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

[everychildmatters]

Because clearly evidence says otherwise!!

Retired Midwife here.I have one horrific memory of a delivery that went horrendously wrong at the last minute.Absolutely nothing at all to suggest this young Mother was at risk,right up until she started fitting just as she was fully dilated!Both Mother and baby were fine,but had that been a home birth they would both have died,no doubt about it.A team were in the delivery room so quick after the emergency bell was activated.No history of high blood pressure,all during labour it was fine.The mother was extremely ill for several days post delivery.

This happened before I had any children,I went on to have 3,would never have considered a home birth.Childbirth is one dangerous event!

But 'banning' a woman from giving birth in the location she wants, for the good of the 'baby' is bestowing personhood on the foetus before it is born. Which doesn't follow for any other law in this country.

The thing is if you ‘ban’ home birth, many women will just opt to free birth instead which IS dangerous

Things can go very wrong in just a few minutes my second child was “low risk” after a perfect birth with my first and being young slim and healthy and it ended in emergency c section because baby’s heart beat was distressed.

factor in traffic and that a lot of people don’t live near hospitals and it could quickly be a disaster

But regarding the news story. It’s worth pointing out that this has made national headlines. According to google about 3% of babies in the UK are born at home. That’s 1 in 33 births. And this story of an adverse outcome, with a woman that was very high-risk and opted for this against medical advice, has made national news.

So I don’t really see how her situation, as sad as it is, relates to low-risk mothers making an informed choice to give birth at home.

My second would 100% have died had I not been in a hospital. They almost couldn’t save her and the damage done by resuscitation plus her undiagnosed condition meant she was in the NICU for months, nearly dying several times.

I loved the idea of a home birth but now absolutely no way.

You aren't listening. Plenty of people go to hospital while in labour and are completely ignored. A friend of mine had a crash c-section after spending hours and hours pleading the midwives to monitor her as she felt something was wrong. When they finally, very reluctantly gave in both she and the baby were in such a bad way she had to be knocked out for the c-section and there was nobody to hold the baby when she was born as the Dad had been sent back home.

Everything was fine in the end and she left hospital 2 days later and was back to normal/driving 2 weeks later, which is why these stories don't get told. Because women are told 'the only thing that matters is a healthy baby'.

Many women on this thread have highlighted that they weren't 'safe' in hospital where they were being ignored and denied medical monitoring, intervention or pain relief when it was requested. These make the home birth horror story anecdotes sound a bit hollow. They also make the 'doctors will force interventions on you' horror stories sound fantastical and dismissive.

We are proposing a narrative that is counter to the 'low risk' = doesn't need intervention and 'high risk' = deserving of intervention, and asking, whether the concept of low risk (particuarly first time mothers) is actually a fob off designed to save money, with mother's blamed for 'not understanding risk' properly, when they didn't come up with the inappropriate, binary labels in the first place. Its not inevitable that medical science finds birth outcomes 'unpredictable'.

That's horrible.

I don't know why it's considered ok to let women labour on their backs like that. It should be total no no. Most other mammals have much easier births than humans and yet we know perfectly well that would cause a massive uptick in problems. Human mothers need to move around to help the baby move through the pelvis and to avoid problems like compression of the baby and cord.

How many times the "baby's heart-rate has dropped" is caused by mum labouring for hours on her back would be interesting to know. Even with an epidural they are supposed to be helping her move around to avoid these issues.

A lot is because they care more about the monitor read out at the nursing station than proper care, and it's easiest to monitor a mum in bed who isn't moving much. The monitors aren't really more effective than regular checks, but they don't require staff to really be actively involved or even necessarily go into the room.

This is why mums need a midwife, or someone who knows what she's doing, with her pretty much throughout the labour.

They wouldn't have been able to do an emergency C-section if she was at home though would they?

She may not have needed one. She was ignored by the staff even when she felt something was wrong

This neglect would not have happened with a planned home birth with 1:1 care. She'd have been listened to and a rapid transfer to hospital arranged if necessary.

That's not really the point I was making though, was it?

However, the stories of planned NHS home births (no private midwife/doula lunatics) for appropriate candidates on this thread suggest she would actually have been monitored at home. Distress picked up and transferred to a hospital expecting and prepared to actually provide some evidence-based medicine/surgery for her and her baby.

This is absolutely not guaranteed for run-of-the-mill 'low risk' women turning up at hospital because they have been led to believe they will have a 'safe' birth there.

