[wolframarnold]

It's heart-wrenching stories like these that prompted my wife and me to have our daughter at home. It was a beautiful birth. Birth is not a medical emergency, but hospital economic incentives are such that they're always trying to make it one.

[et2o]

The only reason it is no longer a medical emergency is because of modern medicine and hospitals. Women and children used to die frequently during childbirth.

[wolframarnold]

The entire mammalian animal kingdom is fully capable of giving birth, autonomously and unassisted (if necessary). Human females, too, can tap into that part of their brains, if you let them, and don't distract or scare them with bright lights, beeping machines, cramped rooms, force them to make complex decisions that require cognitive function. Birth is operating from the mammalian part of the brain, not the pre-frontal cortex. If this wasn't true, mammals wouldn't exist. Think about it. As a male, however, you'd have to have seen it to believe it. I'm a male, and I saw it. It blew my mind.

[et2o]

I have seen many more than one birth.

Your statement is a little ridiculous and I hardly know where to begin. I don't especially care where in the brain things originate (and I think you don't know much about the brain). If I get heart block, I want a pacemaker, even if it's not a part of the "mammalian brain". By the way, a mouse has a prefrontal cortex.

Continue your appeal to nature while I remind you that no one weeps when most mammals lose an infant.

For a lot of biological reasons, it's hard to compare human reproduction to mammalian reproduction at large, and there are even more differences during childbirth.

I'm really glad that your decision worked out for you, but it's dangerous to encourage others to engage in dangerous behavior. If something goes wrong during childbirth without medical attention, people can and do die needlessly.

You seem like someone who might not, but please consider vaccinations for your child.

http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub...

[wolframarnold]

Your judgments aside, we have and are vaccinating our child.

While it's correct that bipedal locomotion and big heads make childbirth more challenging for humans, it still is not a medical emergency. You'd be surprised, if you did some reading beyond what medical school curricula teach, how many of the medical practices that are taken for granted in managed birth have never been rigorously tested with double blind studies, or have had long term empirical studies about effects much later in life. The routine administration of antibiotics is just one of them. An excellent reference on the matter is this book by an M.D. in Australia, and all the referenced cited therein, many by peer-reviewed journals:

http://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Birth-Mothering-Childbirth-Pare...

[et2o]

Women with group B strep, chlamydia, or other bacterial infections get antibiotics to avoid transmission during birth because the complications in newborns can be severe and life threatening. Healthy women should not routinely be given antibiotics during labor. I submit again that you are rather uninformed about the subject.

As hard as it might seem to you, going to medical school doesn't make you dumber or less likely to value evidence.

The second Amazon review of the book mentions that it includes too much mysticism, magical thinking, and spiritualism and characterizes it as bizarre and fringe.

I think a good rule of thumb is that in a perfect situation it is more or less safe to give birth at home. However, in the event that anything goes wrong, which frankly is not a rare occurrence, really horrible consequences can be pretty easily avoided by being in a medical setting.

Also, none of the previous paragraph applies to situations of high-risk pregnancies, which are also really not that rare [1] and should be managed in a hospital.

1. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/high-risk/conditioni...

[powera]

Your comment is complete nonsense, sir.

There are biological reasons that humans have higher death rates in childbirth than other animals. Waving your hands and "tapping into that part of their brains" has nothing to do with it.

[ChrisDutrow]

What are some of the biological reasons humans have higher death rates in childbirth?

[jazzyb]

I had to look this up myself because no one is spelling it out.

In short we developed larger brains than our ancestors (which meant larger heads for infants) at the same time that we also developed an upright walking posture (which narrows the birth canal). Additionally, we also have some adaptations (pointed out in the source below) that decrease mortality, but human mortality in child-birth is still much higher than other mammals.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-evolution-gradually-reduced-...

[ChrisDutrow]

That's fascinating. That first Quora answer goes into it really well.