I often have people say to me, “I wish I had your trust in birth.”
My birth philosophy has nothing to do with trust. It has more to do with NOT trusting that intervening in birth makes it better, safer, or healthier.
It’s not that I don’t think complications can come up, or that bad outcomes never happen, it’s that I don’t think the way the highly-managed medical model of maternity helps prevent them. Not only that, it very likely is often the cause of several of the “problems” it is trying to prevent.
Birth isn’t always easy. It isn’t always challenge-free. But the more I attend births both in and out of hospital, with highly-managed models of care versus more hands-off, stand-by models, the more convinced I am that hands off home births are the better option of the two.
And again, it’s not because I “trust” birth. It’s because I think (and have seen) that trying to control it doesn’t help.