Would you consider a home birth?

Deborah Ann · Apr 21, 2006

NICU nurses, Are you saying that most of the babies in the NICU are homebirths gone bad? Thank you for your input! Deborah

fergus51 · Apr 21, 2006

No. The vast majority of our babies are born in the hospital and are in the NICU for reasons like prematurity that have nothing to do with where they were born.

Gompers, BSN, RN · Apr 21, 2006

NICU nurses, Are you saying that most of the babies in the NICU are homebirths gone bad? Thank you for your input! Deborah

No, I think what we're saying is that we've all seen babies in the NICU that were the result of homebirths gone bad. What bothers us is that, in almost every case, the baby would have had a much much better outcome had it been delivered in a hospital.

Yes, we know that many homebirths go absolutely fine and are beautiful experiences for all involved. But the original poster wanted to know how NICU nurses felt about homebirth - and we overwhelmingly replied that we'd never do it for OURSELVES. This is simply because we know what can go wrong with deliveries - we see it all the time. It's such a shame to us when we see a gorgeous full-term newborn with severe brain damage, because the family had attempted a homebirth and it all went wrong for whatever reason. We just know that if that PARTICULAR baby had been monitored and born in the hospital, it probably would have been fine.

This is not to say that there are never problems wth hospital deliveries, or that every homebirth goes wrong. Not at all. But once you've seen a situation where you think, "If only they'd been in the hopsital..." it's really hard to get that out of your head.

2curlygirls · Apr 21, 2006

I agree with Gompers.

We have all manner of babies in our NICU. Full term cardiac, surgical, preemies, metabolic kiddos. Some odd stuff that no one else is quite sure how to manage. The homebirths kinda stick out cuz they if they come to us, they are usually REALLY sick needing ECMO, hypothermia etc. I can't help feeling like it might not have happened in a hospital birth, but obviously, no one could ever know that.

I *know* homebirths are generally safe but that isn't my experience with them. Know what I mean? I had recently been debating this topic with some other folks and I wanted to know what other NICU nurses thought. I do think it is interesting that most of the actual NICU RN's that replied (with some exception) said they would not choose homebirth for themselves.

Babble babble. I'll shut up now.

Brownbetty · Apr 24, 2006

I am a NICU nurse so my answer is NO!!!! No matter how skewed my view is because of my NICU experience, I would be petrified.

L&D · May 2, 2006

Just putting nursing experience aside and coming form a womans perspective, i agree with Brownbetty NO!!!!!!!!

I have 2 girls that were born on their due date

(felt more like 45wks not 40 lol) and completely healthy, but leading up to that day i would freak out thinking what if i had my baby at home.

so i guess it is a personal choice but I did wish woman looked at the fact that in a hosptial your baby can get all it needs..........ASAP

lovemyjob · May 5, 2006

Could you live with yourself if you had a homebirth and you were that small percentage where MAS, asphyxia, PPHN, ect and your baby either died or ended up wih severe brain damage? Could you really live with yourself? maybe those who have had great outcomes should count themselves lucky, because there have been some very sad situations where parents end up with no baby at all. Why risk it.

ChayaN: The comments you made about your home birth all focused on you and your experience, just what one of the other posters said. Once you become a nurse and see the many realities of childbirth, maybe you will change your mind. Your comments on why "unexperienced" women who choose home birthing are more likely to have delivery complications is appalling. You are saying that a woman being anxious about her labor/delivery CAUSED the complication....mother does not CAUSE CPD (cephalopelvic diproportion)...mother does not CAUSE prolapse cord, or any other complication.

I may be a bad person and maybe a bad nurse for this next comment, but I really dont care, flame me: I have NO symapathy for the parents who have poor outcomes resulting from home births/refusal to accept madical care (refusing blood work/abx on gbs pos/Prolonged ROM..just ridiculous). I grieve for the innocent baby who trusted his/her parents to care for him and keep him safe, and was let down.

Mags4711, RN · May 5, 2006

Okay folks, get ready to attack! :) I am a NICU nurse in a Level IIIc and YES, I would absolutely HAVE a home birth. That is if I lost my mind and got pregnant.

Yep, I've seen home births gone bad, I've seen plenty of hospital births gone bad, too. As someone earlier in this thread said, they see maybe two bad home births a year, I guess that would be about what we see. Compare that to how many bad hospital births we see. I am not talking about the unknown cardiac kids, or the premies, etc...I am talking about the birth depression kids who are transported in to us for Cool Cap and other bad birth problems.

