Thank you coffeeadict for taking the time to type out these statistics. My wife is a doula, and worked in a hospital for years, she saw so many unnecessary c-sections in her time there. OBs are trained in the medical side of birth and the age old tradition of midwifery isn’t taught or attempted to be understood. She always says that she can tell exactly where a mom is in her birth by observation, but the nurses and doctors, who are too busy, only go by the numbers of the machines.
Once there was a mom who was stuck at a certain point in her labor. The doctor put a time limit on her and they would be headed for a c-section within a certain amount of time (maybe an hour?) being stamped “failure to progress”. The nurses were watching the machines and, it was true, the baby wasn’t progressing. My wife asked the nurses if she could try a couple things, because she knew the baby wasn’t aligned right to drop into place as the mom was told to stay on her back. The mom was “allowed” to have a couple contractions on her side, the baby fell immediately into place and she had a natural delivery. The baby was stuck and there was no way on her back that the baby was going to fall into place. Something so simple, is rarely paid attention to, and if they are, it’s done with skepticism. She has many, many stories like this.
I would liken many OB’s and nurses to reading Torah without any knowledge of the Oral Torah. There’s a rich knowledge of birth through thousands of years of midwifery that gets overlooked in the name of medical births, which has only been around for a couple generations. They are trained very well in what to do if something goes terribly wrong, but not how to prevent these situations it in a more natural way, as they have always been done.
As for a home birth, they don’t have to messy. Our last child was born at home and we would never want to go back to a hospital birth. It was so calm and peaceful for the baby to have time to sit with mom and bond quietly. It wasn’t a lot of cleanup at all, but even if it were, I would happily have a baby at home, as all of our ancestors did.