Why do you assume a breech baby would mean death? Most of the time they are delivered successfully.

North Manchester hospital where it says she was has been rated as requires improvement for maternity and as “inadequate” for safety by the CSC. I don’t know why the articles were not mentioning this. If women are terrified to go back to hospitals they’ve had awful experiences at and which are deemed as unsafe then of course it’s unsurprising that they would opt for a home birth. The whole trust needs to be sorted out for its maternity provision which is quite frankly a fucking joke.

Of course they arise in other countries, the problems are exactly the same.

I had two straightforward low-risk pregnancies, but the babies would've died in labour if I'd been at home. Both vaginal births, I had no trouble with labour, birth or pushing them out, and no risk factors to the babies - it was just random

It's not something I'd ever risk tbh

How easily do you think she will be transferred to hospital? I had to take a relative to hospital recently because he was having a heart attack and no ambulance could come for hours. The relative was quite young and would have died if I hadn't been able to do that.

But the thing is tens of thousands of women are having homebirths every year in the UK. Cases where it goes wrong literally make national headline news, and in this case the woman was high-risk and completely went against advice and statistics.

I know lots of us can say ‘well I was low-risk and it all went wrong at the last minute’ but this doesn’t line up with the real outcomes for low-risk women who give birth at home. I think the likelihood is it might seem like ‘last-minute sudden emergency’ to us but there were earlier indications or signals things may go downhill, at hospitals they can watch and wait but homebirth midwives would transfer at an earlier point. Also the fact that as a hospital birther I laboured at home until 7-8cm with zero medical input. A friend who home birthed had health professionals with her, monitoring and checking, well before that point.

Although interestingly enough I remember my midwife, as well as most of the leaflets etc, strongly encouraging women to stay home for longer and not go into hospital early on in labour as it increased the chances of intervention. When I asked why she said because you’re being monitored in hospital. All I can take from this is that monitoring heart rate etc can cause unnecessary intervention?

It really is remarkable here how many babies "definitely" would have died had they not been delivered in hospital. I'm not quite sure that's the reality. Thing is, you simply cannot say with absolute certainty that this would have been the outcome had you opted for a home birth. For example, closer 1-1 care may well have meant the issue was identified more quickly than had you been left unattended/shared a midwife with other labouring women as is usually the case in hospital.

A transfer would have been quite difficult as she lived quite rurally. That was one of the reasons she was in hospital. But that wasn't safe either.

In the case of a hemorrhage after birth, the issue happens so suddenly and dramatically that death (at least of the mother) is absolutely certain without immediate medical intervention, which can't happen at home.

I would have died if I had been at home. My son was poorly too after birth due to an extended labour and he might well have died too. He was jaundiced for a while.

Not sure why it's so difficult to believe people's stories on here.

My friend laboured for 20 hours, she was finally sent for an emergency C section when the baby's heart rate dropped. He was stuck in the birth canal. Both would be dead if she had been at home.

My cousin haemorrhaged significantly and needed a blood transfusion. Baby would have been ok but she would be dead had she not been at hospital.

I know these are the horror stories of birth but this is the risk people are talking about when deciding against a home birth.

The algorithms are working because this article came up on my newsfeed today.

Mother, 34, who tragically died along with her newborn baby after opting for home birth told midwives she wanted a completely natural labour with no medication, inquest hears | Daily Mail Online

Both mine too, and me as well with the first one!

Each to their own but I’d always want to be in a hospital.

I'm one who said both my low-risk babies would have died...maybe they wouldn't have at home, but in hospital multiple consultants rushed in, the midwives were dismissed, and several doctors took over the birth. That wouldn't have been possible at home.

My first birth the baby got asphyxiated by the chord around their neck and the consultant was there within seconds and stopped the baby being strangled during birth. The second was even more hairy - both were "random chance" things and I'm still considered low risk for subsequent pregnancies - it was just bad luck apparently. But I personally wouldn't risk a home birth

She did not want any observations, she did not want any drugs and she did not want any examinations.

Gosh, what an absolutely enormous risk to take.

It is absolutely, categorically not true that having a hemorrhage at home means certain death! It is an emergency and means immediate transfer to hospital but death would still be a very rare outcome (nor is it unknown in hospital). PPH is one of the most common birth complications - if it were a death sentence outside hospital then home birth would indeed be catastrophically dangerous.