My thoughts on Christianity and birth control

(This is another old one I thought I'd repost here.) =)

A few reasons why I personally don't think children are to be avoided (as per biblical logic):
1) A matter of trust. We claim that we are supposed to trust God with our lives. That means jobs, finances, relationships, our housing, education, futures, everything. Why then do we tell God to keep His incompetent hands off our reproduction?
*Disclaimer: If we are going to trust our childbearing to God, I believe we need to do it the way God designed it to work. That means extended, on-demand breastfeeding, tandem or even 3 at-a-time breast feeding, following God's instructions regarding sex (aka, not outside of marriage, not for the designated time following the birth of a child (40 days for a son, 80 days for a daughter as per Lev 12), not the week of nor the week after a woman’s period as per Lev 15:19-28, etc). Not using any form of birth control but not following God’s guidelines either is kinda like a person who bought a really nice computer and said “I like all the parts but not the mouse” then wondered why the computer didn’t work as beautifully as the sales person said it would. If you want to use the thing the way it was made to work, you have to use it the way it was made to function.
2) A matter of God’s competence vs. man’s competence. I have heard several people (including my own brother) say something to the effect of “It’s a good thing we’ve come up with ways to limit the amount of children we have because God sure messed that one up!”
3) God’s concept of what children are. In the Bible I have found countless verses saying that children are a blessing. I have yet to find any verses saying that we need to be careful not to let God bless us too much. In fact, just to emphasize how much we have come to despise God’s view of ‘blessings’ let us consider credit cards. The Bible calls dept a curse and children a blessing. Yet we American Christians choose to file for dept and carefully limit our number of children. My Bible says something about “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” And to be honest, I never noticed the “and you children” part till I looked it up just now to put it here. =)
4) God’s concept of how many children we should or should not have. My Bible is filled with quotes like “fill the whole earth,” “go forth and multiply,” etc. I haven’t found any that say “be careful not to over populate the earth” or “don’t have more children than you can easily support and feed” or “don’t have too many children or you won’t be able to spend time with them all.”
*Disclaimer: There are stories in the Bible of people who had dozens, even hundreds of children. However, they also had dozens (or hundreds) of wives. My Bible says that men shouldn’t have more than one wife. I think that following that advice should serious reduce the chances of a person having a couple dozen children.
5) The matter of who opens the womb. My Bible talks of God being the one who opens and closes the womb, not people. There are stories of women trying to affect their own fertility and stories of women asking God to give them children. (Guess which women had children?) If we have given God control of our lives, why don’t we think He’ll do it?
*Disclaimer: Having pregnancies involving multiple is very difficult, both the pregnancy/birth part AND the caring for several toddles at the same time. Historically, multiples were not as common as they are now since the introduction of fertility drugs, etc. Once again, if we weren’t trying to play God over our fertility, this challenge wouldn’t be so common.
*Counter Disclaimer: Biblically, people lived together in community. If a family had twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc, there were neighbors, friends, aunts, uncles, and cousins living with them to help out. Families were not left to take care of themselves by themselves. Also, the average age a child nursed to was 5. This put lots of space between children and meant that the next baby didn’t arrive until the previous baby was old enough to be a helper.

A few things I am NOT saying:
1) I do not believe that children are something to be collected like baseball cards. They are human beings who have thoughts, feelings, and deserve respect. (I am not part of the "Quiver Full" movement.)
2) I do not think that a person’s faith should be measured ONLY by whether or not they trust God with their fertility. Everyone has their own struggles. If you struggle in an area I don’t, there’s a good chance I struggle in an area you don’t.
3) I’m not advising all Christians to hop off what ever form of birth control they are currently using. I am advising Christians to take a long look at what they are doing to control their reproduction and to ask themselves: “Why am I doing this? What do I believe about God’s role here? What do I believe about myself and the abilities God has given me?” etc…
4) I am not telling anyone who is not a Christian to follow Christian principles. I do not expect anyone to follow the dictates of a religion they do not believe in. That would be silly. =)

Abortion and Personhood

(I wrote this years ago but since this is now my "opinion" blog I figured I'd post it here too.) :)

A few thoughts related to abortion: When does one person have the right to harm another?

• Personhood

  1. Most people supporting abortion do not base their definition of “personhood” on whether or not a fetus is human. Their definition depends on a human’s stage of development.

