Having your child in the home? Who does such things? Wasn’t that just back in the western days when doctor’s had to deliver babies at home out on the prairie?

Not so.  There is a growing group of women who realize the benefits of a homebirth and having your baby at home.

This practice of having your baby at home is called midwifery.  Although they are usually not doctors or nurses, people who are in this profession are professionally regulated.  I myself have seen the steady rise of homebirths through my practice as a San Diego certified midwife.

The people, generally women, who perform this line of work are called homebirth midwives.  Midwives is the term most people are familiar with and means a person who helps during childbirth by providing support of the labor and delivery.

Now why a midwife is usually not a doctor or nurse is because the practice of having your baby at home, or midwifery is generally the belief that pregnancy and birth are natural normal events.  This is in stark contrast with the medical model which relies on medicine to assist and improve the pregnancy and delivery.

With that aside, lets look at why a lot of women are having babies at home rather than hospitals.  What are the reasons why women are choosing homebirths?

First, with the midwife’s continued presence, the labor time can actually be reduced.  Most women do not know that pain medications, although they do help with pain, actually makes the labor slow down.  This actually creates more pain and makes the labor last longer.

Second, midwifery techniques in reality reduce the need for forceps or other intrusive devices during delivery.  The process of allowing the birth and delivery to happen naturally is what reduces the need for those devices.

Third, is it reduces the possibility of a cesarean delivery.  Most cesareans are performed because during labor, somehow a consensus was made that a natural vaginal birth was not possible.  Either because of the safety of the baby was in mind or the safety of the mother.  Well in all actuality that complication was caused because the natural process was not allowed to happen.

These are 3 benefits when you have a natural homebirth.  There are many more, but I am sure most women in pregnancy would agree these are 3 huge benefits. 

So although, most might consider it strange to want to have a child at home, studies have shown that allowing the natural birth process to happen is safer for the mother and the baby.  With over 300 births attended as a homebirth midwife in San Diego, this has proven to be the case time and time again.

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