Home Birth Happiness

CAPTION: Midwife Tuesday Lach holds our baby, Aster Margaret, during a routine visit this past week.

Home births among the Amish and Mennonites are as common as hospital births among the rest of the population.   Birthing at home is as much a part of Plain cultural traditions as home-churned butter, going barefoot in the summer, riding horse-drawn buggies, and line-dried laundry.  The Amish keep the cycle of life at home whenever possible: births are held at home, so are weddings and, in the end, funerals are too.  There’s an inherent beauty to their self-sufficiency.

Among non-Amish, home births began to disappear along with and at about the same time as  passenger pigeons and party lines as more and more people fled to the perceived safety of the hospital for birthing. For me, however, a home-birth just wasn’t a jarring concept. I’ve heard about them plenty in the over 20 years that I’ve been exploring Plain communities.

Earlier this year, when my wife and I found out we were going to become parents the inevitable ritual of searching for the best hospital to give birth began.  But did it even have to be a hospital?  I was open-minded on the issue.  And my sister-in-law had a peaceful and successful home-birth a couple of years ago.  Neither Rachel or myself are averse to bringing in the big guns of modern medicine when needed.  But is child-birth a medical procedure which requires intervention?  That was the argument Rachel kept offering and eventually I had to agree.

Both our mothers are registered nurses so the decision to birth at home was not universally cheered in the family, although, I give them credit for not making a major issue of it.   And I generally kept quiet about it with anyone else because, well, the topic of homebirth often creates a lot of odd and strident reactions.

So we turned to Tuesday Lach, an Indiana-based midwife who has delivered over 1500 babies successfully over the past 17 years. Many of them to Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren moms across rural Indiana and Ohio. Tuesday herself is a convert to the Plain church, which probably makes the Amish extra comfortable with her.  For me, there was something comforting about traveling to the pastoral Amish farmlands of Wayne County to meet her.  (Editor’s Note: Tuesday has an amazing repository of Amish experiences and I’d like for her to share them in her own words sometime, so stay tuned…I’ll be bring back the podcast after the first of the year and she’ll be a guest)

Our first meeting with Tuesday put us at ease. Although within our first few minutes of conversing I learned that she is on this website’s email e-newsletter list and has been for years.  Sweat beaded on my brow and I nervously shifted in my seat.  “Seriously?  You have got to be kidding me, what are the odds?” I thought to myself.  I have a big mouth. Had I said anything over the years that I should be embarrassed about?  I scanned my years of emails in my head and concluded that odds are I probably had, but no matter. This is our baby and her healthy arrival was my number one concern  so I put all other silly concerns aside.

In Tuesday we found a mid-wife who works hand-in-glove with the conventional medical establishment. She won’t work with you unless you have a traditional doctor offering you “parallel care” (i.e. regular check-ups, ultrasounds).  Neither Rachel or I wanted to do anything that put our baby at the slightest risk for a complicated delivery, but in the end it simply is difficult to dismiss someone with Tuesday’s track record. Going into a germ-filled hospital isn’t necessarily risk-free either.

This wasn’t a decision, however, we took lightly. Rachel and I went back and forth for months, sometimes one of us would be more pro home-birth than the other, and then we’d swing to the opposite direction. Our doctor was getting impatient waiting for us to make a decision.

One of the turning points for us was in June when we attended a picnic at Tuesday’s house outside of Economy, Indiana. It’s an annual potluck of home-birth clients  coming together for fellowship and conversation in the sometimes lonely world of non-hospital birthers.  About two-thirds of those in attendance were Plain (Amish, Mennonite or Brethren, and, yes, the food was amazing!:), while the rest were just like us: parents who wanted to try bringing in a baby in a more natural way.   The picnic was packed with children – amazingly well-behaved children – and well-adjusted families who seemed to have suffered no harm by giving birth at home.  That sealed it for me.

Tuesday assembles a team of midwives who give you regular visits before the birth and descend upon your home when the magic moment arrives.  Her main assistant, Leah, is German Baptist Brethren. So, again, the Plain element, intertwined throughout the birth, from Tuesday herself, through the potluck and to the birth itself was somehow poetic and comforting to me, like somehow it was meant to be.

On September 29, almost two weeks past the due date, Rachel delivered Aster naturally with no pain medication, under the watchful eye of Tuesday and her team.  There is a hospital 10 minutes from where we live if we ran into trouble, but the pregnancy had been uneventful and normal which boosted confidence in our decision.  Tuesday’s student midwife, who is also a registered nurse, arrived at 11:30 p.m. on September 28 as Rachel’s labor intensified.  By 3 a.m. Leah had arrived like a beacon in the night, a comforting and calming voice.  And soon after, Tuesday appeared, ready to bring another life into the world.  Seeing Rachel fight off the pain of labor reminded me of a locomotive plowing into Superman and bouncing off.  She would later describe the labor as intense and difficult as the hardest and most rewarding that she had done, and I wondered whether I could have withstood similar assault. In the end, however, everything worked as nature intended, so the shock waves of labor gave away to a beautiful baby at 6:38 a.m..

CAPTION:  Photo is blurry because of movement, but midwife Leah tends to our just born baby.

A home-birth isn’t for everyone. Some people want a pain-free, carefully choreographed birth and that’s rightfully their choice.  There’s a lot of passion (and vitriol) on the topic of home-births and I’ll duck away from that.  I’m just not into that, I’ll leave it to the legislators, doctors, and bloggers to duke out and decide. But for us I think it was the right choice. And holding the beautiful, healthy baby we are blessed with reinforces that.CAPTION:  Hats off to home birth, Amish boys put their hats on the lawn as they eat lunch during the summer potluck.