Last year when Asia Dessert was 40 weeks pregnant and felt her contractions begin, she didn’t pack her bags and rush to the hospital. Instead, Dessert, who is Black, lounged in her bed before eventually moving to a tub filled with lukewarm water in her Los Angeles backyard. A few hours later she delivered her baby near the tub, in a planned home birth attended to by a midwife, surrounded by palm trees and cacti, under a bright blue sky.
The rate of home births in the United States has increased 60 percent in the past seven years, to nearly 2 percent of all births. This is the highest level in three decades, according to a recent analysis published in the Journal of Perinatal Medicine. The most pronounced gain has been in Black women, up 36 percent in one recent year, according to figures by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts say much of the rise stems from women’s desire to take back control over their births. But they caution that not every woman can safely choose the option.
Dessert, whose pregnancy had proceeded without complications, was inspired to deliver at home after reading books some years earlier that described home deliveries as “joyful moments where women were in control and supported by other women they knew in their community,” she says. Most home births are overseen by midwives, who tend to view birth more naturally than obstetricians, who are trained as surgeons.
Equally important was her desire to avoid the negative treatment she and other Black women often experience in medical institutions. Her mother’s complaints of pain had been dismissed by doctors for years before she was ultimately diagnosed with terminal cancer. Dessert herself felt belittled early in the unplanned pregnancy, when a clinic she went to for a pregnancy test insisted on performing additional tests despite her objections.
13August 16, 2024 2.9K 1
