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Baby's Day Out

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Elizabeth knew she wanted a natural birth without anesthesia or labor-inducing drugs, an ideal she thought would be difficult to maintain if she had her baby in a formalized medical environment. She was surfing online when she came on a Yahoo group devoted to unassisted childbirth. "Women have been giving birth for thousands of years in an intimate way and a private way. It's totally a natural experience," she says. "In this Yahoo group right now, there's like 700 ladies in it. Like it's not just something like a dumb idea -- it could happen."

The more she read about unassisted childbirth, the more it appealed to her. "I've heard way too many stories of women saying, 'I hated my experience of having my birth in the hospital. Don't ever do it if you can help it. You'll hate it,'" she says.

At her mother's behest, Elizabeth contacted a midwife in Colorado Springs. The midwife seemed nice, but Elizabeth was not impressed. "I was like, 'What are you going to do? Take my temperature?' Midwives don't have ultrasounds or anything, so what are you going to see that I can't tell from my own body?" she remembers. "Women should know if something's not right. The [midwives] didn't show me what they could do that I couldn't do for myself.

"Because midwives...I don't know. They all come with an attitude like, 'You'll do it my way, and if I don't feel it's safe for liability reasons, then we'll go to the hospital.' And I just didn't want to deal with that."

Her decision to have the baby at home was influenced less by her dislike of the hospital environment -- which she considers unpersonable and autocratic -- than her concern that labor could slide into a sequence of events that would end with the use of forceps or surgery to extract the baby. She'd read about the record rate of C-sections, and also about the shots and vaccines mandatory for newborns at hospitals. "I just felt in the hospital setting, you'd really have less control over things that I know are best for me and my baby," she says. "I just did not want to have to deal with any of that if I didn't have to."

The fact that 99 percent of all babies in Colorado are birthed in hospitals only fueled her determination. "I've never been that kind of person to go with the flow of society just because the medical or political establishment says it's the right thing," Elizabeth explains. "My husband, too. We like to find things out and research them for ourselves and see why."

Over the next few weeks, Elizabeth and Jason read up on everything they'd need to know to deliver at home, "to see if this is something that's smart or a dumb idea," Elizabeth remembers. Though Jason wasn't as into the natural stuff as his wife was, he supported her decision and studied female anatomy so that he could help in case of an emergency. By the end of July, they'd decided to go with a freebirth.

The next step: telling Elizabeth's mother.

With out-of-hospital births, it's the unintended scenarios that get the publicity. During the December blizzard, paramedics in Fort Collins had to use snowmobiles and a front-end loader to help three women who'd gone into labor.

A couple of years earlier, a 911 dispatcher in Denver had to coach a teenager through the birth process when the baby's father and firefighters failed to arrive in time. "You were there when I couldn't be," the father told the dispatcher afterward. "Even if I was there, I couldn't have done anything."

Some of the situations are more tragic. In February, eighteen-year-old Addie Kubisiak was arrested after a newborn's body was found in the ceiling panel of her Western State College dorm room. But the first-degree murder charges were dropped after it was determined that the baby, who'd been born in Kubisiak's car as she drove from her home in Parker, had been stillborn. Sensational stories of abandoned newborns regularly reveal women giving birth in all types of bizarre locations: seedy motels, prison cells, nightclub restrooms, movie theaters, alleys.

But though such episodes run high with peril and drama, they do not represent the average home birth. They do not represent official home births at all.

Since 1989, when Colorado's health department began collecting data on birth attendants and delivery locations, the number of home births has steadily risen from under 400 annually to over 700 in 2005. The vast majority of those babies were delivered by the fifty midwives who are certified in Colorado. Statistics show that there are no greater rates of complications or death associated with assisted home birth.

Midwives aren't the only ones catching babies at home, though. That same year, 88 births were listed as being attended by the husband, 47 babies were delivered by the women themselves, and 90 labor assists were credited to "Other," a category that could include anyone from a relative to a taxi driver. While some of these out-of-hospital, non-midwife births can be attributed to accidents or were necessitated by poverty or geographic isolation, many were by choice.

Rixa Freeze, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, is writing her thesis on the very unstructured freebirth movement. "By its very nature, there is no professionalism involved, because nobody's making money off of it," Freeze explains. "Nobody's advocating a necessity to become trained through an organization, because the whole idea is that this is not something that you need specialized training for -- because it's an inevitable, involuntary bodily function."

It may be an inevitable function, but childbirth is such a definitive moment in the lives of women that it can shape how they view the world and how they wish to present themselves as mothers and people. "A lot of women talk about unassisted birth as kind of being part of a larger paradigm shift in which they realize, 'Wait, we don't need to be slaves to authority figures,'" says Freeze, who delivered her daughter unassisted last fall. "We can take responsibility for our own life, become autonomous. Mothers know what's best for their children in all ways."

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