|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Mothering Magazine
Every woman should have the opportunity to ... give birth as she wishes in an environment in which she feels nurtured and secure, and her emotional well-being, privacy, and personal preferences are respected.
--COALITION FOR IMPROVING MATERNITY SERVICES
MY WATER BROKE one sunny afternoon--a week before the due date for our third child. Not knowing quite what to expect, I realized that our family was about to experience something truly sacred. While anticipating the onset of labor contractions, my husband, Martin, and I made some phone calls to family and checked the supply list to make sure we had everything we needed for our long-awaited homebirth. Although we didn't realize it, we had been planning for this day for more than six years. The natural births of our first two children had allowed us to fully experience the calm of a freestanding birth center and the frenzy of an emergency birth on the side of a highway. Despite the obvious differences, both events taught us the importance of balancing the need to be knowledgeable with the need to surrender to the power of birth. The lessons we learned from the combined experiences gave us the courage to choose a homebirth in a culture that doesn't necessarily make it easy to do so.
Our journey began with the birth of our first child, Maya. Martin and I prided ourselves on being informed healthcare consumers, and we knew that we wanted to be significantly involved in all the major decisions facing us. We were strongly committed to the idea of receiving continual support during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and we believed that midwifery care could help protect us against unnecessary medical interventions such as routine episiotomy, continuous electronic fetal monitoring, or artificial induction of labor. Although we were determined to find a midwife, we didn't know much about choices of birthplaces and assumed that we would have a hospital birth.
We learned that our insurance provided full coverage for BirthCare & Women's Health--a group of certified nurse-midwives operating a freestanding birth center and homebirth practice. As we set out to learn more about where we should have our baby, we discovered that for healthy women with low-risk pregnancies, planned births in birth centers and at home are just as safe as, if not safer than, hospital births. Indeed. hospitals often have policies that encourage interventions or that restrict movement--factors that may actually complicate normal labor. During our first visit with one of the midwives at BirthCare we learned that it had a rigorous screening process....
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
