Home Birth (2003)

My recent home birth experience has changed me for life, convincing me that lying on my back in a sterile, bright and impersonal ‘labour room’, my most bruised and tender skin being stitched up perfunctorily like a turkey at Christmas-time, is not the way to celebrate after one of life’s greatest adventures.

After giving birth to my bundle of joy, Amy-Rose, in my kitchen at home, I had no stitches and only a touch of post natal depression, which devastated me for over a year after my previous hospital birth. The baby latched onto my breast with no problem within the first hour and I had never felt so alive or euphoric. Yes, I was still swallowed up by waves of tears when my hormones started to shift on day three and no, my stomach is not as firm and it used to be. In fact, my 9-year-old son, Sam, now calls me marshmallow belly. I felt well and mentally together enough to start writing again two weeks after her birth and I haven’t looked back since. At five months, Amy-Rose is healthy, happy, calm and content and I’m determined to spread the home birth gospel - much to my friends’ and family’s amusement. Since my own home birth, two friends have decided to go the home birth way - Jo just gave birth to a darling son, safely and successfully at home, and Felicity is expecting in the autumn.

Why did I decide to opt for a home birth in the first place? There were many reasons - some logical, some less so. The logical ones ranged from Naomi Wolf’s heroically honest book ‘Misconceptions’, to the fact that my brother-in-law’s cousin Ali, had given birth very happily at home. My own GP, a very practical and capable woman, planted the seed in my head when she suggested the ‘Domino’ scheme in Holles Street - where your pregnancy care is given by the community midwives and not by a consultant obstetrician. After meeting one of the midwives, spending an hour with her, discussing my concerns and asking all kinds of questions, I decided that midwife care was certainly the way to go. She was a real person and I felt that she genuinely cared about my well being. She had time for me and allowed me to settle into questions. I always feel rushed by doctors - they always seem to have far more important patients waiting for them, I always feel a nuisance. And more than a little stupid. No so with the midwives. She mentioned home birth as an option, assisted by two community midwives. The seed was well and truly germinating at this stage - I could think of nothing nicer than being cared for and coached through the experience by two similarly empathetic and practical women.

My previous hospital birth experience had not been a happy one. I was a young single mum of twenty-four and although everything had gone well and Sam had arrived safely, it was very much a ‘procedure’ and I was just one of thousands upon thousands of nameless ‘mums’ who had passed through the maternity hospital’s doors. At no stage was I made to feel special or even proud - even after giving birth without pain relief and walking up to the labour ward soon after, the wheelchair pushed along redundantly beside me by a nurse. I felt a huge sense of anti climax and I wondered ‘is that it? Is that what giving birth is all about - relief that it’s all over? Surely not? I hadn’t even seen my own doctor during the whole labour or birth as she’d been at a christening. And to this day I can’t even remember who delivered the baby. 

When I broke my home birth decision to my partner he was most supportive. Being a man, he insisted on talking to a consultant to ensure that home birth was indeed safe, but after being reassured by one of the top Holles Street obstetricians (a woman!) he was more than satisfied. What I hadn’t counted on was the downright hostile reaction from some of my close friends. My mother was one thing - on the board of governors of one of the other maternity hospitals, she had every right to be concerned. However once she saw that I’d made up my mind, she supported me 100%, which can’t have been easy for her. But in my innocence I thought that my friends would be equally supportive. My male friends were the worst - ‘if home birth was so safe, Sarah, everyone would be doing it’, they argued. ‘You hear all sorts of disaster stories . . .’ Some of the women proceeded to recount horror home birth stories where babies had died before making it to the hospital. Just what I needed to hear!

I was actually quite insulted. Did they think I was stupid? That I would put my baby, or indeed, myself at risk? That I hadn’t thought about my decision? I’d agonised over it. Like the writer that I am, I had covered all the bases - books, the internet, the home birth association. I felt like I knew Sheila Kitzinger intimately and I knew all the statistics backwards. I’d read the latest British Medical Journal findings on home births, which concluded that they were ‘safe in selected women, and with adequate infrastructure and support’. I took pregnancy yoga classes, walked every day, ate more healthily than I had ever eaten before and prepared myself both mentally and physically for the labour. I saw it as a labour of love, literally, and no one was going to change my mind - I had the birthing pool booked and I was ready to rumble. In the end, everyone’s pessimism only spurred me on and made me more determined to go through with it.

The birth itself was the single most extraordinary and life-affirming thing that I have ever done. I felt the first twinges of labour at midnight and was firmly ensconced in the birthing pool in the warmth of the kitchen by three in the morning, after heroic and rather Victorian water boiling by my partner to fill the pool - involving both kettle and saucepans heating on the aga. The birthing pool itself was like a giant blue paddling pool and my son had spent happy hours playing inside it the previous day. It already felt like part of the family furniture. The midwives arrived at seven and Amy-Rose was born in the pool just after eight, after two almighty pushes. I can genuinely say that I only experienced ten to twenty minutes of mind-blowing pain throughout the whole labour - and not once did I feel out of control or afraid. I knew I could do it and I believed in my own strength and my own body 100%.

I stayed in the warm water of the pool for over an hour, smiling and laughing, snuggling my new delivery and welcoming her into the world. Later, one of the midwives made me lunch and we talked about the birth - a wonderful way to come down after the high of the morning. That afternoon some of my friends came to visit - and we sat in my own house, on my own sofa and ate my own food. And that evening, after a huge feed of pizza, I slept in my own bed with Amy-Rose cradled under my arm and my partner lying at my side. It was heavenly.

Home birth is certainly not for everyone and it’s not a decision that should be taken lightly, but if you are healthy, strong and mentally fit - do consider it - it might just change your life! It certainly changed mine.

This article first appeared in the Evening Herald in 2003