The Birth Center

We decided early on that we would go to a free-standing birth center instead of a hospital for prenatal care and delivery.  At the birth center, the entire practice is run by nurses and midwives and, outside of the hospital setting, they are able to use the midwife standard of care.  This has an emphasis on natural childbirth, treating pregnancy as an "altered state of health" rather than as a disease, with an appropriate level of medical oversight.  This leads to a much lower level of intervention than in typical OB care, and one which seems much more appropriate.  Everyone seems to agree that the rate of Caesarean section and induction is much higher than is medically justified, but OBs continue to perform these procedures regularly out of either convenience or fear of liability.  Avoiding unnecessary intervention was our main motivation for seeking out the birth center.

It is very interesting to see people's reaction to our choice.  There are three main things that surprise people: 1) that we have not had an ultrasound, 2) that I will not have the option to have an epidural, and 3) that we will go home 6-8 hours after the birth.  Most people react very strongly to this, either thinking that we're crazy, or that it sounds great.  It seems that people have very different expectations of how birth should go.  After hearing a description of a friend's labor with an epidural, in which she slept through many parts and had very little feeling, some women think this sounds ideal, while others (like me) wonder why she would want to miss out on actively experiencing the birth of her child.  And hearing the same woman's description of her post-birth hospital stay, in which she had time to rest apart from the baby and watch TV for a day or two, some women agree that this is a beneficial opportunity to recover from childbirth, while others say that they wanted to get out of the hospital as soon as possible and spend time with their newborn at home.

Since I have not gone through this before, of course I can only speculate about what I want.  Hopefully we will find that natural childbirth out of the hospital was the right choice for us!