Ideally all births should happen in a hospital to address complications. My mother carried me to 44 weeks (apocryphally she says longer) and I “breathed in baby poop” as my mother put it when I was born. But it was in a hospital and here I am (I did have a lot of bronchitis growing up). I have a friend who’s baby was born with his arteries backwards (Transposition of the Great Arteries - Congenital & Children's Heart Centre) and who would have died without being in a hospital. It’s smart to have a high level NICU present when you have a baby. It’s certainly smart to listen to your doctors, and respect general science like “don’t go past 42 weeks if you can avoid it, but monitor it if you do”. My last child went to 42 weeks and came out naturally. No castor oil was consumed by the wife.
So, I’m not defending anything here, but there is a divide in play not being addressed. In the southeast at least (I’ve heard other regions are different), you can’t have a natural birth in a hospital. I mean, you can say that you don’t want to induce, you don’t want drugs, etc, and they honor that*, but you can’t get a midwife in there… or you can’t do a tub birth. You can’t do a million inadvisable things. You’re not going to fire up a grill and eat the placenta (people do that). Some of them are fine and some are crazy pants. Hospitals refuse midwives, they refuse obgyns who aren’t on their list. And it makes sense from a liability standpoint to a large extent for the hospital to do that. But what it means is that if you want to do a natural birth of almost any ilk, you are going to have to do it at home or a home birth center. If you want to do it actually at your home, you are going to use a midwife (who will have some training but almost certainly won’t be a proper M.D. doctor). The midwife won’t be allowed to “attend” a hospital birth, because people who do home births at other’s homes are shunned and aren’t allowed to do hospital births. So people do really stupid things, and they do them at home, because their (often small, no nonsense) requests aren’t being provided for by the medical practices/hospitals.
So I’m just trying to say that this lady should get at least the tiniest bit of slack. She was stupid when she needed to be smart and now her kid is dead. She didn’t do this with malice. She’s not a murderer. This little part of the article here:
Women that go overdue are not generally at risk for anything bad happening to them. They can develop life-threatening conditions. However, most of the risk lands on the baby. Therefore the 10-month-mommas do not believe there is anything wrong with keeping their babies cooking as long as possible.
That’s the bullshitiest bullshit I’ve ever read about home births. Most home birth mamas do it because they think it’s better for the baby. There are a lot of things that are done after the birth at the hospital that you don’t want them to do. And some of the things the hospital does are actually against what the science says. For instance, cutting the umbilical cord essentially immediately after exiting the birth canal. Could cutting the umbilical cord too soon stress newborns? | NICHD - Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Or significantly wiping the baby off as soon as they have settled: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF VERNIX CASEOSA - PMC
In a hospital setting, you aren’t given options. The clamp is on the umbilical immediately. The baby is whisked away by a nurse to get wiped down. And a million other things you don’t want. The only way to stop the machine is to have someone there who basically stops them from doing it, actively. There are people who have this as their job. They get paid to come in, deliver a birthing plan to the nurses, and then actively enforce it at every step of the birth. It’s a real thing. No wonder some people say, you know what, let’s just have it done at home or a center where I can control these decisions.
By the way… my friend, the one who’s son was born with arteries swapped? She had her second child in a tub at home. Luckily it went ok that time. My wife and I decided to have all of our children in a hospital because it wasn’t worth the risk to me. We didn’t need it, but we wouldn’t have had to rush to a hospital while our baby died if we did. But the choice wasn’t as simple as you guys seem to think.
* If you are very, very adamant about it. They will push induction or even c-section as early as 38 weeks here sometimes, depending on your ob/gyn group. I know several people who scheduled c sections as early as 36 weeks because that last month is a doozy, amirite?