I’m working on writing out a detailed birth story of James’ birth, but if I make it as detailed as I want to, it will be rather long. So, in order to keep me from sitting here writing for hours when I should be paying attention to my sweet baby, as well as spare my readers who don’t have time to sit down and read a ten page story, I’m going to steal an idea from Katherine and write it in installments. Here is the first part, about decisions we made during pregnancy.

Our birth story starts just three months into our marriage, when we discovered we were pregnant. We had hoped to start our family soon, and so we were thrilled. It has always been very important to me to birth my children with as few interventions as possible, both for the health and safety of me and the baby, and in order to bring our children into the world peacefully. After years of research, I had become convinced that giving birth at home, barring any serious health problems or complications, was the safest manner in which to give birth (see here and here for more studies). This is especially true for us, as we hope to have many children, and the interventions that are so common in the hospital would be dangerous to mess with when one hopes on giving birth to six or more children. Our primary goal in the delivery was to avoid a c-section and to avoid the circumstances that lead to a c-section, and it was clear to us that a home birth the best way to accomplish that (hospitals have a 30-40% c-section rate here, while homebirth midwives are usually less than 5%).

We eventually settled on a midwifery practice that had delivered all three of our friends’ babies at home. One of the two midwives was one of the faculty I worked with at the School of Nursing, where I had just started doing administrative work for the Women’s Health and Midwifery Program. I had a very easy pregnancy, with almost none of the normal discomforts of pregnancy until near the end, when I had hip pain and sciatica. I walked into work every day until about 36 weeks.

The only concern was erratic high blood pressure, which my midwife, Janet, was keeping a very close eye on. High blood pressure can be a sign of impending pre-ecclampsia, so she did frequent tests to look for any signs of things going downhill. Every one of my labs came back perfect. However, at about 36 weeks she became concerned enough about the blood pressure alone that she said that if it didn’t come down, we would have to deliver at the hospital. We were really upset at this prospect, and so, with Janet’s encouragement, we decided to make some changes to keep it down, including having me immediately quit my job. So I spent the last weeks of pregnancy at home, laying down as much as possible, and doing all kinds of crazy things like eating watermelon and cucumbers every day, munching on raw garlic, drinking tons of water and concoctions of cream of tarter and lemon juice. I would also go to the pool with my midwife and stay in the water for hours. Maybe it is all a placebo effect, but my blood pressure went down significantly, and our home birth plans seemed feasible.

To be continued. . . .