Birth At Home

This is birth. 

Normal, natural, biological, physiological birth. 

 This is birth at home. 

 Without being tethered to machines. Without being under constant surveillance. Without being viewed as a patient needing to be managed.

 

Does it match your vision of birth? 

 

Or does it seem strange that I am changing position, totally allowing my body to move in a way that is intuitive? Does it make you uncomfortable that I am my own guide? Is it weird to see me in my own clothes, in my own bed, in my own space? Can you image birth *not* in a hospital, not wearing a gown, not being told what to do? 

 

Do you perceive this to be risky? 

 

Cause I will let you in on a little secret. The only reason we are all here, today, is because our ancestors birthed at home. There are generations of women who valued birth, knew what a powerful initiation the experience was, held it as sacred and holy. Long before the allopathic obstetric model took the power away from women and made us believe authority of our bodies and babies and experiences belonged to them. 

 

This is why I choose to birth at home. Because I want to be in charge. Because no one knows me or my baby better than myself. Because I trust the process, the intricate, heavenly design. Because I believe in its power to change a woman on a cellular level and profoundly inform how she mothers. Because inherent in all birth is risk and I would rather opt for the risks at home over a hospital any day. Because I don’t want to subject myself to violence, abuse, unnecessary interventions, coercion or fear. 

 

If I had either of my babies outside my home, it would likely be disastrous. One being 70+ hours, the other being 42 weeks and over 9lbs. I would have been pathologized with failure to progress, stalled labor, being overdue, growing too big of a baby for too small of a pelvis, etc. So many ways to make me feel inadequate and not capable. 

 

No thanks. 

 

Instead I got two experience to wildly fascinating, incredibly difficult, pushed-to-the-very-edge-of-my-capacity births that have revealed just how powerful this process is. 

 

Because birth is initiation into wildness and that is something a hospital setting is ill equipped to provide. 

 

Because birth is a reclamation, a remembering and an owning of this extraordinary power. 

 

Because you have options and it’s time to normalize and bring birth back home.