Birth Your Way:
Choosing Birth at Home or in a Birth Centre

As research discloses the risks of intensively managed hospital birth, increasing numbers of women are considering home birth. This book brings them the facts.

Photography by Marcia May

Published by Dorling Kindersley
28th February 2002
Format 190x235mm; approx 208 pp; approx 55 b&w photographs.

With information about

The Safety of Home Birth - includes research results into outcomes of over 24,000 home births
Children at Birth - ideas about how to prepare your children for birth
Waterbirth - reports on research into over 4000 waterbirth babies British Medical Journal
Aromatherapy - reports research into the effects of aromatherapy in more than 8,000 births Aromatherapy
How to Handle Pain - includes side-effects of drugs

Sheila Kitzinger says,

"Many more women want home births than are ever able to get them because massive obstacles are put in their way. They're made to feel guilty, as if it's a self-indulgence that can harm their babies."

Hospitals are now competing with each other to provide 'birthing rooms' and 'home-from-home' rooms. All too often this is a cosmetic exercise. A woman is moved across the corridor when labour does not conform to the norm or is going on a long time. Then she gets the full high-tech package. And the evidence that, for most babies, this is of any benefit is very shaky.

It is only at home that a woman can control the environment in which she gives birth.

Sheila says,

"She's usually on other people's ground and they make the decisions. They may give her full information and tell her exactly what they are going to do, may involve her and be very kind, but it's not the same thing. You can dress up a room in a hospital with pretty curtains and a patchwork quilt on the bed and call it a birth room but if a woman isn't able to control the space then it's more like a motel."

Home birth is not for everybody. When a woman goes into premature labour or if she has pre-eclampsia, for example, hospital is safest. Yet even when labour is prolonged and stressful home is often the best place to be. The woman who is dilating slowly, for instance, can keep on the move or take a nap, comfortable in her own bed.

Sheila says,

"What she doesn't need is a group of doctors and midwives anxiously hovering over her and watching for something to happen. Can you imagine how it would be if anybody did that while you were making love? It would hardly be a satisfying experience. It would be very inhibiting. Yet this is done over and over again to women in labour. "

In this book Sheila Kitzinger shows how saying no to hospital, making an informed decision to give birth in a place of our own choosing is for most of us the only way to reclaim the experience of childbirth for women.