     1. I have heard pro-choice individuals argue that the product of a human womb is not actually human but is in fact a maggot or fish, etc. (Yes I have actually heard this argument used.) I take the liberty of assuming that anyone replying to this post does, in fact believe that the contents of a human womb, those contents that eventually grown into people, are, even in their not-so-human looking forms, still genetically human. If you disagree, please say so up front so as to avoid confusion.

  2. Most people opposing abortion base their definition of a “person” on the species that the fetus/zygote/etc is. In this case, a human is a “person” from the moment that that human has its own unique DNA, aka, conception.

  3. Personhood is a concept, or label, not a scientific definition or developmental stage. Thus far, there is not a test or procedure currently employed to discover the “personhood” of an individual. There are merely opinions based on beliefs. (These beliefs may or may not have supporting evidence to back their stand and that applies to beliefs on both sides of the argument.)

• Rights of a person

  1. Most people agree that one person’s rights stop when another person’s rights are infringed upon.

  2. The debate over terminating a pregnancy rages on because “personhood” has not culturally been accredited to humans pre-birth. (I use the term “pre-birth” to mean any and every stage between conception and birth. I am aware that there is some debate among pro-choice individuals as to when abortions should be preformed, ie: not after quickening, not once gestation has reached the third trimester, not once a fetus reaches viability, etc. I am lumping all those people into one group since they all share the belief that there is a developmental point prior to which humans are not “people” and should not be afforded rights.)

  3. If I were to advocate the right of a mother to terminate her offspring post-birth, I doubt I would be taken seriously by the majority of the population in the US since we, culturally, have given post-birth humans the status of “personhood.”

  4. “My body, my choice” makes sense as long as there are no other bodies (people) involved. Men in our country do not have the right to use their bodies to rape. This would be their choice infringing on another person. As long as the “personhood” of pre-birth humans is debated, there will be doubt as to whether or not a woman’s choice to abort her offspring pre-birth involves another person. (As per argument #1, I believe we all agree that the contents of a human womb are human, we disagree as to whether or not that human is a “person.”)

• Consequences of denying personhood to specific groups of humans: (I know we are a far cry from most of these, but it’s a slippery slope, denying person hood.)

  1. Slavery denied the personhood of blacks claiming that while they were human, they were a lesser form of humanity.

     1. Many people who are against abortion think this sounds remarkably similar to denying rights to pre-birth humans.

  2. The holocaust began by denying personhood to the “undesirable” members of society. They began by removing individuals that were a burden to society and did not contribute, ie the handicapped, the mentally retarded, etc and from there moved on to other “undesirable” people groups.

     1. Currently American doctors are already pressuring parents whose pregnancy involves a human with down syndrome to abort.

Any thoughts, comments, concerns? Brilliant insights are welcome! ;-)

The Fear of Birth (Part 1 of 3)

There are many reasons why women fear birth and labor and I'd like to go over some of the basics. There's the way movies show a soon-to-be mother screaming and writhing (add to that the deliberate scare tactics that sex ed is pushing in an attempt to reduce teen pregnancy), there's the history of birth that saw many women die in childbirth, there is the medical community's attitude that birth is something women can't do on their own and need professional help with, there's the mistrust we have of our bodies in general compounded by all the specific times our bodies have let us down, and then there is the plain old fear of the unknown.

First, a movie's goal is not to educate or to give an accurate portrayal of labor, the goal is to entertain and get good reviews. But the knowledge that a movie scene is not actually the way things happen doesn't remove the image from our minds. Also, knowing that our bodies are not the barely pubescent ones the sex ed adds are targeting doesn't really do much to ease our fears either. The truth is, I have yet to find one consistent source that portrays labor and delivery in a positive light. This bugs the snot out of me. I am NOT the only person I know of who has had a very satisfying birth experience. While I in no way believe that all births are wonderful, beautiful experiences, I am equally vehement that wonderful, beautiful births are possible. I feel like our culture believes that birth is heinous and anyone who says otherwise is cracked up. It's as if there was a culture whose only experience of sex was rape and I am trying to say that making love can be awesome.

