"Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't." ~Eleanor Roosevelt
I promised tips on how to tell your family that you're going to be having a birth center or home birth. In researching this topic, I asked on several message boards how other mothers had told their families and got overwhelmingly the same response... They didn't. Not exactly the answer I was hoping for. About the most helpful advice anyone had was to have your family watch The Business of Being Born or Pregnant in America on Netflix.
Whether or not you choose to tell your family is, of course, entirely up to you. If you should choose to do so, understand that it is not your job to change their minds about birth. Try not to get your feelings hurt if they're upset and repeat after me - "My body. My baby. My birth."
In the event that your family decides to do a little research of their own, they're bound to run into "Doctor" Amy Tuteur. Henci Goer says it best:
"Ahh, I see you have run across Amy Tuteur, our very own Bill O’Reilley of the birth world. Like him, her intent is to steamroller you; any overlap with the facts in her rants is strictly coincidental."
Dr. Amy's goal in life is to trash homebirth. There is actually some question (read quite a lot of discussion) about whether or not all the things posted by "Dr. Amy" are actually made by her. Regardless, her medical license expired in 2003, so she is no longer a doctor.
A few quick facts about childbirth in America that you could point out - Maternity care in the US is abysmal. In the World Health Organisation 2010 World Health Statistics report, the US ranked 34th in maternity mortality, 38th in neonatal mortality and 41st in infant mortality. The average price tag to have a baby was significantly higher than in all other countries reporting. Every country reporting better maternal and infant outcomes have a higher percentage of births attended by midwives as opposed to obstetricians. If that isn't reason enough not to birth at a hospital, I don't know what is.
