October 2009
20 posts
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The Power of Birth Stories
~Bekah Sealey, editor of MBPH
We at More Babies Prefer Home Birth have always invited our guests to stop awhile and share their own stories. Why should we share our stories? Beyond statistics and research, lists of pros and cons, stories have staying power. We may not always remember all the details, but having heard or read a personal experience remains in our memories.
Thirteen years ago,...
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Isabella Marie's Birth Story →
I’m not sure where Isabella’s birth story begins. I’d been having contractions that started and stopped for about 10 days.
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Part of me can’t believe I really did it. In fact the first thing I said to Isabella was “We did it, baby! We really did it!” I’m so glad I wasn’t in a hospital. I was very loud and someone would have tried to shush...
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National Birthday Trust - Report of the... →
This is probably the most comprehensive study of home birth ever undertaken in the UK. It attempted to follow all women who booked a home birth in the UK in 1994. Midwives recorded outcomes for 5971 women who were booked for home births at 37 weeks’ gestation, and they tried to find a matching woman from their practice who was as similar as possible to the home birth mother, but was booked...
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Outcomes of planned home births versus planned... →
Background: The choice to give birth at home with a regulated midwife in attendance became available to expectant women in British Columbia in 1998. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the safety of home birth by comparing perinatal outcomes for planned home births attended by regulated midwives with those for planned hospital births.
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Results: Women who gave birth at home...
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Mother knows best - Haaretz - Israel News →
The gift of childbirth
Lev’s decision to give birth at home, unassisted, began to take shape after her son Elhi, 5, was born in hospital. “The lack of intimacy bothered me very much,” says Lev, a graphic artist who in recent years has been engaged in spiritual astrology (which draws upon kabbalah for spiritual growth, not fortune-telling). “A midwife I don’t know...
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Blessings of Homebirth →
By Betsy Leighton
“Knowing comes from the place within us that is connected to our source.” From A Still, Small Voice by Echo L. Bodine
My second pregnancy was “normal” as far as anyone could tell. I had regular prenatal care with my midwife and our family practitioner. Both felt I was a fine candidate for a second home birth, and that ultrasound wasn’t necessary for me....
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Home Birth Story: Two Home Births
Well, I’ve read a few of the other stories posted here and I’m afraid that I’m not as eloquent a writer as the others, but I will attempt to summarize my experience. I’m a mother of 2 beautiful children, son almost 5 and daughter almost 2, both homebirthed with midwives in two different states. When I was pregnant with our son, I was working full-time and my boss had just...
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Safety or Money?
This article from Israel makes the point that underlying the medical establishment’s opposition to Home Birth may be more about its own financial interest. The differences between the Israeli medical system and the United States actually seems to magnify the similarities that do exist.
“Each year, about 150,000 babies are born in Israel. Hospitals vie over the mothers, tempting the...
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Home Birth Story: The Long and Short of it
by Marlene Waechter
My first child, Sean had been a “natural” hospital birth in 1971. This time, in 1977 we planned a home birth, even though we couldn’t find a midwife. My first labor had only three hours long, unnecessarily and unmercifully augmented by Pitocin. I thought this would be a longer labor, since it would be un-enhanced by Pitocin. I had been having irregular warm-up contractions...
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Why Homebirth is Safer, an excerpt from the book,... →
Dr. Michelle Harrison, M.D. (who is a family practitioner and did residency work in OB/GYN) will make us all do some reflective thinking.
“Imagine dancers on a stage. Once, doing a pirouette, a woman sustained a cervical fracture as a result of a fall; she is now paralyzed. We try to make the stage safer, to have the dancers better prepared. But can a dancer wear a collar around her neck,...
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Home Birth Story: A Simple Kind of Birth
by, Jasmine Rae Ojala This birth story can not be fully understood unless you know about the birth of my first child, a beautiful, spirited boy, Gabriel Kelly. I was naive and uneducated about birth; I had no clue that there were any options other than having an obstetrician in a hospital. My 18 hour labor started early one morning with my water breaking at home, I got right to the hospital where...