Thoughts on Home Birth

[Analysethat]

Hi all,

So I’m 36 weeks and just come back from my midwife appointment(for clarity I’m in Scotland)

Anyway the midwives are really pushing home births, not sure if this is a new thing or if they have always done it. However I’m really open to the idea but partner and my mum are very wary as it’s my first.

Has anyone else had Home birth for their first and how did you find it? Is it quite dangerous or should I really just go to hospital?

Thanks in advance ☺️

No thanks. My two DC shot out like bullets but both needed extra care afterwards. One would most likely have died if I wasn't in hospital...I got shoulder dystocia and had 10 physicians come running in to pull him out. I'd like to be exactly where all the emergency resources are.
Apart from that, who the hell wants all that mess in their house?
Last time I gave birth, it was so fast that they said consider a home birth next time. This was minutes after 10 of them had run in to revive my son. I told them 'not a chance in hell'.

I love the assumption that a doctor specifically said someone would have died. I think it’s fairly fucking obvious that if you need a crash section then had you been at home the 15+ minute delay MINIMUM would have resulted in a dead baby. Or if you bled enough in 5 minutes to need resuscitation then that would have gone badly wrong.

But that's the thing, lots of people do assume that they/the baby would have died at home, and they sincerely believe it, but they're usually wrong (assuming they mean if they'd had a homebirth with a qualified and equipped midwife, not just if they'd been giving birth alone - again, people often seem to believe that they're more or less the same thing). We can see that from how incredibly rare such outcomes actually are in home births, and the fact that the risk of them is elevated for first births at home, but still very low, and then not any higher at all for second and subsequent births. The vast, vast majority of women who needed crash sections would have been transferred to hospital long before that (yes, even if the staff in hospital gave no indication anything was wrong, because in a home birth they transfer if there is any cause for concern, whereas why would hospital staff say anything to a labouring woman before the point where something actually needed to be done? It doesn't mean that they had no idea things weren't going optimally, even if it felt like that to the woman). And lots of women on MN seem to think that a postpartum hemorrhage would be a death sentence at home - it comes up time and time again as an 'I would have died at home' - but of course it isn't; it's a medical emergency but one that the midwives are trained and equipped to manage. If these relatively common complications were actually death sentences for the mother or baby then the NHS wouldn't offer home birth, let alone encourage it.

If these relatively common complications were actually death sentences for the mother or baby then the NHS wouldn't offer home birth, let alone encourage it.

The NHS can't be trusted to encourage or discourage anything.