Is giving birth at home safe? If you should ask, I believe every mother prefers to give birth to their children in a safe and comfortable environment. For some mothers, the feel of having medical professionals attend to them during labour gives them a sense of safety. Having doctors and nurses attend to a woman during a child’s delivery sure makes one feel nothing can go wrong.
Some mothers, however, get troubled with the mere thought of having needles injected into their body on a hospital bed, get uncomfortable because they feel strangers are invading their space and other factors that might be discomforting to them.
Despite all these facts, when a woman is due for childbirth, safety and comfort is prioritised over any other thing, but the question now is, is giving birth at home safe?
Getting pregnant and childbirth is as natural as natural can be, and in most cases, some mothers prefer the natural birth of their child to happen at the comfort of their home with the few reasons below.
Why mothers prefer the home birth method?
1. Comfort:
When a woman is ready for delivery, the body secretes hormones that automatically triggers labour, and it is a general fact that a woman in labour functions best when her stress level is at the minimal with little or no discomfort. These factors contribute to making delivery easy.
Home birth gives a pregnant woman a sense of calmness especially since she’s well within her environment, familiar faces and smell she is used to, not to mention privacy all go a long way to making her calmer than when she’s delivering in the hospital.
2. Attention:
Rather than be treated as a patient with a kind of chronic disease, home birth allows a mother to be attended to as a woman going through a natural process. The midwives with their equipment can give a birthing mother all the needed attention necessary for a safe delivery that guarantees the well being of both mother and child.
3. Safety:
Due to the seriousness of birthing a child, mothers are always advised to labour within at least 30 minutes from a hospital, in case of emergency, which is unlikely to occur. Making sure a hospital is within reach covers the same safety margin with women birthing in hospitals.
A landmark study on the safety of home birth was published in the British Medical Journal in 2005 which showed that both home birth and hospital birth had similar safety rate and that there were few recorded complications and interventions from home births compared to hospitals births.
4. Hygiene:
The infection rate during home birth compared to hospital birth is less than half. Reasons being that the baby carries the mother’s antibodies that are passed directly through the placenta, which includes immunity to the household germs the child is likely to be raised. However, there is little protection from hospital germs as they are foreign to the mother, and child especially.
Home birth offers optimum protection from mother to child as there is little or no physical contact interference between mother and child.
Women opt for a home birth because it allows them the chance to be around familiar surroundings where it is most calm and relaxing. It also allows them to monitor other children, if any, and as well get required attention from their partners.
However, there might be a risks present should there be no professional certified personnels present during the birthing process. The only reason, in today\’s time, a woman\’s body faces more complications as opposed to our ancestors. Good article!