In my opinion there is not a right or wrong place to give birth. As a Utah doula I don’t set out to convince everyone that one place or another is the right place for THEM to give birth. I merely write this post in an attempt to protect those who choose a home birth from accusations that they are not giving their child the best birth safety.
There is some debate out there about whether home birth is safe or not. Statistically the number of deaths in a home birth scenario is equal to or better than that of a hospital. Yet many people still insist it is not safe.
I feel like this quote hits the nail right on the head…
“What we’re talking about is felt risk rather than actual risk,” explains Barbara Katz-Rothman, professor of sociology at the City University of New York and author of much scholarship on birth, motherhood, and risk. Take our fear of flying. “Most people understand intellectually that on your standard vacation trip or business trip, the ride to and from the airport is more likely to result in your injury or death than the plane ride itself, but you never see anybody applaud when they reach the airport safely in the car.” The flight feels more risky. Similarly, we can look at data showing our risk of infection skyrockets the second we step in a hospital, “but there’s something about the sight of all those gloves and masks that makes you feel safe.”
I’ll venture that the reason most women don’t choose home birth is because it doesn’t feel safe, and that trumps data any day. What’s unfortunate is that if we could get past the professional turf wars and the mommy shaming, women might have a clearer path to making informed decisions that both are safe and feel safe. It would almost be like having it all.”
“Tuteur let her medical license lapse in 2003 and created the blog Home Birth Debate in 2006, which she used to advocate for her position, which is basically: Home birth kills babies. “Even the studies that claim to show that home birth is as safe as hospital birth actually show the opposite,” she’d frequently post in response to a challenge, smearing the researchers of those studies in dedicated blog posts and igniting flame wars in the comments section. On other sites, including Nature and RH Reality Check, her comments have been flagged and removed for being defamatory or basically spam.”
” The problem is when a dogged journalist like Goldberg elevates Tuteur to expert. Tuteur is not a researcher, she’s not currently affiliated with any medical institution, and more importantly, she’s never published any of her kitchen-table calculations on the risks of home birth in any peer-reviewed journal. Yet she presents herself with the authority of a CDC epidemiologist when she writes, “Homebirth increases the risk of neonatal death. All the existing scientific evidence says so.””