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Baby's Day Out

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But the medical and legal communities do not necessarily agree with that philosophy, and many freebirthers operate in secrecy. Tips on how to avoid trouble with authorities fill the forum boards. Sometimes, freebirthers will obtain "shadow care" from doctors or midwives by visiting them for prenatal checkups without revealing that they have no intention of going to the hospital or calling the midwife once labor begins. Others avoid prenatal visits altogether, referring to them as "scare care" because they feel they'll be lectured or coerced into having a hospital birth.

And some keep it quiet for fear of bigger problems. In Nebraska, it is a misdemeanor for a husband to deliver his child in a non-emergency situation. And in 2005 in Florida, Mara McGlade had just delivered her second baby unassisted when she started hemorrhaging. She was taken to the hospital, where she died two days later. McGlade's mother-in-law and sister-in-law were convicted of practicing midwifery without a license and sentenced to two and a half years in prison last November.

"A lot of women don't even tell their family members that they did it unassisted," says Freeze. "Some will say they have a midwife, because they are their own midwife, and so it alleviates the fear of family members, and they feel like they're being semi-truthful. Some women actually never apply for birth certificates, or do it much, much later in the game. So even if you are actually looking at birth-certificate data, it's not very reliable."

Jenny Hatch, who runs a website devoted to unassisted childbirth, blames the medical community for pushing mothers to the fringe. As a Mormon, she hoped to have a big family with as many as twelve children -- but had a C-section for her second child. "It left me feeling very demoralized and afraid and concerned about having any more vaginal babies," Jenny says. Since most hospitals have policies against allowing VBACs -- sticking to the adage "once a Cesarean, always a Cesarean" -- she was looking at ten more surgeries.

"For those women who were not very educated with their first births, they kind of got railroaded into surgery with their first, and with their next baby, they are hitting this wall of opposition," she explains. "Unless you're highly educated and willing to take on the risk of an unassisted birth, you have no choice."

After fighting with doctors and nurses to allow her third child to be born vaginally, Jenny vowed that she would never deliver in the hospital again. Her husband, Paul, wasn't against the idea of a home birth, but his wife's insistence that they do it without even a doula or a midwife made him very uncomfortable.

"And that debate almost killed my marriage," Jenny says. "The birth issue has really taken us to the depths of our relationship. What Paul eventually came to was that it was my body and I was the one who had to give birth, and he supports my rights of self-determination to give birth how, where and when I feel comfortable."

So in 1996, they chose the upstairs bedroom of their townhome in Louisville as the site for the birth of their fourth child. The three-hour labor was so quick, and the eleven-pound boy arrived with such force, that the umbilical cord snapped and the baby wasn't breathing. Jenny was also hemorrhaging deep in her uterus. Emergency personnel were called, and baby and mother were taken away in separate ambulances. Both survived, but the family was shaken.

Still, that experience didn't stop the stay-at-home mom from continuing her freebirth activism. In 2001, she organized the second International Husband/Wife Homebirth Conference, with Shanley as the keynote speaker. The event drew about thirty families from as far away as Utah and California to Louisville, where they attended workshops and exchanged tips on unassisted birth. Having another freebirth themselves was still a tender subject for Jenny and Paul, but by the time Jenny got pregnant in 2002, her heart was settled.

"I decided I would rather die than go back to the hospital," she says. "If I end up dying during home birth, great, then it's my time to go. But I will not cave."

Their fifth child, Ben, was born at home successfully. Instead of lying on her back, Hatch chose to give birth standing in the yoga Goddess position, a kind of warrior squat with her arms raised at right angles.

By August, Elizabeth could envision her birth perfectly. "I want to surrender and let my body do what it needs to do. I want to open up with every rush that flows through me," mused the mother-in-waiting in her online journal. Her body would push, but her mind would not. "During transition I hope more than anything I will be calm and confident. I don't want to be afraid and go backwards or stay there, but I want to surrender completely."

When it came time, her body would push with unbelievable force. And then when the head began to crown, she would slow down with quick breaths while supporting the ring around the baby's head, to prevent tearing. She'd take it slow, wait for the next few contractions to get the shoulders out. "If the shoulders are stuck I'll get on my hands and knees and release them," she wrote. "The body should then pop out quite quickly into Jason's arms. He will slowly and gracefully bring the lil one up to the surface and onto my chest. Then after making sure the lil one is warm and content and I'm cleaned off, I want to lie in bed with my lil one and husband rejoicing in our Father over our special blessing together."

She posed lots of questions to her Yahoo group: about signs of a pre-term labor, post-partum hemorrhage, what herbs not to take - and, especially, what to tell her parents.

At first Jackie thought that her daughter might be open to at least having a midwife at the birth. "Especially for her first time," Jackie says. "And she read some really radical books -- and Elizabeth is a very radical personality. And I even said to my husband once, 'For the safety of our grandchild, we really should have a nurse/midwife on call.'" But every time she tried to bring it up, Elizabeth would change the subject.

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