Many women find that the privacy and security of their own home provides the ideal supportive, comfortable, safe environment for them to birth in.  This does help to reduce stress hormones which inhibit the labour and increase the "normal" hormones conducive to a good labour and birth experience.

Other women homebirth because they believe in their body's ability to birth, wish to involve their partner and other children, or prefer to reduce the chance of intervention in their labour.

Women choose homebirth to:

• Experience fewer complications in labour
• Reduce the need for interventions
• Use less pain medication
• Lower their chances of a caesarean
• Remain in comfortable and familiar surroundings
• Avoid time limits being imposed on labour and birth
• Experience antenatal and postnatal consultations in their home
• Have continuity of care and carer
• Have choice and control over their experience
• Receive gold standard care
• Lower their chance of having postnatal depression
• Improve their breastfeeding experience
• Give their baby a gentle birth
• Be seen as a person, not a number in a busy and stretched system
• Avoid birthing on the side of the road, unassisted
• Access evidence-based care that supports the birthing woman's physiology
• Experience waterbirth

I'm often asked, "What are your statistics?"  Well, here they are:

Normal birth (no forceps, vaccum or caesarean): 89%

Caesarean 5%

Vacuum 6%

Forceps 0%

Episiotomy 0%

Intact perineum (no tears) 69%; 71% women have no stitches at all after their baby is born

79% women labour without medical forms of pain relief and only 3% women use an epidural for labour

91% women having their first babies have a normal birth

My VBAC rate is 86%

6% women are induced

My statistics are for the births I have attended as primary care provider, both at home, in birth centres and in hospitals.