a mini owner for being irresponsible, which is both unfair, and the opposite of the truth.
Also people who have had crashes in minis sometimes revert back to Volvos and recommend everyone else does the same, ignoring the facts and inadvertently encouraging people to take greater risks, rather than fewer.

Which is annoying for mini drivers.

(Disclaimer: I drive neither a Volvo nor a mini, nor do I have a clue about their safety records. I did my research about homebirth though.)

Remember even with a planned home birth, there is no reason it will end that way. People say "my baby would have died had I had them at home" - changes are you wouldn't have been allowed. You'd have been whisked in at the first sign of concern.

YANBU! I had a hospital birth with no intervention, 2nd time round. With 1st birth, I had a long & painful labour, epidural but VB. YANBU at all.

I think it's wrong people are forced to have medical interventions they don't want just because it's procedure. its the same thing with giving everyone a drip

Cat - the only thing that healed me was my third child and finally getting a good birth experience.

Maybe (whatever form it takes I.e. A planned section) that could happen for you.

I think birth, and life, are inherently risky. Some would find hospital riskier.

The reason I pushed for the first homebirth was because during my first pregnancy I was violently, sexually assaulted by medical staff and got to hear her laugh about "teaching [me] a lesson" to her collegues that had held me down while I cried in a pool of blood. I was very close to miscarrying after that. I was repeatedly yelled and threatened during the birth, and in the postnatal ward a midwife related to a community midwife I'd made a formal complaint about during my pregnancy repeatedly lied to me and social services and other medical staff. Hospital felt pretty unsafe for me and my babies at that point.

As a disabled person, I've dealt with a lot of medical abuse as well as medical neglect, and after the first birth I felt hospital was far riskier for me. I was proven wrong by that unsupportive community midwife's actions which for me showed that it was more the individuals and the systems than any location - though I only went into hospital with my fourth at the last moment because of a feeling and not a thing more.

It's the lack of facility for the baby that concerns me, I think the midwife care is brilliant.

So what sort of care is available to a baby born by the side of the road because the hospital was too busy to admit the mother and sent her home? This happens.

A friend's daughter recently had a three day labour and was turned away from her hospital twice and sent to another only to be sent away from that, back to her home and finally managed to get admitted and needed forceps. We can't say what would have happened otherwise, but I wouldn't mind hazarding a guess that if she had been booked for a home birth the midwife would have said that here was a lady who needed additional help now long before. Instead of being in the situation where she was desperate for support and no one had the foggiest about what state she was in. (BTW I felt really angry on her behalf - how could such treatment be considered safe?)

MrsDeVere thank you. I have good memories of parts of it but bits are blank and mostly what I remember is not getting a baby (until more than 24hours afterwards) when I'd been expecting skin to skin and being scared he would die.

I think what upsets me is I still don't know why what happened happened. No one would tell me anything and I had to keep sending my mum to ask what was going on. I was left on a post natal ward with no baby no idea what was happening or if he was alive. For hours. It was awful.

It's ruined my views on pregnancy and birth

slithytove I hope so. I hope if I have other children I will have a better birth experience

So in some cases, women opt for home birth because it means they'll get one to one attention from midwives - does this exacerbate problems of staffing and care within hospitals and cause more stress for other mums?

No, because they are not hospital midwives. Even if maternity hospitals were staffed properly we'd still have community midwives to see pregnant women and newborns in the community anyway.

It's just using a different resource to the women who choose hospital.

I think what upsets me is I still don't know why what happened happened. No one would tell me anything and I had to keep sending my mum to ask what was going on. I was left on a post natal ward with no baby no idea what was happening or if he was alive. For hours. It was awful.

I think we all sympathise with you on this. It must have been a wretched experience, but why then project this experience onto a home birth, (which you appear not to know a great deal about?) Why not turn your attention to what your hospital did or did not do, which does seem to be where the issue lies? As others have said up thread there is an illusion of safety with hospitals. It often seems, as with the Morecambe Bay Trust problems fairly recently, that things have to go very badly wrong indeed before people wake up to the fact that that particular hospital is just not good enough. It doesn't follow from that that all hospitals are bad. However, that seems to be what happens with people's belief about home births - something went wrong with a hospital birth, therefore it would have gone more wrong with a home birth.

Peregrina I think the care a mother gets during a home birth is excellent, I posted earlier that it's the lack of NICU that bothers me. It bothers me about MLU as well, I think MLU should be no more than 5 minutes from a NICU.

I think that's the issue. Not so much being at home without interventions but not having facilities should the baby need it

You know what strikes me the most about this - the fact that women are being all snippy with each other, rather than about the fact that a lot of things surrounding maternity care are shit.

Some hospitals are shit. The level of information given out about HB in some areas is woeful. The amount of scaremongering about both hospital and home births makes making informed decisions more difficult than it should be.

We should be allowed, and able, to make fully informed decisions about our births. If that was the case we'd know the information other mothers were given so we'd know that anyone choosing an X birth was doing so for a good reason, because she knew all her options and chose the best one for her. A lot of the time the misinformation and scare stories robs people of that proper choice.

Lala I think you're right. We should all be angry at the shitty maternity services rather than each other.

I believe though CatsMeow that there is a shortage of NICU cots anyway. You might give birth in a top consultant unit and still have to transfer elsewhere because of this. Even so though, your issue seems to be with your hospital which, would I be correct in assuming, was a Consultant unit? As far as I am aware babies from homebirths/MLUs are not at particular risk of needing an NICU.

Peregrina it was a labour ward we had to be transferred to a NICU. He was transferred without me because of staffing levels which is why I'd never give birth anywhere that didn't have one again.

He wasn't supposed to need NICU, there were no risks to him just a slightly higher risk of me needing assistance.

"I remember watching an episode of OBEM. I think it was the one with the shoulder dystocia (Sp?).

I had a bit of a lightbulb moment. 'Ahhhh OK, so THAT is why some posters on MN are so anti HB'. I mean the ones who have experienced that. If you are having flashbacks about that sort of birth I expect any thought of a HB would make it 100 x worse."

I had a shoulder dystocia at a homebirth and I'm not anti-homebirth! I feel sick imagining how much worse my shoulder dystocia would have been in hospital... Imagining alarm buttons being hit, panicking doctors and midwives crowding into the room, me lying on my back on a high and narrow hospital bed with my knees around my ears, a doctor doing a massive episiotomy, my ds's cord being cut while he was still pale and not breathing and him rushed off to a resuscitaire where I couldn't see him ... Instead of what actually happened - that two calm and competent midwives dealt quietly with his birth, delivered him without doing an episiotomy, resuscitated him on the bed right next to me, so I could see what was happening and then cared for us both with gentleness and full attention for the next two hours so we could recover from the experience. We had two ambulances outside the house, and paramedics standing outside the bedroom door, who we were able to send away as ds started breathing fairly quickly, despite a fairly prolonged wait between the birth of his head and his body.

I would however, be very cautious about accepting an induction, as this makes shoulder dystocia more likely and I'd really want to avoid one in the first place if at all possible...

I think the tricky thing with things like shoulder dystocia and breech births at home is that fewer midwives have the experience to deal with them as, like you say, when in hospital they are dealt with by emergency buttons, doctors or surgery.

Breech birth is a whole different story - managed delivery vs 'hands off the breech'

Emergency buttons? Breech? Glares at DD. That would be the one where I didn't make the labour room. I did meet my midwife after though.