I wouldn't do it anywhere but in a hospital. If something happened or went wrong would already be there ready to be taken care of. And often times minutes and seconds can mean everything. I wouldn't want to risk being at home and not getting the care would need. Also birth is quite messy too and I like my home to be very clean. I for sure wouldn't want to be cleaning all the mess up or anything like that and for sure my husband never would come close to it.
Hey, like your avatar - is that you on the horse? Just a small point, but if it's you, do you only ride in the hospital grounds? Horseriding is way more dangerous then birth! Do you know anyone who's had a riding accident? Heard of any? Yip we all have, just the same as we've all heard horror birth stories, yet we can't allow it to rule our lives "Just in case", as we know it's the minority. With birth it's far, far less likely to be an issue than with riding.
There are very, very few birth complications that are 1: not caused by the very interventions meant to "protect" us, or 2: not able to be picked up very far in advance of being an emergency situation.
To each their own, though and if you are the type of person who puts absolute faith in the medical method of birth and likes the clinical hospital setting, then fine, you need to be where you are most comfortable - as it's been well studied that fear in labour produces the "fight or flight" hormone, Adrenaline which can stall labour and stop oxytocin production (which gives you your contractions). Perhaps the reason that so many women are topped up with Pitocin in hospitals, the synthetic version, which generally doesn't work the same way and causes undue stress to the labouring woman, much pain and is a huge cause of fetal distress. Many find hospitals distressing, and the monitors etc do nothing but increase the fear, yet Continuous Fetal Monitoring has been shown not to have improved outcomes at all, but is thought to be responsible for raising the C-Section rate. For the sake of our babies, for our labours to progress normally and smoothly, we MUST be where we are most comfortable - for many that is home, with all it's familiarities and for some it's hospital, but the hospital choice seems to be driven by the fear of "what if", rather than comfort for most.
I just find it so sad that whole generations of ladies have been led to believe by the obstetric community thet they are unable to birth their babies normally, without these "knights in shining armour" and have lost faith in our innate ability to birth. The control and choice has been taken from most women about how best to manage their births, which in itself creates dependance on the medics and fear, thereby creating a vicious circle and perpetuating the very idea that we can't birth normally or naturally and that birth is so very dangerous it HAS to be in a medical setting. Statistically, you are more likely to be in a fatal car accident during your pregnancy than you are to have any kind of fatal emergency in birth. C-sections carry
four times the morbidity risk of ANY vaginal birth, yet the rates for these are soaring in every "developed" country. Who's taking risks with our and our babies' health, then?
