Home birth

[chuckles] Um, we ended, we ended up having a really beautiful midwife, um, again, you know, for our second.

Um, and very fortunately, she was able to offer us a home birth.

Oh.

So our first midwife, um, with our son had al- had actually also offered us a home birth.

When I mentioned it to Andy, he went, like, I don't even know, gray-white.

He just, uh, it was immediate.

Um, you know, that gives me a kind of a baseline.

That's what the hospital experience is like.

So once you enter the system that we talked about before, it's like quicksand.

The reason I celebrate this is because Crowd Health has a 50% at-home birth rate.

Yeah.

If y'all wanna have a baby at home, come sit around the fire with us.

So I went with them again.

Having an at-home birth...

Where you're like, I think what you're telling me is until the last half an hour, you're just doing it yourself.

Yeah, my husband and I. I did want a free birth if I could, but we had midwives close at hand.

We're trying to do things also to make it more hospital friendly.

We recently added a faith-filled cesarean track as well because we don't want it to be like, oh, you can only have this beautiful, faith-filled, peaceful birth if you're having an unmedicated home birth or something.

A lot of people, that's not going to be what's right for them for various reasons.

Some people really do need to have a cesarean as well.

I don't want to ever try and make out like it's just everyone should have a home birth, some people do need to be in the hospital as well.

So we really want to try and help people no matter what kind of birth they're planning to feel that love and peace and support throughout their birth.

What sort of feedback have you received over the years from mothers who've done both, let's say, home hypnobirthing and perhaps the over-medicalized birthing experience?

Because we were in a market town in the UK, which was half an hour drive from the hospital, but maybe in traffic probably could be like an hour and a half.

So I was like, oh really? So maybe part of it could have been because my mom did it and I wasn't aware subconsciously, right? that it was there but I do believe a lot of the resistance is around like you said just all the common beliefs of okay this is how we do things and so now that I have my daughter EC isn't the only thing that we're going against the grain with all the traditions everything that we were taught and how we should do things and how we should parent no we're here like testing testing and doing things in such a different way and it's actually been a really fun journey I'm enjoying the process

And you had a home birth too.

I did.

Yeah, I did.

We decided we want to wait.

We want to wait.

And I wanted to do a home birth.

So again, just doing things different than what society is doing now, like finding the gender right away, going to the hospital.

Yeah,

as it was, I was like 26 days overdue when I finally went into labour and had my lovely home birth physiologically at home in two hours.

It's

not true.

It's a big uphill battle.

I

think as well, for me, it's become really apparent that the only way women are now achieving that sort of home birthy thing is by having doulas um you know 40 percent of women will book at the beginning of their pregnancy be considering having a home birth less than one percent are achieving that

yeah

You tell me what you want, and I'll give it to you, and that's all I'll ever ask you in return.

I've got Kirsten back on the show today to share her second birth story with her little boy, where she had a home birth, and it was everything she'd ever wanted it to be.

She did have HG again quite badly, saw a lot of sickness, and she was dealing with all the fun stuff like having a baby that was measuring on the 97th centile, and she talks a lot about what it was like having prodromal labor for weeks as well.

I really picked Kirsten's brains here.

But do you wanna give us a rundown on your first son's birth before we dive into your second?

Uh, yep.

So he was a, um, a planned home birth, um, after quite a difficult hyperemesis pregnancy.

Um, and a very fast whirlwind labor with my first, ended up in a transfer to hospital, um, where I ended up having an instrumental delivery, um, after quite a long pushing, pushing stage.

So background is I breastfed my first baby for 16 months.

We do things very naturally, holistically, home births, et cetera.

However, my second born, our breastfeeding journey is not going well.

He's six months old.

Yeah.

It was a home birth.

Okay.

So-

... how does that work? When you choose to have...

First off, I mean, why did you go from being from her in a hospital and the transformation here where you said, "We wanna do, um, um-

...