Does anyone plan an emergency home birth? Actually there are a few pregnant women who want a homebirth but plan a hospital birth but wait at home to the last moment to leave and end up with an emergency home birth. It is sort of unfair to call any unexpected homebirth an ’emergency’. An emergency implies something is drastically wrong. In fact most ’emergency’ , unplanned home births are straight forward and easy births.
However, if the birthing mother and father do not have the good birth and coaching skills then they can become unnecessarily afraid of their unplanned home delivery … so sad really.
Most women would give their eye tooth to have an easy birth. You probably can’t even imagine having an unexpected and unplanned homebirth. The thought conjures up in your mind … ‘I’m going to birth alone’. That terrifies many, many pregnant women. Here are two things to think about:
- No matter where you birth you, alone, are doing the activity. When you are skilled you are more capable of managing, dealing with, handling, coping, staying on top of and in control throughout your birth.
- When you are skilled and have an unexpected home birth you will never be afraid because being skilled keeps you focused, conscious, able to discern whether there is really a problem and settling down to ‘do’ the birth rather than feeling frantic.
Here’s a Birthing Better birth story of an unexpected, unplanned home birth.
‘We had the bags packed, a car full of gas, grandma and grandpa lined up to babysit so at the slightest sign we’d head off to the hospital. Well, Life can throw a curveball now and again. My wife woke up in the middle of the night saying to me ‘I feel weird’. I asked ‘how weird?’ She said ‘Just weird’.
What does that mean? In hindsight, I know. 20 minutes later she said ‘I think I’m pushing’. I said ‘Pushing what?’ She said ‘I’M PUSHING?’ I said ‘No don’t do that?’ She said ‘Get down there.’
I’d say at this point my mind did several things at once. ‘Am I prepared for this?’ ‘Yes, I have the skills I didn’t have at our daughter’s birth 3 years earlier’. I never thought ‘What should I do?’ Once it was clear our baby was coming, my ability to work with my wife clicked in. That wasn’t hard, our daughter didn’t take long to slip out with us laughing the whole time.
How surprised everyone was the next morning to find all three of us all in bed grinning from ear to ear. My suggestion to all dads … become skilled then you’ll never fall short inside yourself and certainly not in the eyes of the woman you love.’
An unplanned and unexpected homebirth is interesting because this type of birth is much like the story of ‘women who birth by the side of the rice paddy’. That’s an unplanned and unexpected birth as well. No woman plans to birth by the side of a rice paddy any more than a modern woman plans to birth in the back of a taxi or in the parking lot of hospital. Instead of feeling afraid you might become skilled in case. Fear is not what you should be feeling. Confident, capable and skilled is what you should strive for no matter the type of birth you have.
All Birthing Better skills were developed by hundreds of dads and moms and used in absolutely every type of birth. Birthing Better online birthing classes are housed in Common Knowledge Trust.