Here in Canada, where most babies are delivered by masked medical teams under glaring hospital lights, our daughter was born at home.

Not by accident, but because we planned it that way!

Our Decision

Our previous three children were born in a hospital. My wife and I were together on each occasion until she was wheeled away into the hands of interns and nurses. At the exciting moment of birth, she was alone with strangers while I was out in the hall!

Something was missing. So when we learned that our fourth child was on her way, we decided to share her birth together.

Many hospitals respect, even encourage, such a desire of parents by allowing the father in the delivery room when a baby is born. Still, a hospital is an institution, not a home. We hoped to provide something more loving and personal for our new family member.

Also, in some hospital cases misguided or prejudiced officials have forced unwanted medical treatment on newborn infants. We did not favor taking such a risk.

We decided to have our baby born at home!

A rash decision?

Not according to the better survival records of countries where most births occur at home compared with those where excited fathers-to-be rush their wives to hospitals.

According to a recent issue of Scientific American, “The U.S. continues to rank poorly among industrialized nations when it comes to infant mortality. The latest statistics put this country 15th,” behind several countries in which most babies are born at home.

American author Mrs. Lester D. Hazell reports, in her book Commonsense Childbirth: “At this writing [1969] we lose twice as many mothers in childbirth as England does, four times as many as the Netherlands. . . . Rightfully American women fear having a baby. The way we do it is a fearful thing.”

Of Canadian losses in childbirth, a recent Science Council of Canada report states: “Canada has no grounds at all for being pleased with its performance.”

However, with home deliveries there are benefits that hospitals cannot match. Our older children accepted their new sister the day she was born. She never carried the stigma of having taken mother away for a week in the hospital.

Often older children and fathers must wait until a baby comes home before developing love for the little one. There was no waiting in our household!

Is It Safe?

In a part of the world where people depend almost entirely upon doctors and hospitals to supervise childbirth, some may think birth at home is risky, even dangerous.

But is it?

“Should babies be born at home?” asks author Dr. Ashley Montagu. “What a question! Where else should they be born, if not in the home? The hospital? But I had thought that the hospital was a place where one went for relief from sickness or injury. . . . Is pregnancy a sickness? Is the birth of a child a disease?”

Some countries with mostly home deliveries have better survival rates than North America with its majority of hospital births. Our nurse-midwife has delivered hundreds of babies without needing a doctor, not even for a tear in a mother!

Obviously, the popular concept of childbirth problems is greatly exaggerated in North America.

“There are indications in this country that home delivery, though not stylish, is, in fact, safer,” reports Mrs. Hazell in Commonsense Childbirth.

In the 1950’s when the United States was losing an average of one mother per 1,000 births, a maternity center delivered 8,339 babies at home in Chicago slums without losing a single mother!

For three years, from 1960 to 1963, when a nurse-midwife service operated in Madera County, California, the infant mortality rate was cut in half, to 10.3 per 1,000 live births from a previous level of 23.9. Within a year after childbirth cases were returned to a system centered around doctors and hospitals, infant mortality in the county tripled, to 32.1 per 1,000 births!

Home deliveries are less likely to involve medical fads, which are often confused with genuine advances. As an example, there was the boom of childbirth painkillers, which backfired with soaring rates of complications associated with lack of oxygen to the baby’s brain. Mothers and babies are not exposed to infections or illnesses present in hospitals.