http://blogs.smh.com.au/lifestyle/whosyourdaddy/archives/2009/02/i_love_the_word_home.html
I love the word “home”, with all its connotations of familiarity and Gemutlichkeit. I also love the word “birth”, with its suggestion of hope and new beginnings. When you put those two words together, however, the effect is confronting.
In this age of reason (well, mostly), there is something stubbornly anti-modern about homebirths. I mean, with all the advances of modern medicine, and with the ensuing drastic decline in infant mortality rates, why would you choose to have a baby at home?
One couple who wanted a homebirth were John Polson and Amanda Harding. For a few years now, the couple have been based in Brooklyn, and at 2am on Boxing Day they had their first child, a girl, named Harper.
“We didn’t want to do the hospital thing,” says Polson, the film director and Tropfest founder, currently in Sydney choosing the 16 finalists for this year’s festival. “America’s reputation for pulling out the scalpel and doing a c-section is horrific. We didn’t want that. So we did it at home with a midwife.”
Now there’s courage.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of a homebirth. More to the point, so does my wife. Back in 2005, for the birth of the bundle that turned out to be Edie, Jo seriously contemplated the notion of a home delivery. Instead, she booked into RPA’s birthing centre, which we figured would be a bit of a compromise between labour ward and homebirth. Well, that was the plan, but Edie was three weeks overdue, so Jo was belatedly told that the birthing centre was out of the question.
The delivery ward it was, and what followed was intensive induction with intravenous hormones, extended foetal monitoring via a belt around Jo’s middle and, ultimately, an epidural. Jo was a whisker away from an emergency caesarean when, miraculously, our monkey was born. If Edie had arrived by c-section, she wouldn’t have been alone: nearly one in three Aussie kids now enter the world with the help of a scalpel.
In our pre-natal classes, Jo and I had been warned about the cascade of medical intervention: how induction can lead to epidural, for instance, which in turn can lead to c-section. In our case, all was well that ended well, but even so I was left wondering whether all the intervention had been necessary. In much the same spirit, actress Ricki Lake has made a film about her child’s birth called The Business of Being Born.
To counter the medicalisation of birth, organisations such as Homebirth Australia have been established: “a group of consumers and midwives committed to ensuring the survival of homebirth as a birth option for Australian women, with the overall aim of public funded homebirth across the country.” Also helpful is Homebirth Access Sydney, which provides midwife profiles and sells birthing pools.
So, how did Polson find the homebirth of his first child?
“I can’t speak for my wife, but there were times when I wanted an epidural,” he laughs. “But I caught the baby, and there was none of this shoving-needles-in stuff. It just happened there in our bedroom, and an hour later, the three of us were lying in our bed together thinking, ‘What just happened?’
“I’m very pro-homebirth,” he says, still exuding the wide-eyed delight of newfound fatherhood. “I want to get the word out there.”
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