I had a home birth because I really believe in the body's natural ability to give birth. The medical profession has kind of warped women's minds into thinking we don't know how to birth and we need doctors and epidurals and Pitocin.
I wanted to give birth as opposed to being delivered!
They are very healthy. Yes, they were sucking and breathing on their own and everything when they came out. So there was no need to stay in the hospital. So we took them home the next day.
The scariest thing I ever did was give birth in the kitchen by myself, with my three-year-old bashing me on the head with a sword, but it's not like you have a choice is it.
I think it's important to balance out what people see today as normal birth, in a hospital room, flat on their backs, usually with an IV and a fetal monitor hooked up to them. That does happen, but other things are possible.
Simply put, when there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women’s capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society—to professional caregivers, as well as to the women of childbearing age themselves.
I was born at home in rural Kentucky, in 1942, in a house that my father Howard had built. He did most of the construction himself and built it on land that his father had given him when he married my mother Faye.
Nothing I have accomplished has given me more confidence than birthing my children at home naturally. I was so high after delivering my children-not just because I had a new baby, but because I was so proud of what my body (and mind) were able to do. I strongly encourage women not to give this power away.
In the spring of 1978, when my parents were 23, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert's farm in Oregon with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish.
[On home births:] In a house where there had been three people, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.
Women are being told to get midwives [in UK] because there's not enough room and there's not enough pain medicine at the hospitals.
I was born in Manhattan on West 12th. My parents were kind of hippies and they did a home birth.
The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.
I taught woman-centered childbirth classes for five years and have a particular interest in the history of childbirth practices.
I wanted to be a 'jungle mom', where you're giving birth and getting up and doing things straightaway.
My big thing is I think women should birth their babies, as long as they're healthy and their doctor says it's OK, however they want, whether that means in the hospital with no drugs, at home with an epidural, elective C-section, whatever.
A home birth is about being able to create exactly what you want, because it's such a violent moment inside of the body that you want everything else to be as beautiful as it can be.
I witnessed a home birth with my sister Khloe and, after seeing it, I felt it wasn't for me. There was too much risk involved, and it wasn't as sanitary as a hospital.
When you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.
When I had my kids, I took a lot of homeopathic things, and I had them both with no painkillers.
My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
We're going to do a natural birth. At first she was like, 'We should do it at home,' and I said, 'Look, either way, when you go into labor, I will be checking into a hospital... so if you want to come along, come along.
I think there can always be beauty in struggle. I mean, as far as childbirth, I had my son in the hospital, but then I had my daughter at home. There's no doubt that there's a struggling in birth, and a beauty and a horror and fear and joy too.
I was actually born in the front bedroom while my dad sat on the wall outside, feeling sick. Twenty minutes after my mother gave birth, she went downstairs and made my old man a cup of tea.
I had a very long home birth. She was almost 10 pounds and did not want to come out.
