I’m a big fan of homebirth, it’s just the most sacred, most
precious and most natural way to birth a baby.
None of that poking and prodding, bright lights, monitoring,
panic and pressure that you get in hospitals.
I know. I’ve had both experiences. All my births were normal,
non-medicated, but I still wince when I think of the fear I felt from the
unnecessary stress of being monitored constantly in hospital.
The lasting memory of my two homebirths is being in my own cave,
closing my curtains and lighting scented-candles so I could relax in a
womb-like darkness, and going for long and private showers and lie-downs in my
own bed.
So it was refreshing to finally read a media report saying that
home birth was better for both mother and baby.
The results of the study - Outcomes of care for 16,984 planned
home births in the United States from The Midwives Alliance of North America
Statistics Project mana.org -
confirmed that among low-risk women, planned home births result in low rates of
interventions without an increase in adverse outcomes for mothers and babies.
Even though the study – the largest analysis of planned home
birth in the US ever carried out over five years (2004-2009)
- was published back in January 30th, 2014, it is starting to gain more
widespread publicity around the web.
This study enables families, providers and policymakers to have
a transparent look at the risks and benefits of planned home birth as well as
the health benefits of normal physiologic birth.
Here are some key points:
- Very low cesarean
rate of 5.2%, compared to the US national average of 31%.
- Much lower rates of
interventions in labour. Cautious use of intervention means healthier
outcomes and easier recovery, and this is an area in which
independent-thinking homebirth midwives excel.
- Women who planned a
home birth had fewer episiotomies and drugs such as synthetic oxytocin
(Pitocin) which they use to allegedly speed up labour in hospitals.
- Ninety-seven percent
of babies were carried to full-term and delivered healthily.
- Only 1 percent of babies
transferred to hospital after birth,most for non-urgent conditions
- It’s a myth about
bigger babies have to be delivered in hospitals – the weight of an average
baby in this study was eight pounds at birth.
- Astonishing informed
decision making from the mothers with 98 percent still breastfeeding at
six weeks.
“This study is critically important at a time when many
deeply-flawed and misleading studies about home birth have been receiving media
attention. The MANA Stats dataset is based on the gold standard -- the medical
record. This study adds to the large and growing body of research that has
found that planned home birth with a midwife is not only safe for babies and
mothers with low-risk pregnancies, but results in health and cost benefits that
reach far beyond one pregnancy, said Geradine Simkins, Executive Director of
the Midwives Alliance of North America.
The problem the world over is women are becoming more and more
fearful of birth and are allowing hospitals to take over, which means
homebirths and even Birth Centres are suffering massive decline.
In 1959, 34% of women gave birth at home in the UK, the figure
now is around 3%, in Ireland it's around 1% of all births, and in the US
down to just 0.1%.
It’s true that medicine has taken over the birth process,
but also in the UK and Ireland, there simply aren't enough midwives. The small
increase in numbers over the past few years has not kept pace with the
exponentially rising birth rates, plus the rise in higher-risk births caused by
more prevalent medical conditions such as obesity, gestational diabetes and
modern day preferences to have babies later in life. And then if a woman is
low-risk, she might just have watched too many movies where women give birth
screaming in shopping centres and become fearful of 'doing it herself'.
For most healthy women, the safest place to give birth is at
home or in a midwife led unit, so I hope this ground-breaking study goes some
way to throwing a collective ice bucket over the global conspiracy against
homebirth.
References:
- Cheyney M, Bovbjerg
M, Everson C, Gordon W, Hannibal D, & Vedam S. Outcomes of care for
16,984 planned home births in the United States: The Midwives Alliance of
North America Statistics Project, 2004-2009.
- http://www.cfmidwifery.org/pdf/MANAHBStudy04-09Considerations.pdf
- http://mana.org/index.php?q=blog/home-birth-safety-outcomes
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jmwh.12165/abstract
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