Advice needed for an UNPLANNED emergency homebirth

To be clear... I really would prefer to be at the hospital when i give birth.... but on the likely chance that i'm gonna have another quick labour (possibly quicker).... 

I want to be prepared if a home birth... or even a birth on the side of the road... is inevitable. I want my husband to be ready. we need all the information we can get.

I've found two 'emergency home birth' information sheets (neither have very good referencing)... but both conflict about clamping the umbilical cord.

One says to clamp it... the other one says not to until the ambulance arrives, because atleast the baby is still recieving oxygen and nutrients via the placenta. i guess you wouldn't clamp it if the baby wasn't breathing???  but you would think the baby would somehow be alert? i dunno. I wish I knew more.

Anyone been involved in an emergency home birth? Any advice you could give me and my husband in case we have to go through it on our own?

The hospital is about 20 mins away... so an ambulance will be here in next to no time... but just in case things go alot quicker than anticipated... or worse... if I have to do it on my own before hubby gets home.

I have soo many questions to ask... and I wont be seeing the midwife at the hospital for another few weeks.

Do not clamp or cut the cord. There is no reason to cut the cord, and this in fact prevents the baby from getting all of his/her blood. The only reason to clamp the cord is if you are going to cut it (the baby will lose blood through the cord stump if the cord is cut without being clamped or tied). With my home births, we did nothing to the cord until after the placenta was delivered. Then the midwife tied the cord with cord tape before my husband cut it. A lot of people request delayed cord clamping/cutting even in the hospital.

Is there a midwife who could get to you faster than you could get to the hospital? Would you consider a home birth with a midwife if that is possible? I know a hospital birth is your first choice, but I think a home birth would be much better than an emergency birth by the side of the road. I know I am speaking as someone who chose a home birth, but a roadside birth sounds like a nightmare to me, while I absolutely loved my home births. Even if you can't get a midwife there in time, a home birth doesn't have to be an emergency. It's great that you and your husband are preparing for this possibility. I think you might get more reassuring information if you look at material from the planned unassisted childbirth community instead of "emergency home birth" materials. It's a different mindset.

Mom2RJA

Thanks for your response... esp to the cord cutting issue. I really had no idea about that part... somewhere in the back of my head i thought there was a reason why they clamped it once the baby for born. obviously that thought was wrong.

Thanks for your advice regarding better search topics.

I have actually tried to make contact with a midwife that supposidly does home births in my area. In Australia, it's not a common practise, because of the lack of availability of insurance (I have another thread that has started to talk about this... and as I find out more information I will ad to it) but there aren't many women in Australia who even give homebirth a thought... because it's out of the norm here. Infact noone has responded to my thread "Homebirths in Australia".

There are websites advocating homebirth in Australia, but I'm still yet to look at the referencing as to whether they have credible information... I don't like websites that are completely pro- a cause without looking at the cons. I think all the necessary information should be on there... not just to support their case.

So yeah, I'm looking into the homebirth midwife, but she hasn't returned my email, and it's been almost a week now. I have to look at costs as well... no one as yet can tell me what the approximate costs are.

Also as another sideline issue, I've looked up the practising guidelines in Australia for homebirths... and they say that a midwife can be registered to perform homebirths, and they are suppose to adhere to the guidelines set out by our registration authority... but there is way of regulating the midwives practise, thus the reason why its hard for them to get insurance.... and if something was to go wrong through midwife fault/ error... there isn't much legal standing on who's to be held acountable. That's what makes me nervous about the home birth midwife....

So I'd like to hear what she had to say about it all, and hwo frequently she practises homebirths. and her general beliefs on labour and womans choice and medical intervention if required.

What country are you in?

I'm in the USA, where insurance also does not cover home birth. We had to pay out of pocket for our births. The last one was $3800. I have no idea how that would compare to costs in Australia. I think it is ridiculous that insurance does not cover it. All the data shows that home birth is at least as safe as hospital birth for low-risk pregnancies, and a hospital birth (covered by insurance) could easily cost 10 times as much. A lot of the laws that affect midwifery and home birth vary from state to state here. I believe I just read that Vermont has now required insurance to cover home births. Home birth is definitely "outside the norm" here too. I think it's only something like 1% of births, although I'm sure there is a lot of geographical variation within the country.

It is hard for midwives here to get insurance too. I believe most of them here do not have malpractice insurance. I know that my midwife has been practicing for over 30 years, has delivered over 1200 babies (as of 2 years ago) and has never had a malpractice situation. She has never lost a mother or a viable baby (I say viable because she has delivered a few babies who had conditions that would not have been survivable no matter where they were born, such as being born with no kidneys).

I think you will have a hard time finding a home birth website that includes cons. Most of the "cons" to home birth are fear-based and not based on real data. All of the real data I have seen shows that home birth is safe. Midwives are highly trained to attend births and also to know when something isn't right and a mother needs to go to a hospital. You might be interested in looking at data from countries where home birth is the norm, such as the Netherlands. They have significantly better birth statistics than we do here.

I would say give that midwife a call. Maybe she isn't into email--I don't think my midwife even has an email address! Hopefully you can meet with her and talk through your questions and get some satisfying answers.