Birth is momentous, you go from being a woman to a mother, a couple to a family. But how informed are you along the journey? PBB created this video called ‘Birth – A story every pregnant woman should see!’. A must-see video that challenges the very status quo – the predominate view that every birth should occur in hospital. Based on the original article ‘Out of the laboratory: Back to the darkened room’ arguably one of the best articles on homebirth in the last 30 years. We hope you enjoy our video.
The full article Out of the Laboratory: Back to the Darkened Room is available here.
Sadly most midwives and doctors working today have trained and worked for most of their lives in that laboratory: and in that laboratory – which is, of course, a modern consultant maternity unit – childbirth is in a mess. In health care, there is lost of talk about evaluating all aspects of care, and yet no-one is saying that there is a desperate need to evaluate the biggest intervention of them all – asking women in labour to get into their cars and drive to a large hospital where they are cared for by strangers. The effects of this en masse intervention, which is well into the third generation, is becoming increasingly apparent.
Current Statistics
According to the Mothers and Babies Report 2017 Currently in Australia 35% of women have a caesarean birth (some hospitals have rates as high as 35%), 12% have instrumental birth – leaving 53% of women birthing their babies vaginally without assistance. If you choose to give birth in a private hospital, please note that the average caesarean birth rate is 2018 in NSW is 44%. With one NSW Private hospital having a rate of 62% caesarean birth. Sadly only 32% of women experience physiological labour – that is one without oxytocin to start or speed up labour. These days 99% of women give birth in a hospital, less than one per cent give birth at home
Helpful Links Used in the Creation of ‘Birth – A Story Every Pregnant Woman Should See’
It is often the women who arrive at the labour ward door in advanced labour who are able to give birth without intervention – for no other reason than because there isn’t time for the ‘laboratory’ routine to inhibit the natural labour process. Birth at home Helping women to give birth at home made me realise that there is – most definitely – another kind of birth. At home women give birth like Amazons to babies that seldom need resuscitating. Take birth away from the laboratory and back to the darkened room, and the whole picture changes. For example, around 40% of Dutch women give birth at home and they have one of the lowest rates of infant deaths in the world. What does that tell us?
The research on homebirth shows that homebirth is as safe, if not safer, than hospital birth for women at low risk. At home less than 10% of women requiring transfer to hospital, caesarean rate is around 5 per cent and few babies distressed at birth – homebirth is a safe option for women. The latest Review of the research concludes that ‘all low-risk pregnant women should be offered the possibility of considering a planned homebirth’ – to help bring birth back to the darkened room.
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Published 9th June 2020
Further Reading
I believe that it is so important that women and girls (and men and boys for that matter) see images of birth in its raw, natural state and hear stories of the incredible, natural intensity of birth. When we learn that birth is a normal and natural event for the majority of women; we can trust in our bodies to do the same.