Birth Is Not A Medical Condition
 The miracle of birth creates babies, changes women into mothers, and turns individuals into families. Being born and, in turn, giving birth are the most transformative and miraculous events human beings experience. Yet in our society the medical profession and the ‘ eliminate all risk ‘ brigade have turned the experience of birth into a technological and medical event experienced by most families. In the USA Currently, 50% of babies born in the United States and the rest of the English speaking world are surgically delivered from their mothers' bodies. Another 30% are born to mothers who are numb from the waist down and tangled in a web of tubes and wires. Worst of all is that the rate of Cesarean section in the UK, Canada, and United States, has more than quadrupled in the past 30 years, with no corresponding improvement in neonatal outcomes – c-sections simply do not help to improve mortality rates, in fact they make them worse. Every expectant family desires the safest possible passage through birth for both mother and child. When it comes to birth, most western families equate "safe" with the sterile, closely monitored, technological environment of the hospital. These families may be shocked to learn that giving birth in a "sterile" medical environment designed to monitor and control the birth process does not improve the quality or safety of birth. Despite all of this birthing technology and intervention, the US, Canada & the UK maintains one of the highest rates of maternal and neonatal mortality among all developed nations, Holland has one of the lowest.
Home Birth Is Safest For Low Risk Factor Pregnancies.
 In fact, study after study conducted on the issue has shown that for healthy women with low- to moderate-risk pregnancies, giving birth in a hospital is actually less safe than giving birth at home with a trained midwife. So perhaps this is a major factor in the mortality rates. A particularly large Dutch study so comprehensively endorsed home birth for low risk and even many medium risk mothers that the the declined in home birth has been arrested and is now march towards 50%.
A great many studies throughout the westernized world support these findings. No study has ever proven hospital birth to be safer than planned, midwife-attended homebirth.
Most women innately choose to move around during labor, finding the most comfortable positions in which to give birth. At a home birth, midwives encourage such position changes and a woman's freedom of movement is limited only by the size of her house and yard. Licensed midwives also offer their clients the choices of laboring and birthing in water, delivering their babies with their own hands, or having the father/partner catch. After birthing at home, mother and infant may bond without interruption. A comprehensive newborn examination is done right on the family bed next to the mother. Home birth also allows for greater sibling involvement in the birth process, in our extended family siblings, cousins even, are brought along to watch the birth, this may well help to explain the strong bond within our family.
The familiar comfort of home makes it the safest birthplace for healthy, low-risk women. In the safety of their own homes, women are less likely to experience complications of labor, such as hypertension and muconium staining, which may be brought on by stress. The freedom to move about as desired decreases both length of labor and the need for pain medications, therefore lowering the risk of maternal exhaustion, fetal distress, and caesarean section. Whereas a woman's home usually contains only microbes to which she and her baby are immune due to daily exposure, where as hospitals are full of disease-causing microbes, many of which are resistant to most antibiotics.
The Dutch Experience
 We have conducted trials and studies all over Holland, but here I will take the Northern region's perinatal mortality survey as an example as it is very representative. The Northern Region of Holland reports 134 perinatal losses in 3466 births outside the hospital, about four times the number of losses in hospital births. At first sight this seems to endorse the view that hospital is the safest place to deliver. But 97% (131) of these perinatal deaths at home were recorded in women who were actually booked for a hospital delivery or had no prearranged plan for delivery. The perinatal outcome in planned home births was better than for all women giving birth in the region - a result in line with Swiss and other Dutch findings also reported. This supports the safety of home birth provided it is offered to women at low risk of obstetric complications. Most perinatal deaths occur in women with health or obstetric problems that existed before or developed during pregnancy, and these women can be identified and referred before the onset of labor.
To put this into plain figures, of 3333 planned home births in Holland's northern region there were 3 deaths, this is a mortality rate of one tenth of just 1 %. This is one quarter of the mortality rate found in hospital births
Read More: the Dutch Way Of Birth Read More: The Rights Of Birth
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We are pleased to say that in Continental Europe the Doula was never completely squeezed out of existence, but even so many people do not know what a Doula is. The word, "doula," comes from the Greek word for the most important female slave or servant in an ancient Greek household, the woman who probably helped the lady of the house through her childbearing. The word has come to refer to a woman experienced in childbirth who provides continuous physical, emotional, and informational support to the mother before, during and just after childbirth.
Photo left: Me standing alongside me. Our children wanted to keep tracking of their little sister as she grew inside me and so on their height wall we let the children draw around me every few weeks.