The One Reason I Decided To Have A Home Birth

I Never Considered Myself A “Crunchy Mama” until I decided to have a home birth.

I never really considered myself a “crunchy mama”. And yet I make my own chicken stock and I add chicken feet. I have a garden and I preserve the food from it, I cloth diaper my kids (well I try anyway), I don’t give my them Tylenol. As I’ve made choices surrounding my kids health, I’ve edged my way into, what is perhaps considered, the crunchy mom category. I landed shoulder to shoulder with other crunchy moms when I decided to have a home birth with my daughter.

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When got diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes nothing about my care moving forward felt right

I remember talking to my sister-in-law while I was driving home from the appointment where I was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes. I had just learned what the rest of my pregnancy would now look like.

“I kind of never want to go back there again” I told her. None of it felt right.

I didn’t know if I just didn’t want to admit to myself that I had a diagnosis or if my mama intuition was telling me that something was wrong. When I was pregnant with my son everything went perfectly. I was blessed to have a non complicated pregnancy and a beautiful water birth at a birth center that was connected to a hospital. I had the natural birth I wanted while also having the security of modern medicine if anything went wrong.

I learned a lot between my two pregnancies that were only eighteen months apart.

I unexpectedly got pregnant with my son. At that time I wasn’t very educated about birth and what I really wanted for my own birth. I wanted to have a natural birth if I could and if I couldn’t that was just fine too. I wanted was a healthy baby and I didn’t understand how decisions I made could affect that outcome. I learned a lot in-between my pregnancies about what a healthy/ideal birth looked like for me.

I learned that there has been, what I believe to be, an overmedicalization in childbirth. This has led to trusting mom’s body less and our modern technology more. This is really a disservice to moms because our bodies were designed to birth children. After I had a natural birth with my son I had a new appreciation for my body. It knew exactly what to do and pushed without me even telling it to. It was really just amazing. Suddenly, the idea of an epidural inhibiting my body from doing what it was designed to do was really counterintuitive to me.

I wanted my best chance at having a birth with zero interventions

I also learned that to have a birth with zero interventions you really need to be your own health advocate. Although C sections can be life saving it was not what I wanted for my birth if I could avoid it. With 32% of births in the US being C-section I realized I needed to be an advocate for my own health if I wanted to be on a different trajectory. In one study documented by Time Magazine, induced births were twice as likely to have a C-section delivery as those who experienced spontaneous labor.

This supports what I believe that intervention leads to more intervention. It’s likely that the standard use of epidurals and increasingly high induction rates of pregnant moms in our country are contributing factors to why one in three babies are born via cesarean.

By the time I was pregnant with my daughter I knew my ideal birth was a vaginal birth. This was for a lot of reasons including higher rate of successful breastfeeding, avoiding risks associated with major surgery, and that vaginal births prepare your baby’s lungs to breathe. The most important factor for me was the healthy bacteria baby gets going through the birth canal. Beneficial bacteria goes from the mama’s cut to baby and this boosts baby’s immune system. This blows my mind and is so affirming that this is how God designed a mama’s body to give birth.

I didn’t want to be another statistic

I heard about about the intervention me and my baby would have to go through after my diagnosis and I started to realize that maybe my ideas of a safe/successful birth didn’t align with my care providers anymore.

A close friend of mine believes that natural births in the hospital are possible but that they are the exception not the rule. After learning the hospital policy for someone diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes, I was beginning to wonder if she was right. In an effort to ensure a safe birth there were a number of interventions I would have to go through. They included extra ultrasounds and tests and the possibility of inducing labor early.

I learned that as a mom with Gestational Diabetes, along with the possibility of using insulin, I would need an extra ultrasound at 36 weeks. If the baby measured ‘large’ they would induce me a week early. Even if the baby measured ‘normal’ they would induce me on my due date because my baby could be too large for a safe delivery if I carried beyond that.

After doing some research, I learned that an ultrasound isn’t actually very reliable for predicting fetal weight near term and that there’s a recognized error rate of 15-20%. The idea of inducing labor on information that wasn’t 100% accurate didn’t feel good to me.

It’s true, I probably could have refused to move forward with these standard practices and continued with a hospital birth. But I would have been putting myself in a situation where my views on birth didn’t align with those of my care providers. I would be reducing my chances of having my birth go the way I wanted it to.

Then I met my midwife and I knew I needed to change my care.

Ultimately, I chose to change care to a home birth midwife because I felt safer. Her views on health aligned much more closely with mine. A friend had referred her to me shortly after my diagnosis. We met at a coffee shop. I intended to just to pick her brain and learn what a home birth could look like for us. It was clear in the first few minutes of chatting that her views on pregnancy and birth aligned much more with mine. I felt like an empowered mama instead of a high-risk patient needing intervention and close monitoring.

I appreciated her more robust approach to high blood sugar management customized to my specific circumstances. With her support I was able to keep my blood sugar levels in a healthy range with only diet and exercise. I ended my pregnancy feeling stronger and healthier than I had before I was pregnant.

The biggest difference was mutual trust.

There was a big difference in how I felt in with the midwife versus the hospital. The biggest was the feeling of mutual trust. I trusted her expertise on foods, supplements, and practices that could help lower my blood sugar during my pregnancy. She trusted that I knew what was best for my body and that I would take care of myself.

This trust continued into birth where she trusted that my body knew what to do to deliver a healthy baby and I trusted her to support the natural birth process and to take care of us in an emergency.

“I’m not the kind of midwife who just shows up with an herb and a prayer”, she assured us at our first meeting. She explained that her instruments and her experience of delivering thousands of babies allowed her to see an emergency situation coming from a mile away. She was equipped to stabilize both mom and baby until they got to the hospital if that became necessary.

I’m so glad I chose a home birth.

Changing our care to a home birth midwife seemed radical at first. After educating myself I knew it was right choice. My husband and I agreed that maybe it wasn’t so radical after all. I was 32 weeks pregnant when I made the really big decision to have a home birth. I’m so glad I did. I felt so supported before, during, and after the birth of our beautiful baby girl.

I understand the need for hospital policies to keep people safe. But it’s clear to me that standardized versions of care are not how birth was meant to be. Birth is such a special experience that’s unique to each mom. Home births allow for a customized birth experience where the best interest of mom and baby are at the center. I’m so glad I chose a home birth to bring my daughter into the world.