Having a Secular Home Birth – Is it Possible?
My midwife came today for our monthly meeting. Everything went well, she had a new sphygmomanometer -which if I haven’t mentioned I am weird about certain things- that made me nervous. Her old one, which was big, loose and soft – finally broke, and she picked up a new one at the pharmacy that was small, tight, blue and vinyl like. So of course my BP was 108/66 – the same as our first appointment when I hadn’t yet known her cuff. She thought the BP was good though, my pulse was 74, I’m nursing congestion and a cough. I was sure the urinalysis would be pitiful again because I am ill and drinking as much as my small bladder can hold – but that came back all normal.
The only troubling thing was
my iron today – a 10. I had gotten it up to 13 before, and I have still been regularly taking my iron and b12, prenatal vitamins and eating iron rich foods. I explained this, so she calibrated the machine, came back normal, retried my sample, and it came back at 9.4 – she is giving me the benefit of the doubt and will further test the machine at home. Maybe being in her cold trunk had something to do with it.
The baby is head down and ready to go anytime two weeks from now, she is guessing it is on the large end of 6 or small end of 7 pounds currently. She took a look at my legs, and they are great, no more swelling – so everything is green lighted for the home birth. Today was even my last payment, I am all squared away and paid up for the baby’s birth, that is a weight off of my neck.
We went over some of my concerns – the pinching sensation in my cervix – normal as the cervix dilates and effaces (she thinks this one will be early if not on time), the soreness in my sides (too much abdominal work and tight abdominal muscles that are stretching – she says I have the tone of a first time mom – yeah one that was out of shape maybe!), my fear about not knowing when the baby is coming / not knowing when to push(normal since my last birth in the hospital included a 24 hour stay from the minute they accidentally broke my water until he actually delivered, with everyone under the sun telling me what to do and when) and my concerns about the mess and the placenta (I will not be using mirrors or want to look at the placenta). Seems some midwives like to make art with the placenta (Tree of life art it is called by pressing it against paper like an inking) – other women like to have Lotus Births (where they leave the placenta attached for up to 4 days).
Now my only concern ever with my midwife is that she is very religious, goes to church a lot, doesn’t wear pants – and I was not raised Christian, my husband is a recovering Catholic as he says, and we are just spiritually oriented.
There are not many midwives in our area who attend home births, and those who do are usually very religious. We had found a midwife prior to this one, but a series of bad experiences and incompetence on her part drove me to leave her care – and thank goodness I did. You need to feel as though you can rely on someone and they have your best interests at mind. She was a secular midwife, no mention of the big guy ever, all of her literature was very logic/medical based and she came off more as a Women Empowerment type. We interviewed another Midwife group that does home births and they were just nutty – total new age hippie types with a practice out of a shared acupuncture office – they made you take off your shoes – so you wound up with these midwives running around barefoot, white lab coat, beads/crystals on with a stethoscope around the neck – made me think of kids playing dress up – and they were rude and clinical. One telling me that since I was over the age of 25 I was high risk – now that is just plain ignorant and incompetent. High risk for first time mothers conservatively starts at 35 – but even now that is not mentioned as much.
Back to my midwife…A great deal of her literature mentions "The Lord delivers babies", "Bible Passages for Pregnancy, Labor and Delivery", etc. My husband debated long and hard on whether to hire her, what it boiled down to was I felt very comfortable around her and truly believe in the First Amendment, and that America is great because we supposedly have Freedom of Religion and Expression. As long as she didn’t pray over me and the baby, I’d be fine. My way of bringing this up was to mention the fact that although I do not practice my religion actively, if we have a boy, he will be circumcised (I am not looking for comments on this, thank you – for every anti-circumcision article/belief out there I can come up with just as good as one/medical reason etc in favor – so this isn’t a debate -again this is free country we live in ) – that our last midwife pretty much yelled at me and try to convince me otherwise. I wanted to make sure this would not be a problem with her. She said it wasn’t and understood my position, and we left it at that. Occasionally she does mention something about the bible during visits, or her church (like a friend at church’s birth, etc).
Today I was glad to hear that she is not so far ingrained that she swears off medical interventions, etc. We were discussing unassisted child birth, and some of the articles out there about women who truly do not want or have anyone else there – which to me seems quite dangerous – when you are in labor – labor is pretty much all you can and are doing – to not even have a friend there is kind of a foreign idea to me. I mean, I only have 2 hands, I couldn’t birth, monitor with mirrors and Doppler, catch, etc. the baby through contractions – it just isn’t feasible. I think for some of these women this is born out of a fear of loss of control, maybe past abuse trauma (we went over these issues in my doula training), whatever – I fear for these women and their babies.
My midwife lives in a rural area, highly religious and she knows of several families that have had deaths of newborns that could have been avoided by having an extra pair of hands and someone skilled in what to do. She quoted one family as saying, "The Lord needed our baby, and he has gone to a better place". She rolled her eyes and said, "The Lord gave us doctors and people to help, that loss wasn’t necessary." – That made me feel better to be honest.
Its odd that so many of the lifestyle choices I make are made by others for non-secular reasons, such as diet, home schooling, home birthing, etc. It is hard to find secular services for the last two, but I truly believe in tolerance, everyone’s right to choose what is best for them and their families – so as long as others don’t push their beliefs into my choices, I can interact and have wonderful experiences.
