Are we trying to prove something?

There is one thing I don't understand at all. Why is it that when someone is planning a non-hospital birth, whether home or free-standing birth center, they are so often accused of having something to prove? I've been accused of this a lot over the course of the past couple years, and it seems to be coming up again with the announcement this week of our plans for a homebirth for baby #3, so I'd like to explore it a little bit here.

First of all, I do wonder what exactly I'd be trying to prove. Some who know me, know that I was a hospital transfer for Erin's birth. I have never had a hospital birth by choice, but I did unfortunately end up with one due to state law that time. I'm not talking out my ass when I tell you what I think of hospital birth. I am speaking from personal experience, and with the knowledge that my unintentional hospital birth was really about the best case scenario when it comes to hospital birth today. Let me just tell you, it was awful.

First they took my clothes and made me wear some stupid gown. Then they stuck an IV in my hand, and at that point, I really just wanted to die. I hate needles, and having one stuck in my hand for a solid 20 hours was pretty much my idea of hell. Then they told me I couldn't eat or drink. Then they hooked me to some monitors. Then some nurse I'd never met in my life did an internal exam. Then that happened again another time before our midwife got there. In the morning, we found that I wasn't progressing fast enough for some arbitrary policy, so they gave me some pitocin... one bag, then two, then finally a third. Have you ever experienced three bags of pitocin coursing through your veins? Mind you, I had no pain medication because I knew it was horrible for the baby and not great for me either, so I felt every twinge of it. It was bad... REALLY bad. The IV being in my hand the whole time made it even worse. 17 hours in, and stuck at 7 cm for four of those hours, my midwife said, "You're exhausted. You have to rest, and the only way I see that happening is with an epidural. If you don't rest, you will not be able to relax enough to dilate, and you will end up with a c-section." A c-section is ten times as evil as an epidural, so I took the epidural. Awful barely begins to describe what that thing was. I was groggy, and numb, and out of control. Erin was born drugged after two hours of the epidural, and never nursed very well. The recovery for me was a nightmare. I felt like I'd been run over by a bus for at least a week.

Orren's birth was completely natural. I labored unassisted, literally alone because I let Thak sleep through almost the whole thing, at home until it was time to push. It was not nearly as painful as my first labor, and probably less than 1/3 the length of time. I didn't have a painful IV in my hand (I was supposed to because I was Group B Strep positive, but we didn't get to the birth center in time to get it.) I could do whatever I wanted, get up and walk around, eat, drink, take a million baths, cook chicken and dumplings... When we finally did go to the birth center, Orren was born an hour later, totally alert (huge difference from Erin), nursed like a champ (Thak does regret making us quit. He said I was just in too much pain and he thought it was the right choice at the time.), and my recovery? What recovery?! I wanted to get up and dance the minute after the birth was over! It was perfect, and I felt amazing from day one! In addition, I even looked better. Pre-pregnancy, I was a size 2. I gained 40 pounds with the pregnancy. 4 weeks postpartum, I was wearing a size 6. 4 months postpartum, I was a size 2 again. I think the natural birth helped my body heal faster, and that the drugs the first time harmed me and Erin.

Taking these experiences both into account, does it look like I have something to prove by going the non-hospital route again? It doesn't to me. In fact, it looks like quite the opposite. My non-hospital birth was easy because I did it the way nature designed me to do it. My hospital birth was absolutely the most difficult thing ever because I did not do it the way nature designed me to do it. If I had something to prove, wouldn't I plan a hospital birth, and try one last time to beat the intervention monsters? It doesn't make sense that I have something to prove if I'm doing what has come easy to me in the past. If I did, I would do what had been difficult. Right?

Although I will say, in the process of Orren's birth, I was surprised at how much I proved to myself. A huge reason my kids are 5 1/2 years apart in age is because after Erin's awful birth, I carried a lot of fear and doubt. I couldn't do it myself. I was poked and prodded, injected with the entire pharmacy, and finally by some miracle, I avoided a c-section by half a hair. That's not a confidence-building experience, and experiences like that are exactly why so many women think our bodies are lemons, ineffective at the most basic task of existence. It takes a while after something like that, when you know it's wrong, to jump back into the ring again. With Orren's birth, I proved to myself that I am able. The minute Nancy handed him to me, and said, "Take your son! You did it!" all the fear and doubt that I had carried with me for over half a decade flew out the open window, and disappeared somewhere into the grasses and the oyster beds of the coastal salt flats, never to be seen or heard from again. Do you have any idea what a weight that is to NOT carry around anymore?

On a related note, I do think that a lot of American women are carrying that baggage that I carried for so long, and that only Orren's birth freed me from. I sense it in them when they tell me that I'm crazy for having a baby with no doctor present, or that I don't care about my baby if I don't have him/her in a hospital. They are so fearful because they believe they actually needed all the things that were done to them in whatever hospital their babies were born in, and they believe doctors who profit from every intervention they order. I'm not trying to have a right and wrong discussion, but these are my observations. 99% of the time someone tells me her "I'm so glad I was in a hospital because..." story, her big scary bugaboo really isn't so emergent. American women at large have a lot of fear in them when it comes to birth. It seems like that's what they're speaking from when they tell me I'm crazy for sparing myself and my babies from the medicalization of it all.

Are we trying to prove something? No, we never set out to prove anything to anyone, even ourselves. We just did what we knew was right. In the process, we proved a lot to ourselves and each other, many things that I haven't even touched on here, and while that was a nice outcome, it was not the main goal. The main goal was to bring our son into the world in the healthiest, kindest, most peaceful way. That is the main goal this time as well. Anything we prove to ourselves in the process is just an added bonus.