Home Birth

A full natural birth guide to broaden your understanding of birth and how to empower yourself in the process.

Supporting Women to Give Birth at Home describes and discusses the main challenges and issues that midwives and maternity services encounter when preparing for and attending a home birth. To ensure that a home birth is a real option for women, midwives need to be able to believe in a woman’s ability to give birth at home and to promote this birth option, providing evidence-based information about benefits and risks. This practical guide will help midwives to have the necessary skills, resources and confidence to support homebirth. The book includes: the present birth choices a woman has the implications homebirth has upon midwifery practice how midwives can prepare and support women and their families the midwife’s role and responsibilities national and local policies, guidelines and available resources pain management options With a range of recent home birth case studies brought together in the final chapter, this accessible text provides a valuable insight into those considering homebirth. Supporting Women to Give Birth at Home will be of interest to students studying issues around normal birth and will be an important resource for clinically based midwives, in particular community based midwives, home birth midwifery teams, independent midwives, and all who are interested in homebirth as a genuine choice.

Describes different approaches to childbirth and their advantages and disadvantages, including midwife delivery and birth centers.

This is a book for midwives and health professionals but it is one which starts from women's stories and their points of view. Pointers to best practice are presented alongside the narratives, making this a practical read for those concerned with making home birth a real option for women.

"What do a Dutch university lecturer, a US Marine, a Scottish artist, and an English engineer have in common? They have all experienced the transformative power of home birth, and their stories - and many others - are told in this groundbreaking book. As hospital-based maternity services become increasingly medicalised, more and more parents are deciding that birth belongs in the home. For many women, this choice may be an easy one, but for their partners, home birth raises some serious questions. For the first time, The Father's Home Birth Handbook provides a resource aimed specifically at exploring men's hopes and fears around home birth. Thorough research, balanced discussion, and dozens of home birth stories from real men all over the world make this book essential reading for all fathers-to-be and the professionals who support them."--Publisher's description.

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act. Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women. What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, Blessed Events challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America.

In the 21st century, women are supposed to have a choice about where they give birth. But when that choice is home, women often encounter obstacles, despite robust evidence that birth at home is safe, beneficial and should be available for women who want it. Why Home Birth Matters is a clear discussion of the reality of modern home birth, which aims to show how the home environment supports and powers the birth process, while encouraging parents to consider how it might work for them.