Home birth SHOULD be a comfortable and safe option for Americans. It isn’t yet, and here’s why.

Now of course this piece will create a storm of feces on the interwebz, so here’s the full interview I did with pediatrician Dr. Blair Duddy that dives into the details. Supporters on Facebook and Patreon can get continuing education credit for that show (instructions in the post).

It should be noted: we SUCK at keeping mothers safe even in our hospitals in the US. So this is NOT about medical hubris when it comes to birth (a “natural” process); we have a long way to go in this country to catch up with the rest of the developed world. It’s about improving safety, training, and outcomes.

Check out the original Facebook video here and leave your thoughts and comments. If you’re running short on bandwidth and phone battery life, you can listen to the optimized audio-only podcast version here on iTunes and Soundcloud. Please subscribe and leave a review, it helps us a lot! The podcast is now available on Spotify as well, spread the word! FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

 

 

 

– Hey, what’s up, ZPac. It’s your boy ZDoggMD. Okay, check it out. First of all, if you haven’t become a supporter yet, why not? It helps us do all this, you get private one on ones with me and CME credit for an episode like we did with Dr. Blair Duddy talking about home delivery and the risks and benefits thereof.

I wanna summarize that one here because it’s so important to quickly make this statement, which is home delivery, delivering a baby at home, works really well in Europe and the reason is they have certified midwives that are actually nurse midwives that are very well trained, they have systems and processes that keep people close to hospitals and a very good integrated system that allows the care to be delivered when things go wrong. Guess what we don’t have in the United States? Any of that.

And I’m telling you right now that I would never allow my own family or people that I love to deliver outside of a hospital setting in the United States. Why? Because there is an excess risk of one death per 1,000 deliveries when you do that. Why?

Partially because some of the people delivering at home are not qualified to deliver babies at home and I’m talking about certified professional midwives. These individuals, depending on your state, have minimal training compared to a certified nurse midwife or an obstetrician. And they often don’t know what they don’t know and we have seen, as clinicians, deaths and disabilities, cerebral palsy, anoxic brain injury, from mistakes that these people have made in the home. And this is all because people have this sense that if I deliver in the home, I’m less likely to get a C-section, I’m less likely to have all these medical interventions that could be harmful and I’m gonna have an amazing experience that’s gonna be this beautiful thing and everybody wants to be at home.

Hey, I’m sympathetic to all of that. But the truth is when the shit hits the fan and things go wrong and you’re at home, you are going to wish, and I have had mothers who have lost babies message me with a picture of them with a dead baby in their hand after they’ve delivered at home from some incompetent quack of an untrained, non-nurse midwife at home, responsible for the death of this baby and you can see on the mother’s face the regret, you can see it there. Why would you put yourself through that?

Deliver the baby in a hospital. You can do your research, you can pick the hospital, pick the obstetrician, make sure you have your birth plan, pick a nurse midwife or an obstetrician that you like, that’s great. Don’t do it at home in this country, unless your home is a hospital. And that’s my advice, simple as that. Hit share. If you disagree, I don’t care, you’re wrong. All right, we’re out.