No Hospital For Our Baby

Sean and I knew that we did not want to give birth in a hospital.  There is this whole rigamarole with hospitals.   Parents have no control over how their baby is born or what happens to them or their babies when birthing in a hospital.  Eh, you get some illusion of control, but if the doctor deems it necessary, that goes out the window.  Parents might have let their provider know of their wishes and birth plan.  But, when you're in the hospital, you're in the domain of doctors.  What you want and what actually happens are two different things.

In the hospital, mothers give birth on their backs with their legs spread wide in stirrups.  This is the best position for the doctor to work.  However, this is not the best position for the mother and baby during birth.  In fact, women are encouraged to stay in bed and not move into comfortable positions.  A women's body will let them know what position it needs to be in if we let it do it's job.  When at a birth center or at home, women can move about and get into a range of positions that facilitate an easier birth for baby and mama, be it on all fours, sitting, standing, walking, on a birthing ball, and/or in a birthing pool.

Hospitals administer unnecessary drugs to facilitate the birth process.  These drugs stop the body from being able to do it's job, and the body knows what it's doing.  A woman should be encouraged to eat and drink normally during labor, because the body needs strength to give birth.  But, a woman in labor is given IV fluids and is unable to eat/drink during labor.  If labor is induced, this speeds up the process of cervix dilation, which causes contractions to come more painfully.  Instead of opening at the natural rate that the cervix wants to, the drugs cause it to open the same distance in a much shorter amount of time.  There are other options for a less painful, but more speedy birth, including just standing or walking around.  But, the mother isn't permitted to really get up and walk around at a certain point.  Natural birthing positions minimize pain, but being on her back and/or after the pain of inducing labor, she might opt for the epidural.  This prevents the body from being able to feel the muscles in the lower abdomen, which prevents a women from knowing when to push.  So, she pushes too hard and doesn't let the baby come naturally.  The baby is coming on the doctor's schedule, not the baby's schedule.  

Speaking of the doctor's schedule, if the labor isn't progressing at a doctor-accepted rate, the doctor can opt for an emergency c-section.  A mother is given all of these drugs and put in a position that's not optimal for child birth.  No wonder things aren't going as planned.  In a country where our c-section rate should be around 15%, it's actually more like 40%.  And, if the doctor wants to do it, you don't really have a say, because it's an emergency at this point.  So, the doctor can opt for major abdominal surgery just because something Mother Nature has been doing for thousands of years is taking too long (according to the doctor).

During a natural labor, a mother can reach down and touch the head of her baby when it's crowning.  A mirror can be used to see the baby as it's starting to be born.  And, fathers can even catch their baby as it's making it's way into the world.  Sean wants to catch out baby.  What an experience for a new dad to be the first person to touch their child as it's born. A natural birth can even be organismic.  Rent Orgasmic Birth and check out Hypnobabies for some ideas. 

Lighting is important when a baby is born.  The womb is comforting and dark.  They have never seen light before, and so little ones should come out into a world that is dimly lit.  Hospitals have lights blaring so that the doctor can see what he/she is doing, and this is very jarring for the newborn.   Home or birth center births allow parents to control the lighting to make it more comforting to a newborn.

When watching videos of natural birth versus hospital birth, the hospital babies are all bloody, but the natural babies are clean.  Something is really wrong with the hospital process if the difference is a bloody baby.  When the little one is born, it is immediately weighed and cleaned, but those first few moments after emerging from the womb are so important.  A baby should immediately be placed in the arms of it's mother.  There are so many studies about the correlation between a baby's development and how much it was touched and held just after birth.  In the first week, a baby should hardly be put down, and newborns should be as close to their mother as possible. 

And, then there are vaccines. There are some useful vaccines.  But vaccines nowadays are preserved cheaply with a highly toxic metal, mercury.  There are stories of children who have tragic and irreversible reactions to vaccines.  The issue with mainstream vaccination is that hospitals are drug pushers and new parents aren't educated about vaccines or given the choice.

Not all pregnant women have a choice of home birth or a birth center, because there are risk factors that make birth in a hospital safer, as things can get sticky quickly.  Hospitals are good for emergency medicine, even emergency medicine during birth  They aren't good for routinely keeping us healthy.  Giving birth is a natural part of life that our bodies do so well on their own.  If it's not broke, don't fix it.

More to come on where we decided to give birth.