If you want to start a fight at the next party you go to, bring up birthing politics.  Hospital or Home.  Drug-Free or Epidural.  Birth Tub or Stirrups.  But not so long ago, there was only one option.  It was called, Your Doing This Now, Whether You Want To or Not.

I have no problem stating my personal preference for a natural, drug-free, non-hospitalized birth.  The scientific and statistical evidence supports that, if all goes well, this is the ultimate in “healthy” experience for the mother and child.

One of the biggest supporting arguments of natural and non-hospital births is that the birthing process is a instinctual and natural event, happening for hundreds of thousands of years without outside aid.   This is true.  But there are many additional things the hunter-and-gathering mother were also doing that prepared the delivering muscles much better.

Looking back a hundred years, the birth-induced mortality rates (of both baby and mother) of non-industrialized civilizations were more favorable than rates of births happening in city areas.  Medical journal articles from the 1800s were looking at this fact back even back then!  Why were women who lived in the larger, industrialized areas of London having such a difficult time birthing than Gypsy women and Tinkers?  The populations without medical intervention fared better (less death and cranial deformity in babies and less death or injury in the mothers) than those with the advantages of surgeons, antibiotics, and a more sterile environment.  Why?