There are OB's who specialize in home births. They come prepared with suction, intubating equipment, meds, oxygen, etc... So if something bad happens there is appropriate help there while waiting for EMS to transport. That would be who I would choose for my OB/CNM.

Of course if I were to spike a temp and ABX were needed, then the baby would go to the hospital for said ABX. Unless it is known B and she/he could get Pen G IM.

JeanettePNP, MSN, RN, NP · May 5, 2006

ChayaN: The comments you made about your home birth all focused on you and your experience, just what one of the other posters said. Once you become a nurse and see the many realities of childbirth, maybe you will change your mind. Your comments on why "unexperienced" women who choose home birthing are more likely to have delivery complications is appalling. You are saying that a woman being anxious about her labor/delivery CAUSED the complication....mother does not CAUSE CPD (cephalopelvic diproportion)...mother does not CAUSE prolapse cord, or any other complication.

I do think your comments directed towards me are way out of line. No, I do not blame mothers for births gone wrong. However, I know from my own experience and that of my friends that when a woman is in a childbirth situation where she does not feel safe/supported/secure, labor tends to stall and things go wrong. My first hospital birth was an awful experience because of insensitive, uncaring nurses (or maybe they were just overworked but that's not my problem.) Fact is, I did not get the care and attention that I needed to have a safe and comfortable birth. For two days after the birth I had to lie there in discomfort because I had no shower in my room and was unable to walk down the long hallway to get to the shower, and no nurse was available to assist me. I could go on and on. Please don't accuse me of putting my own comfort before my baby. If all I cared about was my own comfort I could have gone to the hospital and taken the epidural. Poof, my troubles are over. It's because I strongly believe in the value of natural, unmedicated childbirth for both myself and my baby that I delivered at home, where I have my own stress-management tools available to me. Stressed mother = stressed baby, in my book. Trying to go natural in the strange and unnatural environment of a hospital, where comfort measures were not easily available to me, proved to be too stressful.

My homebirthed babies thrived from having ongoing skin-to-skin from the moment of birth unlike my hospital birthed son who was taken to a nursery and stuffed with formula (which he promptly vomited) because the nurse decided he was hungry.

You have a right to birth where you choose. I hired a competent, professional experienced midwife who was wonderful and we would have transferred at the first hint of problems. I am pleased with my homebirth experience and if I were in the .001% that had problems that would make me no different from the small percentage of hospital birthers who had problems.

Your tone was rude and inappropriate for a nurse as you made personal judgmental comments directed against me, not just the general situation.

Bowing out of this thread now.

Mags4711, RN · May 5, 2006

All of you are right and I can't really argue with your logic. And yet, and yet, what I experienced with my homebirth is something that I could never get in a hospital. The relaxation, feeling of total control, being *inside* my body and so aware of what was happening. Doing the things that I needed to do to manage pain -- not the things someone else thought I needed to do. That absolutely amazing adrenaline rush after the birth, the feeling that I could run a marathon, the exclusive bonding time with baby - these are things I did not and could not experience in a hospital birth. I have 2 healthy homebirthed babies, and I strongly believe that my relaxed state of mind during labor contributed to the healthy outcome for them. Of course there are all kinds of reasons why babies go into distress but distress in the mother does affect the baby!
If my baby was in the 0.001% that had problems because of my decision to homebirth (meaning a problem that shot out of nowhere and became critical in seconds, which is an extremely minute risk) I would of course be devastated, but I don't think it's that different than the what-if of things going wrong because of hospital interventions. Homebirthing is my epidural. Women take the risks of epidural because they want to minimize the pain of labor. For me, giving birth at home in a stress-free atmosphere helps me keep on top of the pain more than anything else.
OF course I'm one of the homebirth success stories and the amazing experience I had is part of the reason why people do choose it. But like skiing and skydiving it has its risks.
You're right that I'm still learning and I am respectful of your knowledge and experience. Maybe if I found this site 4 years ago you'd have talked me out of homebirth, and I would have missed out on something very special.

ChayaN, I am sorry to see that you said you are bowing out of this thread. The quote above that I have pulled up is one of the most eloquent and beautiful explanations I have ever seen about why one would choose a home birth. You are right, you may have missed out on that very special experience if you had been here 4 yrs ago, and that would have been awful. Home birth is something that is a very personal choice and should be a very carefully made decision. It sounds like you had a wonderful Midwife and certainly you had the experience of a hospital birth as well, so you knew what would have needed to be done, and you would have done it if the need arose.

