What to do when your partner says she wants to consider home birth?

Well, I don’t know what you should do, but I’ll tell you what I did…I said something along the lines of, “You must be (expletive) joking”, and didn’t think much more of it, expecting it to be a passing notion that would be filed with things such as, “maybe we should have a red feature wall”…

I get the impression that many people start considering home birth after knowing, or knowing of, someone who’s had a positive home birth experience. That certainly was the case with us (a work colleague of my partner), and in turn, we seem to have inadvertently influenced some of our friends to do the same, or to at least think about it seriously.

But for now, back to our beginning; when the home birth notion didn’t disappear, and I was dragged along to some information sessions regarding birth choices, I honestly still thought that my partner would eventually ‘come to her senses’. The information sessions were very, um, informative, but statistics, no matter how compelling, can only mean so much when they’re independent of any real personal experience. For those of you in Australia who saw the SBS program, Insight, the other night (http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/index/id/56), it’s obvious just how easily statistics can be bent or framed to suit one’s personal view. So often when the topic of homebirth is raised, it is quickly portrayed as a David and Goliath battle of Obstetrics versus Midwifery; but this misses the point completely: It’s not about one being “better” than the other, it’s about individual women being able to be informed and free to choose what’s best for them.

After the information sessions, I was left almost feeling guilty if I didn’t step up to the home birth plate; the statistics and arguments really were so compelling. Still, my partner and I felt overwhelmed and needed time and space to digest it all. We took a step in the ‘natural’ direction though and booked into a birth centre (all the while the home birth concept was niggling in our minds)…

More to follow soon.

Thanks for reading.