My Clinical Notes
Arguments for and against home birth
Arguments against home birth
1) What if things don’t go right? Consequences are disasterous
2) What if you cant get to hospital?
3) What if my midwife changes? Always hearing about problems with midwives, what if I fall through the net?
4) Doctors are often against home deliveries but that is because they are more likely to see the complications
5) Have to explain again and again what you want with each different midwife that you get
6) Less pain relief options
7) Women who choose home birth are considered selfish and irresponsible
8) If an unforeseen emergency occurs, the women must be transferred. In hospital staff and equipment can be speedily summond, not so if the women is at home
9) No randomised trials
Arguments for home birth
1) child birth is a natural phenomenon, women have been giving birth for thousands of years without doctors and hospitals
2) last birth was bad, made to feel bad by midwife who made me feel it was my fault things weren’t progressing
3) in hospital you have no control, doctors/midwives can do whatever they like to you
4) stress of hospital can delay labour and milk production
5) students around, lots of onlookers, loss of dignity
6) naked n front of lots of people
7) resentment being told the risks – ‘bleeding to death’, ‘might kill your baby’
8) women can feel vulnerable, the medical profession is seen to bully them
9) obviously home birth is only sensible when there are no risks, the problems is that very often there is no consensus regarding what is risky and both doctors and mothers concept of risk can be skewed
10) the practice of all women regardless of risk delivering in a hospital environment is accepted as having no real evidence base
11) the fact that 31% of women undergo a home delivery in order to avoid innecessary medical intervention underlines the lack of trust pregnant women have for midwives/obstetricians
12) birth is not a medical condition.
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