Mags4711, RN · May 5, 2006

All of you are right and I can't really argue with your logic. And yet, and yet, what I experienced with my homebirth is something that I could never get in a hospital. The relaxation, feeling of total control, being *inside* my body and so aware of what was happening. Doing the things that I needed to do to manage pain -- not the things someone else thought I needed to do. That absolutely amazing adrenaline rush after the birth, the feeling that I could run a marathon, the exclusive bonding time with baby - these are things I did not and could not experience in a hospital birth. I have 2 healthy homebirthed babies, and I strongly believe that my relaxed state of mind during labor contributed to the healthy outcome for them. Of course there are all kinds of reasons why babies go into distress but distress in the mother does affect the baby!
If my baby was in the 0.001% that had problems because of my decision to homebirth (meaning a problem that shot out of nowhere and became critical in seconds, which is an extremely minute risk) I would of course be devastated, but I don't think it's that different than the what-if of things going wrong because of hospital interventions. Homebirthing is my epidural. Women take the risks of epidural because they want to minimize the pain of labor. For me, giving birth at home in a stress-free atmosphere helps me keep on top of the pain more than anything else.
OF course I'm one of the homebirth success stories and the amazing experience I had is part of the reason why people do choose it. But like skiing and skydiving it has its risks.
You're right that I'm still learning and I am respectful of your knowledge and experience. Maybe if I found this site 4 years ago you'd have talked me out of homebirth, and I would have missed out on something very special.

ChayaN, I am sorry to see that you said you are bowing out of this thread. The quote above that I have pulled up is one of the most eloquent and beautiful explanations I have ever seen about why one would choose a home birth. You are right, you may have missed out on that very special experience if you had been here 4 yrs ago, and that would have been awful. Home birth is something that is a very personal choice and should be a very carefully made decision. It sounds like you had a wonderful Midwife and certainly you had the experience of a hospital birth as well, so you knew what would have needed to be done, and you would have done it if the need arose.

I had edited this once to add more to my thought (I accidently posted it before I was done), and then something screwed up and my three paragraph, wonderfully written addendum went into never never land.

So I won't be quite as wordy as I was a few minutes ago, but the gist of what I said was that people view and experience pain in different ways. What a wonderful testament your story is to the positive ability of the mind and the spirit to overcome pain! Sometimes I think we are too quick to jump in with a pharmaceutical intervention that could have a serious impact (such as an epidural) before perhaps fully exploring other methods of pain control. Visualization, relaxation, massage, quiet, warm water, etc... I am NOT saying that epidurals are unneccessary, nor am I saying they are evil, but I am saying there is plenty of data out there that shows they *can* and *have* led to complications. Not the least of which is the decreased ability of the mother to push the baby out, which can result in birth depression, or a need for a section. Granted epidurals are wonderful in most cases and allow the mother to get some rest. But if a woman is able to get on top of her pain through whatever means she has at her disposal, and as long as it doesn't jeopardize herself or her baby, I fully support that. And ChayaN was able to do that be staying at home.

When I was in nursing school, I remember seeing movies of births from around the world and at that time I thought I really wanted to become a CNM and be a part of supporting women through a non-traditional (well, non-traditional nowadays) birth. But then I realized I'd have to deal with too many other things along the way that I knew I'd have a huge problem with, so I ditched that idea. However, one of the videos really struck me, it was of a woman who was at home, naked and squatting while giving birth, her partner and her midwife were supporting her as she squatted. The baby came out and she laid back, the midwife placed the baby immediately on mom's chest to dry the baby. Once dried, the baby was placed up at the breast and she latched on immediately! It seemed to be a very peaceful and beautiful experience.

It was at that moment that I decided that if I were to ever give birth (saint's preserve us!), I wanted to to be at home, if medically possible. Years later, after having been a NICU nurse and seeing all I've seen, I still stand by that decision. With one caveat, that I have the appropriate personnel and equipment with me.

JeanettePNP, MSN, RN, NP · May 5, 2006

ChayaN, I am sorry to see that you said you are bowing out of this thread. The quote above that I have pulled up is one of the most eloquent and beautiful explanations I have ever seen about why one would choose a home birth. You are right, you may have missed out on that very special experience if you had been here 4 yrs ago, and that would have been awful. Home birth is something that is a very personal choice and should be a very carefully made decision. It sounds like you had a wonderful Midwife and certainly you had the experience of a hospital birth as well, so you knew what would have needed to be done, and you would have done it if the need arose.

Thanks for your support, Faith. I'm bowing out becuase when things get nasty and personal it's time for me to go.