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

[everychildmatters]

Because clearly evidence says otherwise!!

@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.

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

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

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.

@Paaseitjes I couldn't agree with you more. Which country is this? My guess is Finland, Sweden or Norway - all far better safety records that the UK.
If home births are so inherently risky, why do your stats suggest otherwise? Answer - they wouldn't. But yet people will still not accept this.
Not so random a question...what age do the children start school where you are?

In essence, the Nordic countries are all excellent in terms of safety standards in maternity care. The UK doesn't even meet the top 10.

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.

@EvelynBeatrice But if we're takling solely from a safety perspective...the Nordic countries are outperforming the UK. As are numerous other countries.

Quite. UK maternity care is in dire straits.

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

Nordic women are healthier, younger and slimmer.

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.

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.

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.

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

The trouble is you don’t know if you are one of those women until you try it. Furthermore, just because one delivery was ok it doesn’t mean the next one will be

@Bigpinksweater Evidence?

Yes. We had an ambulance station just down the road from us. It could have taken five minutes. It took half an hour for the ambulance to even be in attendance, let alone how long it took for me to be stable enough to be moved. The ambulance had to come from a further station, in rush hour.

I would be significantly more likely to kill myself after a still birth than a traumatic birth where my baby lived (and I’ve had two of those)

@Tralalalama That's you. It doesn't mean everyone is the same. Please don't minimise the experiences of others.

The fact you can even write that response is slightly unhinged

You think there are people out there who think a stillbirth is the better option out of that or traumatic birth with an alive baby….wtaf

When one of my twin daughters didnt survive I was heartbroken and still am. I will never not cry about her, never not miss her or want her in my arms.

When I had a traumatic birth it left me with CPTSD and severe PPD. I was so ill that yes I did have suicidal thoughts just to make the pain go away. 25 years later I still suffer.

I am glad that you will never find out what either of those things feel like. You cant say "I would rather have that pain than this pain" when you have never experienced either. My home birth actually helped heal a lot of the mental wounds I had from the hospital birth that caused the PTSD

Okay I’m surprised.

I would risk my own mental health over the life of my baby any day of the week

and I say this as someone who prayed and bartered everything in my gift with god that my baby would survive while I was being put to sleep.

@PyongyangKipperbang I am so very sorry for both the loss of your daughter and for your traumatic birth. I am sorry too some posters on here have no idea what it is to suffer with challenges in their mental health (lucky them I guess).
I've suffered and struggled for different reasons to your own, but I totally understand where you are coming from when you say your home birth helped you to heal ❤️

There are definitely people out there who think like this and practice this.