Secondly, yes, many women died in childbirth. But, as it turns out, they were not dying when they gave birth at home with their midwife, women were dying in droves when birth was first moved to hospitals. This was before the discovery of germs. Doctors were quite literally giving pelvic exams to laboring women when they were fresh from doing a cadaver and had not washed their hands. As birth began to move from the care of midwives (who only attended laboring women and not sick people) to doctors (whose sole responsibility was visiting sick person after sick person), things really got bad. Women had every right to fear birth because they went into the hospital perfectly healthy, had a baby, and then became deathly ill or died. It made sense at the time that birth was to blame. But luckily germs were discovered and standards for hygiene were established and now doctors and hospitals are no longer the germ ridden harbingers they once were. (One of the things that facilitated this shift in caregivers was the popularity of witch hunts. Any wise old woman bearing herbs was obviously not to be trusted!) This was a very sad episode in the history of birth. The birthing knowledge that midwives had was lost to the mainstream as male doctors who had never given birth themselves, tried to figure out this crazy process and reinvent the wheel of delivery. They had the very best of intentions and wanted so much to help. And hospitals have come a LONG way in their care and treatment of laboring women, but they still have a long way to go in reclaiming the knowledge that they accidentally rejected so long ago. (A good book to read on the history of birth in America is Immaculate Deception II.) So yes, women used to die in childbirth. But it was not birth that was the problem.

The third fear, the idea that doctors are the authority on birth, not laboring women, makes a lot of sense once you understand the history of hospital birth in America. (At first, as doctors took over from midwives, many babies were still born at home. Even Lady and the Trap showed the Dr. leaving the home after delivering the baby.) When doctors first began taking over birth, American women wore corsets. Obviously, deforming a woman's body makes it hard for her to birth naturally. Plus pregnancy was not socially acceptable in public so women were confined to their rooms. These women were physically weak, misshapen, and as a result, unable to birth without interventions. They truly did need a doctor to deliver them! It didn't help that for hundreds of years people were clueless about prenatal health. Lots of things went wrong and so moving birth out of homes and into a hospital was a very logical step. Birth in America became a very surgical, sterile, cold and impersonal procedure. Even as recently as 50 years ago we had things like Twilight Sleep. (My grandmother was given this when she birthed my mother and aunts.) This drug puts a person into a semi-conscious state that, once they awake, they remembered nothing. Under this drug laboring woman became half crazed psychos who raged out of control. Their hands and legs were cuffed to the bed to keep them from harming themselves or the attending physician. Even though this is no longer the practice, the stigma that a woman in labor is no longer in her right mind has persisted. (In fact, I think a laboring woman is perhaps more in her right mind than normal! I have a theory that a woman's reproductive hormones are God's way of forcing us to tell the truth. When PMSing or in labor, women are known to bring up silly little things, crazy things, that bother them, things they would never mention normally, but I assert that even w/o the help of hormones these things still do bug us. We are just able to suppress it normally. There is evidence that shows emotional baggage can also stall labor. Once the soon-to-be mother gets the load off her chest (generally something related to her mother or husband) the labor picks up again. Crazy, huh?) Because doctors once WERE necessary and women once WERE crazy when they labored, it's been hard to replace these ideas now that things are no longer done the way they used to be.

The last two, the fear of our bodies letting us down and the fear of the unknown, I will tackle together. While our bodies might be fearfully and wonderfully made, we do live in a fallen world and things do go horribly wrong sometimes. In my opinion, the fear that our bodies are going to let us down, especially if they have in the past, is the most real fear since the other fears (IMO) are based on misinformation. So what's the accurate information? It is so important to educate yourself as much as possible on what a normal, natural birth is, the less interventions and interference the better. God could have thought up any way at all for new people to come into the world and this is what He picked. I personally believe He knows what He's doing. So, if you are armed with information and know the way your body is supposed to work you'll know when something is wrong. If you only focus on the stuff that can, and does go wrong, you'll be clueless when your body is doing it right. I've been told that reading any Ina May Gaskin book is wonderful in boosting one's faith in the female body's ability to birth. (I intend to get a couple of her books if and when #4 is on the way.) Ina May is probably THE authority on natural childbirth here in the US. But, since I have only read ABOUT her books and not actually read the books themselves I can't recommend any at this time. :) Reading about birth and familiarizing yourself with what is normal will also take away much of the fear of the unknown. It is true that there is no way to KNOW what giving birth feels like till you've done it, but you CAN know what to expect. That in and of itself can make it so much less scary.

So What's a Normal Birth? (Part 2 of 3)

So what's normal?

Well, for me, labor is amazingly intense. Contractions start out quite bearable but after a while they are not so easy but I think “pain” is the wrong word to describe them. Pain is your body telling you that something is wrong and should be stopped. Birth, in and of itself, isn't something gone wrong, and you should not make it stop. Did you know that in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam his punishment would be “toil” to bring forth fruit from the ground God used the same word for Eve's punishment? She would “toil” to bring forth fruit from the womb. Even God said birth is supposed to be hard work, not torture! While it is the hardest work I've ever done, it is work I am can do. In fact, I've done it thrice! Would you believe me if I told you that I'm looking forward to possibly doing it again someday? (Not preggers now, but we'd like a fourth someday.) =) Think of it like a runner's high. It's though at the end, but once you get through that supper hard part, it feels pretty cool.

