I have to confess, I am a home birther. When a new friend invited me to be present at her child’s high-risk birth, I politely said I’d see if I could be there depending on the timing—after all, I have three kids of my own. None of them were born in a hospital. Nor did I want them to be. For me, a hospital is a place where people go when there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Pregnancy, birth and death are no such thing, under normal circumstances.
But this friend has been through a lot. First of all, she wasn’t supposed to be pregnant. Since the age of 13 she’s had three bouts of cancer, the last of which allegedly wiped out her reproductive system. She was told, at 23, that she would never be able to conceive a child. In a new relationship at the time, she wept over this, feeling utter misery over it, and then proceeded to go to the hospital to check up on a possible urinary tract infection. She learned she was four days pregnant. The impossible had occurred. Doctor backpedaling ensued.
The pregnancy continued to entail more pronouncements about what would or wouldn’t happen, and further backpedaling: miscarriage was likely, since she lacked much of her cervix. The first trimester passed without incident. A premature baby was likely, since the environment was less than ideal (heavily medicated, both self- and prescribed, none particularly healthy for the fetus). Six months came and went, labor expected at any moment. Her third trimester was the longest three months ever on record.
Last night I got a call from the baby’s dad telling me they were at the hospital and subsequent reports informed me how much the mom was dilated. I was invited to come down and visit. Knowing what I know about births and the cumulative effect of a hospital environment on a laboring mother, I felt I should stay away: in part because I didn’t want to watch the eager anticipation fade into the hours of an all-night, forced-wakeful, the-baby-must-be-coming-any-minute vigil. But also because I couldn’t bear to watch the hospital staff at work. Something about the whole thing, the flurry about a laboring woman, the over-medicalization of it, the heavy reliance on technology and machines, and the condescension that pervades the air between personnel and very young mothers (particularly mothers with a certain history of not taking the best care of themselves)—it’s really difficult to witness and much more difficult to experience.
So I showed up at 7:00 am mostly expecting that the baby would have been born already. I was slightly surprised to discover that things had not progressed much.
I thought for sure things would shift to the need for a c-section. When one asks for an epidural and then gets pitocin (synthetic hormone) after not “progressing fast enough” (sometimes doctor code-speak for “I want to be able to play golf this afternoon”)—the odds are that you’ll be put under the knife. I imagine the uterus doing contortions. “Relax!” the anesthetic says. “Work!” the synthetic hormone says. No wonder it gives up. But everything was fine. Baby’s heartbeat was normal, just loping along, and the epidural had taken full effect a long time ago. The pitocin drip continued to drip.
I lingered for two hours feeling a bit useless, but taking a lot of pictures of machinery, and cracking as many inane, sarcastic jokes as I could when the hospital staff was around. In a way I was annoyed at the attitude they seemed to have with my friend. It could be that I was just defensive and a little hyper, it being so early and me with no breakfast but a full travel mug of strong coffee instead. But I sensed a lot of looking-down-on, and overall, a really powerful impersonal vibe that just made me so uncomfortable, and I was only visiting for two hours. I was reminded, unhappily, of why I chose not to birth in a hospital, and how glad I was not to have any memories of such an experience.
Not that laboring and birth was suddenly easy and blissful at home. It was still a lot of work. But I didn’t have machines and drugs to rely on. I just had my body and, in general, some other people around to give me a hand. Essentially, this is how it’s meant to work, but we make it into something else entirely in our western ways. I wonder sometimes if I was transplanted here from the Serengeti, and I’m just in a vain search for my people, a Sister from Another Planet.
Leaving the hospital this morning, eager to return to my family, I told myself again what a miracle it is that this baby was coming into the world. She was here for some magical reason, a gift to her mom and dad, a special gem who arrived so unexpectedly. Whenever and however they come, when that time arrives, it’s the right time, the right way, whatever way it needs to be.