Take me to a hospital!

Wed, 04 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Homebirth. The word sounds so warm, so inviting, so fresh-baked, so
Mothering magazine. Do it yourself in a soft-sculpture kind of way. Think
"hospital," and soon enough, you're conjuring up bureaucracy and blood
draws, brutal parking and antisocial bacteria. Place, however, might not
be the most important factor in a "good birth outcome," as the jargon goes.

The safest place to have a baby, I remember reading once, was the back
seat of a car.
My doctor told me I was crazy when I said I was planning a homebirth.
"Sure, if everything goes right you could have your baby on a beach," he
said cryptically. In retrospect,
perhaps that's exactly where I should have gone. I might have chosen to do what the other animals do and crawl away to
a secret corner of the woods to have a good scream for three days if the
option were available; barring that, I thought I'd do my grunting at home.

Salon.com > Susan Gerhard

Take me to a hospital!