Why Home Birth Is Necessary

When there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women’s capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society— to professional caregivers, as well as to women of childbearing age themselves. The disappearance of knowledge once commonly held paves the way for over-medicalization of birth and the risks that poses. Nothing in medical literature today communicates the idea that women’s bodies are well designed for birth. Ignorance of the capacities of women’s bodies can flourish and quickly spread into popular culture when the medical profession is unable to distinguish between ancient wisdom and superstitious belief. To illustrate, I would cite a 2006 National Geographic article, which states, “…we [humans] can give birth to babies with big brains, but only through great pain and risk.” The writer, J. Ackerman, depending upon the work of two U.S. anthropologists, contends that the fact that our species walks upright causes inevitable pain and risk during birth, forgetting how easily we can go to our hands and knees if need be.

I would have had no way to know how well healthy women’s bodies can work in labor and birth had I (and several hundred other people) not experienced a rediscovery of women’s capacities in birth as we established a midwifery service in our newly founded community in 1970. Most people would have predicted that my diving headlong into attending home births for friends and then training a group of midwives to work with me would have ended in disaster, given that I came into midwifery only with the training afforded by two degrees in English literature. What happened instead is that I received timely and essential help from a few generous, wise physicians, and our service was able to help 186 women give birth vaginally (without instruments or other medical interventions) before our first cesarean was necessary; the second did not become necessary until birth No. 324. All of this was accomplished without negative consequences to mothers or babies.