Home births are safe, healthy option.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Darcy Hannibal For The Register-Guard

Register-Guard reporter Andrea Damewood's Sept. 16 article "Dilemma Upon Delivery" assumes that hospital births lack any risk to the mother or infant, and that home births are inherently risky. Damewood addresses the issue of home birth around the extremely rare instance of a preventable death, setting up the reader to be against home birth from the start, and frames this as something women choose for the aesthetics of the home birth experience.

Although babies seldom die from birth complications or errors in judgment by doctors and midwives, this can and does happen on rare occasions both in hospitals and at home. Birth is not an illness but a normal biological process that works pretty well on its own without intervention.

I gave birth to my son at home, not because I selfishly wanted a particular birth experience, but because the nature of hospital deliveries involves high degrees of intervention that can interfere with an otherwise healthy birth. Both my personal experiences in the health care system and the best information available on hospital and home births led me to the conclusion that a home birth was the safest and healthiest option for both my son and me.

At home, we were not exposed to hospital-bred antibiotic resistant bacteria. I was not tempted by potent painkilling drugs that could dull my instincts or my son's senses, and I was not at the mercy of attendants who hardly know or care about us.

I was able to regularly eat and drink small amounts to fuel the marathon of 10 hours of active labor; I was able to move about and change positions often, which was critical to making progress during labor and delivery; and we received constant care and monitoring by my midwife during the entire labor - someone who had spent hours and hours with me during prenatal visits.

None of this would have been feasible in a hospital setting.

I would have had brief prenatal visits with an obstetrician who barely knew me, with the possibility that someone else from his or her practice would actually attend on the day I went into labor. The obstetrician might have had to make decisions within the limits of hospital policy, even if he or she believed some of those policies served the interests of the corporation and not the patient.

Through most of my labor, I would have been attended and monitored by other hospital staff and not an obstetrician.

I might have been restricted from eating or drinking anything due to the increasing likelihood of Caesarian sections.

I would have been limited in how much I could move around by the monitors that would have been attached to my son and me.

I am grateful the hospital was available if my son or I had needed it, but I have also witnessed the corruption and disease of our health care system. When my father and my husband were hospitalized with serious illnesses, either of them would have died without immediate care in a hospital.

It was frightening, however, to witness the degree to which the quality of their care depended on whether or not one gets sick on a weekend or evening vs. a weekday; whether your insurance pays for the service you need; whether a doctor is willing to give you more than minimally adequate time, attention and consideration; whether a nurse is more interested in taking care of you than gossiping with a colleague about the case next door; whether a certified nursing assistant understands that gloves are meant to protect you against disease as much as her; and whether friends and family are willing to keep a watchful eye and bring you fresh home-cooked food so you don't have to eat the cheap institutional food served in the hospital that passes for "heart healthy."

When I tell someone I gave birth to my son at home, the most common response is "that's brave."

But I trusted my midwife and birthing at home. I trusted them more than I trusted the hospital health care system, and it would have required bravery on my part to enter into it. I am thankful that my son and I did not need it and that he came into this world in the warmth and comfort of his home.

Darcy Hannibal of Eugene is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Oregon.