Anyway, when my labor starts it is indistinguishable from Braxton Hicks (practice contractions). As the concentrations progressed I go deeper and deeper into concentration. For me it helped to visualize my uterus tight on top to press my baby's head against my cervix and relaxed at the base to allow my cervix to open. Birth requires an amazing amount of focus and concentration. Each concentration pulled me deeper into focus. It's interesting to know that your baby is not a passive participant in their birth either. Babies work; moving, wiggling, and turning into specific positions in order to make their way through the birth canal, it is a pretty tight fit after all! Thinking of my baby working with me also helped me focus.

One measure of how far Baby and I were progressing was how well I am able to carry on a conversation. I'd pause for contractions, but between I'd chat and laugh. I was able to do that while my body slowly progressed. Eventually I wouldn't be able to talk at all, labor took all my attention. Once it got to the point where I wasn't sure I could do it anymore, I wasn't enjoying it and I wanted it over with, usually meant that I had less than 10 minutes left. (My labors were 14 hours, 2 hours, and 6 hours.) As long as you are allowed to labor naturally at your own pace that “I give up!” feeling usually means you're basically done, as in transition is over, you are fully dilated, your baby has descended, and you're ready for birth.

It is common for the urge to push to feel like you need to poop. With Ian I rented a huge birthing tub and when I felt I had to go to the bathroom I'd hop out and run to the toilet. (Almost all births involve at least a little poop being squeezed out along with the baby and I wanted that tub kept clean!) However, once Ian was in position I mistook the urge and he was born in our tiny little half bathroom! (Turns out we can fit me, my husband, and 2 midwives in that little room!)

Crowning, when the baby's head begins to come out, is very different than labor. Instead of a deep intense pulling sort of pain, it is a sharp surface burning. If you want to avoid an episiotomy or tearing, make sure you take your time at this point. It turns out that just as the skin on male genitalia is able to stretch, so is a woman's genital skin! (Who's a thunk, right?) It's ok if the baby's head moves in and out slightly at this point. It's just stretching things gently so they won't tear and will be able to heal faster. Many people talk about “breathing” the head out since pushing the head out would be way too fast. I pushed with my first and needed a couple stitches, nothing bad though. With the next two I massaged my skin myself to help it stretch and then kind of rubbed it around the head. (Man, I hope this isn't TMI!) You can ask your midwife if she does perineal massage (it's medical name). :)

Once the head is out they tend to check to see if the cord is around the baby's neck. Bree's was around her neck and didn't have enough slack to pull it over the top of her head so the midwife held the cord in place and had me give one more push to get her shoulders out (her body just slipped out after that) and Bree slipped out through the cord.

Things to Conciser for Your Birth (Part 3 of 3)

A few things to concider:

When a baby is conceived it is a very private, very emotional, very bonding experience. A good birth will involve these things as well. The time and place where you bring your baby into the world needs to be a place you feel comfortable and safe. For some, that place is their home. Others would not feel safe at home and so they should not even conciser a homebirth. When you tour the birthing facility, not only get acquainted with it, but also get comfortable with it.

Go as drug-free as possible. In my opinion, drug-free is the best way to go. Alternative ways to cope with the pain include having your husband press on your hips- squeezing the top of your pelvis- also called the Bovine Squeeze since people stole the idea from laboring cows!, or laboring in a hot tub. (I've heard more than one person say that hot water is better than an epidural!) But my all time personal favorite pain managing technique is making out. No idea why, but when Nathan kissed me, any pain (there's that word again... can't think of a good alternative... unpleasant intensity?) just melted away. It was the weirdest sensation. I could feel the contraction begin, feel it building, then Nathan would start kissing me and it just melted. Again, I HIGHLY recommend that one! Other things that can help make birth more comfortable and relaxing are massage, bouncing on a birth ball, low lights, relaxing music, and soft scented candles.

