yungerman1,
I’ve never heard of a great delivery. Deliveries are extremely painful even with an epidural- which a midwife cannot administer.
Not all labors and deliveries are painful.
And to both of you- Please respond to Health’s post- he make a very important point.
I have no interest in responding to Health. What I will say to you is this: the snippets of what sounds like a news article he quoted made no mention of the maternal mortality rate in U.S. hospitals, which is significantly higher when interventions are utilized, and higher in comparison to other developed nations that promote home births for healthy pregnancies. While he framed his argument as pitting a mother’s convenience and comfort vs. infant’s life, if anything it really is a question of mother’s life and infants life. Whose blood is redder?
By the way, the ACOG probably lumps all “planned home births” together, including those who have little to no screening or monitoring, which I have certainly never advocated. And I wonder what definitions the ACOG used to attribute an infant’s death to the birth itself.