Choosing a home birth may not guarantee you’ll have a home birth

Most people assume that choosing to have a home birth is all you need to do. Birth Plans are very much like a wish list or a menu choice. After all, we are living in a world where we often feel we know our rights to choose, we want it now, or others can be put to blame if we fail or we feel we are falling victim to the medical community.

The last thing you want to hear is that your chosen home birth might not be the birth you wanted or hoped for, and you may even end up transferring to that dreaded hospital. It’s most politically incorrect to talk about the lack of success of home births or even how to make home birth success more likely.

Home births are assumed to be the perfect, ideal and best birth. For those families where a home birth has been absolutely ideal, they have extreme difficulty in imagining the huge sense of failure experienced by many families who had hoped for a home birth and a great birth.

Birth is much more than a choice. There is no way you can know what your birth will be like. What happens at all births is much more connected to how the woman takes the journey of this extraordinary activity. In fact, birth is less a choice then an activity. And that activity is often connected to the hard work of coping with the naturally occurring pain of labour.

But then it also seems to be politically incorrect to even talk about birth pain. Now, the words rush, wave, intensity etc are the preferred words. However, pain it is, unless you are one of the very fortunate few who actually experience little or no pain. But home births can be as painful as those in hospital. A great deal of the woman’s job is to cope or manage the pain, rather than get lost and feel out of control or overwhelmed.

Because you are choosing a home birth you have a much greater responsibility in a political climate that may not support your choice. If you live in a country that does support your choice then you still have a higher responsibility to safely birth at home, so that home births remain a viable option for other families.

The responsibility has to do with preparing our pregnant body for birth so this very large object (our baby) can come out easily and safely. Since birth is an activity, preparing our pregnant body for this activity is very real. Since there’s no way to know what your birth will be like, you need to prepare your body to stay open, mobile and relaxed.

If you want to know more about Directed Breathing, the Pelvic Clock or Deep Touch Relaxation, Kate’s Cat, Hip Lift and Sacral Manoeuvre then visit http://www.birthingbetter.com.

Learn more about The Pink Kit Method For Birthing Better®, the only childbirth preparation course that focuses entirely on birth skills for mothers and fathers for ALL births.

Wintergreen is a Trustee to Common Knowledge Trust http://www.commonknowledgetrust.com which produces The Pink Kit. She is a childbirth communicator and communicates on the societal benefits of growing a skilled birthing population.