Other benefits of going drug free are that you are better able to understand what your body is trying to tell you to do: walk, stand still, sway, moo, squat, pseudo belly dance, whatever. Sometimes bodies give some really weird instructions during labor, be sure you pay attention and are ready to go with whatever you and your baby need. Plus drug-free is so much better for the baby!! Any drug that makes its way into your bloodstream has, by default, also made it into your baby's bloodstream. The placenta holds nothing back. In this case that's a problem because once a drug is in your system your fabulous kidneys begin removing the drug immediately so your dose begins to be reduced almost on impact. However, a baby's kidneys still have a ways to go before they are able to function. Birth drugs have been found in babies' systems as late as one month after birth. I often wonder if birthing drugs are the reason so many people say their babies aren't very responsive till they're a month old. (All the brand new babies I've ever held were drug-free and pretty alert. But since I have no other babies to compare them to, my “alert” might be another persons' “unresponsive?”)

Get a Douala. A Douala is not a replacement for your husband, she is your personal, private birth guru to make sure you, your husband, and your baby are cared for in the way you want. Your husband is there to support you. A Douala is there to be your personal expert on all things birth. She is also there to interface with the staff. Remember, for the people who work there, this is their job. When they get up and go to work, this is what they do. If you want something that is uncommon (like walking while laboring, or not wanting the staff to mention an epidural, you know it's there, if you want one, you'll ask!) there's a chance the staff might forget and accidentally give you their “standard” birth. Your Douala will go over your birth plan with you, talk you through hospital protocol, and explain any hospital practices or policies that you have questions about. When you go into labor, she will meet you at the hospital and stay with you through your whole labor and delivery. Most are also trained to help facilitate breastfeeding (if you are planning on doing that.) Having that one same professional with you start to finish can be worth hiring a Douala, forget all the other awesome stuff they do! Hospital staffs are on a rotation and they go home when their shift is over. Your Douala can get the new nurse up to speed on your labor and your wishes without having to interrupt you and your progress. In case you haven't noticed, I am a huge fan of Doualas. They are even great for home birth. They provide a wealth of knowledge, a huge support (sometimes Dad needs someone to talk to during labor, “Is this normal? What's happening now? Are babies supposed to be that color?”) plus they are a friendly face who believes in you and in the birth process. =)

Ask for delayed cord clamping. This one is really hard to get doctors to do. Not because they don't want to but because it is such a habit and so hard to catch before it's already been done. All the blood in the cord and placenta is the baby's. As they are being born they are still relying on you for their food and oxygen. That means their blood has been leaving their body, traveling to you, then returning. When the cord is allowed to stop pulsating before it is clamped that means that the baby's body has stopped sending blood to the placenta. When a cord is clamped right away a baby loses a high enough percentage of their blood that it can make their recovery from birth more difficult that it needs to be. The other benefit to delayed cord clamping I got to see firsthand less than a week ago. My girlfriend had a baby that required resuscitation. When she was born she had no interest in breathing and it was a very scary minute? Five minutes? That they worked on her. However, her cord had not been clamped and so the whole time she was getting oxygen through her placenta, just as she had her whole life previous to that point. Her heart rate remained strong the whole time; she just didn't want to use her own lunges. Had her cord been clamped, she would have been without oxygen that whole time and would probably have ended up in the NICU, but, as it turned out, she just took a sec to catch her breath. Then she was fine. All thanks to delayed cord clamping. =)

Wipe off the eye goop they will put in your baby's eyes. It's done just in case you have gonorrhea as that can cause blindness if a baby gets it in their eyes during birth. If you and your husband have an exclusive relationship, you have zero risk of having gonorrhea. But since we live in such a promiscuous culture, birthing facilities are required by law to give eye goop to all babies, just in case.

There are a myriad of positions that can help labor progress and encourage dilation. Laying flat on your back is not one of them. This position is left over from the days when women couldn't deliver on their own and this was the position easiest for the doctors. But when you are flat on your back, the angle of your spine as it connects to your pelvis makes your baby's trip through the birth canal an uphill climb. Birth is hard enough without having to fight gravity. A few positions that take advantage of gravity are standing, leaning against a wall, sitting on a birth ball, sitting on the toilet, and squatting. Avoid a low squat, but one where your thighs are about parallel with the floor can actually give you an extra centimeter or two! You can sit on the edge of a chair or have your husband or Douala squat too and sit on their thigh with your arm around their neck. You don't want to do anything that is going to wear you out, let your husband be your support physically as well as emotionally. One of my favorite laboring positions is hanging by my arms. Some birth facilities have birth bars (they look kind of like the rails in handicap bathroom stalls) but if they don't have one you can always hang on someone's neck. I did a lot of hanging on Nathan's neck for Bree's birth. (To be honest, that was one of my favorite parts of that labor. There was something really powerful about having Nathan support me so much physically.)

