More Babies Prefer Home Birth

Midwives used to go on house calls to help women give birth at their homes. Now, they are establishing centers where women in labor can avail themselves of home-like comfort and a clean environment equipped with modern medical facilities. Fourteen such birthing homes exist in Dagupan City and other towns in Pangasinan, says Villa Payag, 51, one of the midwives who pioneered the project. A mother herself, Payag says giving birth is a “natural process” and midwives are trained to help women who want to give birth naturally. “Hospitals are for sick people and pregnancy and birthing are not diseases. Unless there are complications when mothers need medical attention, midwives can efficiently handle birthing. Because we are trained, we know if the mother needs to be taken to a hospital,” she says. Payag’s birthing home in Bonuan District even renders “personalized services” that no hospital offers. She serves “malunggay” (Moringa) soup and rice broth to those who have just given birth. “I have plenty of malunggay trees in my yard. I just boil some leaves with some ginger and seasoning and give them to the mothers. When you just gave birth, a hot soup is very welcome,” she says. One time, a woman who had just given birth could not sit down by herself because she was so heavy. “I just propped her with pillows and spoon-fed her. She was so happy she cried,” Payag says.

Watch more free documentaries

“He could have died if I’d had a home birth — his cord was around his neck.” You’ve heard that, right? Heard people also say that their baby wasn’t breathing at birth, because the cord was there, or that their baby had medical issues, even anemia or brain damage due to the cord? However, it appears that we shouldn’t be as terrified of this. A cord around baby’s neck is actually very, very common. As in, 1 in 5 babies are born with the cord around their neck, and rarely is it ever a problem. But despite that, many doctors are still doing c-sections or manually yanking the cord over the head, which actually is risky for both us and our babies. Yikes.

“Home/Birth” is structured as a fragmented succession of thoughts, recollections, slogans, facts, poetry, stream-of-consciousness riffing on pregnancy, on birth and sometimes on the state of the world. On any given page, the pieces appear only loosely connected, but throughout the book a number of themes recur at intervals, creating a number of interwoven plot lines around the larger theme of childbirth. Much of the text involves a conversation between Greenberg and Zucker, exerpted from their actual conversations, conducted by e-mail. Zucker, who had three children of her own, the first two born in hospitals and the most recent a homebirth, was in New York at the time, but committed to becoming a doula (someone who helps the mother during labor) for Greenberg’s birth, and in the initial chapters of the book, the friends appear to be trying to figure out how it will all work. The style and point of view are both unusual among homebirth literature, Greenberg said. The lyric essay style was inspired by the author C.D. Wright, who used a similar montage of observations, snippets of dialog and other ephemera to write about prisoners in Louisiana in her book “One Big Self.”

Read more…

Long Beach Mothers Go All Natural - Long Beach, NY Patch