Third Time's the Charm

By Christina Wypijewska
Issue 129 March - April 2005

After laboring at a birth center and in a car, this mom finally found her way to birthing at home.

Every woman should have the opportunity to . . . give birth as she wishes in an environment in which she feels nurtured and secure, and her emotional well-being, privacy, and personal preferences are respected.

—Coalition for Improving Maternity Services

My water broke one sunny afternoon—a week before the due date for our third child. Not knowing quite what to expect, I realized that our family was about to experience something truly sacred. While anticipating the onset of labor contractions, my husband, Martin, and I made some phone calls to family and checked the supply list to make sure we had everything we needed for our long-awaited homebirth. Although we didn’t realize it, we had been planning for this day for more than six years. The natural births of our first two children had allowed us to fully experience the calm of a freestanding birth center and the frenzy of an emergency birth on the side of a highway. Despite the obvious differences, both events taught us the importance of balancing the need to be knowledgeable with the need to surrender to the power of birth. The lessons we learned from the combined experiences gave us the courage to choose a homebirth in a culture that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to do so.

Our journey began with the birth of our first child, Maya. Martin and I prided ourselves on being informed healthcare consumers, and we knew that we wanted to be significantly involved in all the major decisions facing us. We were strongly committed to the idea of receiving continual support during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and we believed that midwifery care could help protect us against unnecessary medical interventions such as routine episiotomy, continuous electronic fetal monitoring, or artificial induction of labor. Although we were determined to find a midwife, we didn’t know much about choices of birthplaces and assumed that we would have a hospital birth.

We learned that our insurance provided full coverage for BirthCare & Women’s Health—a group of certified nurse-midwives operating a freestanding birth center and homebirth practice. As we set out to learn more about where we should have our baby, we discovered that for healthy women with low-risk pregnancies, planned births in birth centers and at home are just as safe as, if not safer than, hospital births. Indeed, hospitals often have policies that encourage interventions or that restrict movement—factors that may actually complicate normal labor. During our first visit with one of the midwives at BirthCare, we learned that it had a rigorous screening process. Even after being accepted as a patient, my health would be carefully monitored throughout the entire pregnancy. For problems that might arise, the midwives work with backup physicians and are sometimes required to transfer patients to the nearest hospital. They also are trained to carry out emergency procedures. Because of their thorough, skilled, and comprehensive care, they demonstrated low rates of medical interventions and had superb birth outcomes. We were convinced that birth outside a hospital was safe, supportive, and far more appropriate for us. In the end, although we saw little difference between homebirth and the birth center, we felt more comfortable choosing to have our baby at the center, primarily because we were first-time parents living in a rented city apartment.

During the pregnancy, we looked forward to our prenatal visits and became true partners in our own care. The visits were never rushed, and the midwives took time to answer all our questions. We also educated ourselves with stacks of reading material and 12 weeks of Bradley childbirth classes, but nothing could prepare me for the intensity of becoming a mother. Although labor progressed smoothly and according to the stages outlined in the Bradley workbook, there was nothing ordinary about Maya’s birth. Every event of that night is forever etched into my mind.

Soon after the contractions began, in the middle of the night, they became regular and progressively stronger. By the time I could no longer tolerate any distractions, we had decided to drive out to the birth center to meet the midwife. Because the only comfortable position for me was kneeling on all fours, the 20-minute drive from Washington, DC, to Virginia was surprisingly difficult. We arrived at the birth center at 5:00 a.m.—just three and a half hours after the first contraction. We were the only ones there, and the midwife gave us the space we needed to progress. At first I spent a lot of time sitting on the toilet, flushing my body of the Thanksgiving dinner from the previous day—uncomfortable but necessary. Eventually, the midwife suggested that I climb into the bathtub to ease the pain. This was something we hadn’t considered ahead of time, but laboring in the bathtub was remarkable. The warm water enveloped my aching body, providing the necessary relief and support.

I labored in the soothing water until the very end, when I felt the need to climb into bed for some much-needed rest. As soon as my head hit the pillow, however, I was overcome with a force so powerful that I lost myself to something greater than any of us in that room. I was surprised that the loud moaning I heard was coming from somewhere deep inside me. Although I didn’t know it, I learned from the midwife that my body was finally pushing the baby out. As she placed warm compresses against my perineum to encourage stretching, she let my body lead the way.