You don't need to be strapped in bed to the fetal heart monitor. First off, any time you move it messes up the reading. (And moving is SO important during labor!!) They might try to give you an internal monitor which can be more reliable, but for that they literally use a screw to attach a wire to the top of your baby's head. Without any numbing agent. (At least not when last I heard.) And once your baby is born the puncture can get infected. I have no idea why this practice was even developed in the first place. Eww... So, suppose you are happily laboring somewhere other than the bed and someone says that they really need you back in bed so they can check your baby's heart rate. (I do support checking the heart rate! It's easy and a great indicator of fetal stress!) Tell them to get the hand-held Doppler. Remember, you are the one in labor, you know what your body needs to be doing. Let them do a little to make this process easier for you.

A little more on relaxing during birth:

It is vitally important to relax during labor because it is literally impossible to birth while anxious. In the wild, pregnant animals have a “fight or flight” instinct that halts labor. If a gazelle is in labor and a lion appears on the horizon, her labor will stop, allowing her to find a safer location, and her labor will resume. That same instinct is at work in human mothers who are uncomfortable with being poked, prodded, hooked up to machines, and put on display for med-students all while she lays half naked strapped to a bed. (Luckily this is no longer the only face of birth available in the US! As I said earlier, hospitals have come a long way in improving things!) When the “fight or flight” instinct kicks in, the muscles on the bottom half of the uterus clamp down to halt the labor. If a woman's labor slows, hospitals are in the habit of administering pitocin to speed things up. This causes the muscles at the top of the uterus to start working overtime. In this situation the woman's body is literally working against itself, trying to keep the baby in AND push it out at the same time. This is amazingly painful. It can actually get to the point where a cesarean is required because the uterus has been locked into an amazingly tight knot.

Honestly though, even in the best case scenario, pitocin is still really hard on your body. When your body is gearing up for birth naturally, it starts things slow and works up to full strength allowing you to slowly get more and more focused on the task at hand. The best way I can describe this is that my body takes my brain away. Any thought for the goings-on around me are totally forgotten and my entire focus is bent on working with my baby to bring him/her earth side. As this ramping up progresses, distractions (pulling my focus back out, onto my surroundings) can cause contractions to be more painful than when I am able to ride them out in my own internal process. Pitocin works the opposite way. The initial contractions come on very strong, and as your kidneys do their job of removing the foreign substance from your bloodstream, the intensity diminishes. So natural labor starts slow and increases in intensity while pitocin hits you like a ton of bricks (as one of my friends described it) and looses strength from there. With pitocin there is no “gearing up” to help your body prepare.

So that's everything I can think of! Thanks for sticking it out! ;-) It is such an exciting time to be alive! Right now the old knowledge of midwifery is once again becoming available and at the same time we have amazing hospitals that are able to step in when things go wrong! I think it's pretty cool. =)

On Birthing and "Brave" Women

I have heard many times other women say something along the lines of “Oh! You had a home birth? You're so brave!” I know many women who have given birth at home as well as women who have had their babied delivered in the hospital. My observation: I do not think the homebirth mothers are any braver than the hospital mothers.

When something scares you and you do it anyway, that’s bravery. The homebirthers I know have done their research, explored their options and concluded that (for them) homebirth is safe, desirable, and something they are comfortable with. For the women I know, giving birth at home isn’t scary.

My conclusion: women who have their babies at home aren’t any braver than hospital delivered mothers. Like hospital mothers, homebirth mothers are just looking to give birth in a place where they feel comfortable.

PLEASE STOP CALLING US BRAVE AS THOUGH WHAT WE ARE DOING IS SCARY.

For us, it isn’t. ♥

Easier in or out? To birth or not to birth

I only have a couple weeks (in theory) left in this pregnancy.
I think I am getting to the point where I am trying to figure which is harder, having Baby #3 on the inside or the outside.

Pros of Baby #3 staying in: feeding and elimination needs are taken care of by my body and require no extra time on my part.
Pros of Baby #3 being out: Moving around will be SO much easier.

In theory, I have friends who are willing to help out the first week or two after Baby is born so I will have time to sit back and rest. But then... I will take over taking care of my family again. However, by then, I should be able to stand up, roll over, and walk around with much more ease than I currently enjoy.

So my question: Which is harder? Taking care of two small children while VERY pregnant, or taking care of two small children and a baby? Any thoughts?