Two of my 3 daughters were born at home with midwives, as were 2 of my grandchildren. In fact, the midwives who delivered my youngest daughter also delivered those two grandchildren, many years later, which is kind of cool.
I won’t say it was some “beautiful” experience, with soft music and candlelight or anything, although there were friends with me who made the time pass easily, made food, and kept me as comfortable as possible, cracking jokes between contractions and so on - I had long, painful labors, but there were no complications or any reason for me to be in a hospital, and once the baby was born, it was great to be sleeping in my own bed with my new baby in my own home.
Midwifery in Canada is a great option, and they don’t just do home births- as I mentioned, they have hospital privileges and are part of the medical system. So my oldest daughter, who isn’t a risk taker at all, had midwife-assisted births in the hospital. There was no need for a doctor to be in attendance, although of course they were available should it have been necessary. Midwives just tend to intervene as little as possible, whereas doctors may not be as patient with long labors, or women who don’t handle the pain well, and want to hurry them along by giving a woman some drugs or suggesting a caesarean when there’s really no medical necessity for it.
When I had my first home birth, after about 30 hours of pain, I was whining, “I want some drugs, I want to go to the hospital.” My midwife said calmly, “I know it’s painful, but the baby isn’t in any distress, so how about we wait a little longer and if you still want to go to the hospital in a couple hours, we can decide then.” I was so grateful to her for that- my daughter was born only 2 or 3 hours later, all was fine.
That birth happened in a tipi I was living in. My newborn baby spent the first hour of her life staring into the fire in the firepit in the middle of the tipi, mesmerized, before she fell asleep. That was pretty magical and certainly wouldn’t have happened in a hospital.
