My Illegal Home Birth
Giving birth at home was weird, magical — and a felony.
by Madeline Holler
June 23, 2008
First, we wanted to know how to dispose of the placenta.
"Most of my moms bury them," the midwife said. "Placentas are great
fertilizer."
My husband Wayne and I rented the upstairs apartment in a two-unit
block. Our fenced-in yard served mainly as a dog run for the downstairs
neighbor's chocolate Labrador, who I doubted could leave a decomposing
organ to rot underground. I pictured the playful pup yanking at my
umbilical cord, a one-sided tug-of-war game whipping placenta through
the air and snagging bits of human tissue on the bristly bushes lining
the fence. "Can't we just throw it away? We're moving a few months after
I have the baby."
"Freeze it and move it with you," the midwife offered, not hearing our
reluctance to dote over the very flesh and blood that nourished and
connected our baby to me. Wayne and I are as
unsentimental as we are squeamish. A placenta in the freezer was
equivalent to nail clippings in a Ziploc, only more nauseating.
Wayne and I were on the verge of making what felt like an impractical,
if not reckless, decision: giving birth to our second child at home. I
had come to prefer midwives to doctors during my first pregnancy, but
the laws in Missouri, where we moved from the East Coast the year
before, kept midwives out of hospital delivery rooms.
Through an underground network of women and families across the state we
found Alice [ed. note: this piece uses pseudonyms], a trained and experienced midwife.
Seated on her living room sofa, eight weeks pregnant and yet to have an
initial prenatal exam, I worked through a list of questions about the
logistics, safety, cost and outcomes of pregnancy and birth in her care.
Alice had been a midwife for twenty years.
"You can't be arrested," Alice said. "But I could."
She had seen it all: cords
wrapped around necks, preemies, breech deliveries, stuck shoulders,
twins, babies born weeks beyond their due dates, stillborns, newborns
needing resuscitation, rapidly detaching placentas, the occasional
uterus following the baby and placenta out of the mother. Her clients
included the obese and the underfed, women in their forties and those in
their late teens. She had attended the birth of a couple who were
themselves a pediatrician and an obstetrician.
We liked Alice and her hands-off style. She would not break the amniotic
fluid sac before or during labor. She did not perform cervical exams
routinely. She did not cut episiotomies. Weight gain did not concern
her, so long as the mother ate a healthy diet. Due dates helped gauge
fetal development and size, Alice said, but they were not deadlines. She
spewed out facts, illustrated with anecdotes and sometimes even pulled
out photographs. She was easy to talk to, relatable, more like a
nurturing big sister than the dowdy earth mother homebirther I had expected.
She told us a third of her $1,500 fee was required up front, the rest to
be paid at each month's visit. Prenatal check-ups were at her house and
included urine tests, blood pressure checks and weigh-ins. She charted
belly growth and listened to fetal heartbeats after twelve weeks. Her
intelligence, self-assurance and friendly openness tempted Wayne and me.
Still, we felt reluctant.
Wayne caved in first and asked what had been on our minds since we
scheduled the interview.
"What about the police?" he said. "Could we be arrested?" In Missouri,
midwife-assisted homebirth is illegal — a felony.
"You can't be arrested," Alice said. "But I could."
I laid a check on her coffee table.
©2008 Madeline Holler and Babble
About the Author
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Madeline Holler is a writer and mother of two. She lives in Long Beach, California. |
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