What I Learned After Covid-Crazed Hospital Rules Drove Me To Try A Home Birth

In the aftermath of the coronavirus, a record number of women are choosing to give birth at home — myself included.

Numbers released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month showed the number of home-born babies hit a 31-year high between 2020 and 2021, jumping from 45,646 to 51,642, an increase of 12 percent. The last time they were so high was in 1990, around the time the Bradley Method, a book advocating husband-coached childbirth and more natural approaches to labor and delivery, was at its peak of popularity since publication in the 1970s. 

Experts are saying this spike is Covid-induced. The increase in home births is the result of “an overwhelmed health system,” according to Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This drew women away from over-filled hospitals to avoid the risk of catching Covid, he told the Washington Times. 

“This is another recognition that we need to do better to assure one public health action does not impact others,” Dr. Galiatsatos added. 

Which is to say that an increase in home births is concerning, a failure of the medical establishment to do its job, and something, ultimately, to be remedied. I think it’s actually the opposite. 

I became pregnant with my daughter, our first child, at the tail end of 2021. While the pandemic was technically over by that point, both in spirit and in truth, as my husband and I searched for the right provider with which to establish prenatal care, we found that in hospitals in Northern Virginia, Covid was still running things.

At 20 weeks of pregnancy, we were told by our provider that my husband could not join me for the anatomy ultrasound, “due to the ongoing pandemic.” This, for those who are unfamiliar, is the scan at which most parents learn the sex of their unborn child; it is the time when the technician carefully counts fingers and toes and parents get to watch the little baby rolling around in her mother’s belly for the first time up close. It is, for many, a rite of passage in the pregnancy, and for us as first-time parents, a moment we had been anticipating for weeks. 

It was at this moment that we began to think about a home birth. Not because we were afraid of overcrowded hospitals, but because we were learning that pandemic regulations were still being held above all else: even familial bonds, even trust in the mother to decide how to respond to various risks to her and her baby. We found a midwife, bought some books, joined a birth class, and started to plan to have our baby in our two-bedroom apartment.

What we learned in the process was eye-opening. Hospital births in America are associated with an abnormally high rate of delivery via Caesarean surgery — 32 percent in the United States, versus 21 percent worldwide. While the Caesarean procedure is lifesaving in certain circumstances, as a major surgery it poses

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