As I have been moving forward with my
pre-conception diet (which I love by the way), I have come across a
lot of information about home births and midwifery. I have always
leaned towards having a home birth, but after watching The Business of Being
Born my baby's fate is sealed as being born under my roof with the help of
a midwife.
This documentary was created by Ricki
Lake (talk show host), after she had a disappointing birth in the
hospital. Ricki Lake found that after being given pitocin (a drug to
increase labor intensity), she was in intense pain and needed an epidural.
In the U.S, more than 50% of people are given epidurals while giving
birth.
Unfortunately, most people are not
aware of the potential risks of an epidural. Here are a list of some of
the effects that epidurals have on labor and delivery:
• They quadruple the chances a baby will be persistently
posterior (POP, face up) in the final stages of labor,
which in turn decreases the chances of spontaneous vaginal birth (see below).
• They decrease the chances of spontaneous vaginal delivery.
In 6 of 9 studies reviewed in one analysis, less than half of women who
received an epidural had a spontaneous vaginal delivery.
• They increase the chances of complications from instrumental
delivery. When women with an epidural had a forceps delivery,
the amount of force used by the clinician was almost double that used when an
epidural was not in place. This is significant because instrumental deliveries
can increase the short-term risks of bruising, facial injuries, displacement of
skull bones and blood clots in the scalp for babies, and of episiotomy and
tears to the vagina and perineum in mothers.
• They increase the risk of pelvic floor problems (urinary,
anal and sexual disorders) in mothers after birth, which rarely resolve
spontaneously (taken from CHRIS KRESSER "Let's Take Your Health Back Now").
One of the most concerning facts of
the side effects of an epidural would be that your risk of needing a cesarean
section increases by 2.5 times. How is this possible? It seems that
one intervention leads to the next intervention and all of a sudden, a woman
who desired a vaginal, "natural birth," is all of a sudden needing an
"emergency" cesarean section.
This is a highly problematic
situation for the health of the baby because vaginal birth is critical to the
baby receiving the gut flora necessary to build a healthy immune system and to
develop a healthy digestive track. While a baby travels down the
birth canal, she or he receives gut flora from the mother's vagina in order to
start building immunity to protect itself from the environment outside the
womb. Unfortunately, in a cesarean section birth, the baby does not
receive gut flora from the mother's birth cannel; rather, the baby
receives gut flora from skin contact or the breath. This can cause major
imbalances of gut flora and later on can develop into digestive, neurological,
and immune system dysfunction for a child.
In 2005, 1 in 3 births ended in
cesarean section. This is unbelievable. Cesarean sections are
treated so casually today because so many people are having them during labor
and delivery. A C-section is considered major surgery and the recovery is
gruesome. Further, the mother is put in the high risk category after
having a C-section and most likely will have to have C-sections with the
remaining pregnancies.
C-sections take
about 20-minutes to perform, but take so much away from the experience
that a mother could potentially have in delivery a baby. For example, in
a natural, home birth, a women peaks during vaginal birth by having a release
of oxytocin hormones that causes her to have almost an orgasm release while
the baby is being born (specifically during the distension of the cervix
and uterus during labor). Oxytocin has been shown to be pivotal in
the bonding of a mother and a baby and has become known as "the bonding
hormone (Wikipedia)."
Epidurals have been found to inhibit
oxytocin production and to keep it from rising during birth. This brings
forth huge questions that I am not sure that we fully understand at this stage.
The research that has been done on monkey's show that monkey's who
deliver babies through cesarean section do not care for that baby at all
because the hormones are not released properly (oxytocin as the bonding hormone
is not released during a C-section).
What is even more
concerning to me about hospital births is that America has the worst maternal
mortality rates during pregnancy among industrialized nations. In Europe
and Japan, midwives deliver over 70% of the births. In America, midwives
are involved in less than 8% and some say the statistic is actually 0.5%.
In Norway, home births constitute 1 in 3 births; however, Norway
statistically loses less women and less babies to child birth than in
America.
These are just a few of my concerns.
There are many more. My concern primarily is that women do not know
of their options. There is simply the assumption that a woman who
is pregnant will have a hospital birth. In the 1900's, 95% of births
were done in the home. It became foreign territory to have babies
born in the hospitals. In fact, the doctors who began to deliver
babies after receiving their education had never even witnessed a baby
being born.
Doctors began to systematically
speak again midwives and to paint pictures of them as ignorant, uneducated
people who did not possess the expertise to deliver a baby. Throughout
this process, the doctors began experimenting with different drugs to give a
mother during labor and delivery, many babies were born without arms or legs
because of the experimentation of drugs without full comprehension and
knowledge of the dangers of these drugs.
As women, I firmly believe, our
bodies have been designed to give birth naturally. We have all that we
need from God and from nature to naturally conceive and birth a health,
beautiful baby. We have the hormones needed that are released during
labor and delivery to ensure an other-worldly experience and an ability to bond
with our baby in a way that we would not otherwise have without the
release of these hormones.
Modern medicine interferes with this process to a
large degree and takes away from women a potentially magical
and pivotal moment of her life. For me, I am excited to deliver
a baby at home and to allow my body to do exactly what it was created to
do: give life.
