Green Options

On April Fools Day, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named, Clark. I wrote a post on how to prepare for homebirth and so when the day arrived things fell into place just as planned. The day before I gave birth I’d been experiencing a little cramping. Nothing unusual but the sense a woman gets when her monthly cycle is going to begin. I had a feeling that it was the onset of labor so I told my husband to be prepared to come home (he commutes an hour away). Just after I called him he left work because he too had a feeling. I called him in the early morning before 10AM and we spent the rest of the day taking it easy.

The cramping had subsided by late afternoon. I was 38 weeks and 4 days and ready to have a baby! I didn’t realize that he’d really come on April Fool’s day as some had predicted. That evening I went to bed at 8:30pm and woke up with surprise to what I thought was my water breaking. It turns out that I had a high leak which means that baby Clark only tore my bag of waters rather than rupture it. With my first my water broke and that was that! This time around it was a gradual process.

Why do I think a homebirth is so much better than a hospital birth?

I’ve experienced a planned hospital birth, a planned homebirth that ended with an induced hospital birth (and a month-early preemie) because of pre-eclampsia, and two homebirths. I am a big proponent of giving birth at home because of these experiences. The hospital births did not end up being horrible, and the nurses and doctors were (mostly) good people, yet after the homebirth, I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

One major reason is that while a male OB/GYN may be technically proficient in his field, the fact that he hasn’t given birth, and can’t ever give birth, gives the midwife and doula a huge advantage in terms of actually relating to and understanding birth from a woman’s perspective.

35 Reasons to Give Birth at Home:

Guest Contributing Writer Philip Proefrock is more frequently found writing about green building and design issues at our sister blog Green Building Elements. His wife, Stacia Proefrock is a homebirth midwife, doula, and fertility consultant and is a member of the Michigan Midwives Association organizing committee for the MANA conference.

The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) annual conference will be held in Traverse City, Michigan later this October. MANA is a professional organization for midwives throughout North America. “MANA’s goal is to unify and strengthen the profession of midwifery, thereby improving the quality of health care for women, babies, and communities.”

You can help support the work of midwives.  MANA is working to push legislation in a number of states where the practice of midwifery and homebirth is not fully legal.  While some states have laws that support and encourage the practice of midwifery, many other states are less supportive.  MANA is also advocating for insurance companies to allow homebirth options as a safe, less-expensive and less resource consuming alternative to standard hospital births.

Ina May Gaskin is the most famous midwife in the United States. As one of of the founding members of the intentional community the Farm, Ina May and the Farm Midwives have thirty years of statistics that demonstrate the safety and benefits of natural childbirth. For example, only 1.4% of births attended by the Farm Midwives have required a Cesarean section compared to the national average of about 25%. Ina May has long been respected for advocating women’s rights, as well as changing people’s perceptions about natural childbirth. Instead of an agonizing ordeal, Ina May believes that childbirth can be an orgasmic experience.

When I first became pregnant 16 years ago, a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, I read Ina May’s first book Spiritual Midwifery. Not only was this book full of information on natural pregnancy and childbirth, but it was packed with images and stories of labor, in which the parents saw psychedelic colors and experienced orgasms. I thought that these hippies had done too many drugs and were just having flashbacks, but by the time I read her second book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth before the birth of my second child, I decided to try out some of the visualizations described in the birth stories.