My Story: Deciding Where to Give Birth

MB explains how she came to the decision to give birth in a hospital. She recalls learning about midwives and receiving advice from her mother, an OB-GYN nurse.

Transcript:

OBOS Today: Um, did you do all three of your births in a hospital?

MB: I did, yeah. I did. I have—one of my closest friends did two of her births in her apartment in New York City. And so, it’s so interesting hearing about the differences, you know, in our experiences and—Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s in—in a lot of, I know in some European countries, like, when a midwife goes to their house, and they give birth at home with a midwife, and they have really great maternal outcomes, and neonatal outcomes, and stuff like that. So I think being able to—for low-risk pregnancies, being able to provide that as an option is really important, you know, for people to be able to do that with a well-trained midwife, a low-risk pregnancy, you know, and everybody being, you know, well educated on when the person would need to transfer to a hospital and stuff like that.

So I think when I first heard about home birth it sounded like, oh what a terrible idea, but then you realize, like, other countries do it and they do it really, really well, and we probably need to support midwives a lot more than we do currently in this country.

OBOS Today: Yeah, absolutely. What contributed to your decision of giving birth in a hospital?

MB: My mom is an OB-GYN nurse. And so, I think, you know, we always grew up knowing what could go wrong in labor and delivery and that was like sort of our dinnertime conversation. And so— so I think, you know, that was probably a big factor, and I think if there were—yeah, that was probably a big factor, but I think it’s, um.

Let me see. I don’t think that—I don’t think that I felt so strongly about it that I would necessarily have gone either way. I think that it probably was, like, just defaulting into it more than anything, because I actually—when I was in college, one of the things that I was considering like as a career option was being a midwife, and so, it wasn’t like—I think it wasn’t like I was against home birth or anything like that, it was more so, like, just defaulting into the, into the hospital system like most women do.