Ok. You and your partner have decided to have a home birth or birth center birth. Should you tell your family? Should you wait until the birth has already happened to tell them? Here are some considerations we've come across time and again, to help you in your decision making. 

Home and Birth Center Birth is still a small fraction of births in the U.S.

Ok. You and your partner have decided to have a home birth or birth center birth. Should you tell your family? Should you wait until the birth has already happened to tell them? Here are some considerations we've come across time and again, to help you in your decision making.

1- Honor Your Safety.

If you KNOW your family is going to be critical and unsupportive you CAN choose to not share your plans for a home or birth center birth with them. You may need to nest and coccoon and not be barraged by their texts emails and phone calls "worried about your safety." If you KNOW there's nothing you can share with them that will ease their concerns, you might want to keep this information to yourselves. Be at ease. Be Safe. As Brene Brown says, we share things that are vulnerable to us only with those who have earned the right to hear them.

2- Your Role In Your Family Is Changing. This may be a good time to show them that you are now establishing yourselves as leaders in your family.

No matter what your choices are, family and friends may still be LEARNING that you are now the key leaders in your own lives. Becoming parents is a very good time to practice being the "parents" of your family members and gently and firmly show them what they need to learn. Share with them our safety statistics, encourage them to watch "The Business of Being Born" or "Why Not Home?" - both are excellent documentaries about home and birth center births. Ask them what they KNOW about Home and Birth Center Birth. You might even try the old, "Just one bite. How can you know you don't like something if you've never tried it?" Recognize that Americans know very little about home birth and that your family is normal. They just need new information and you can hold THEIR hands while they learn to try something that feels a little scary to them. You CAN support their growth. Doing so puts you in the leader position - which is exactly where you need to be as you move forward in your new relationship to your family.

3- They love you and want you to be safe. Knowing this, knowing they have been AS COMMITTED to YOUR safety and well being since you were a baby as you are to yours... Knowing they did everything they thought was best to keep you safe and healthy - be gentle with them as you embrace their fears as they embraced yours. "I know I am so important to you, Mom. Our baby is just as important to us. We've done so much research and heartsearch and we'd love it if you would look into this too and see what we've seen. Because you're important to us and we want you on this journey with us."

4- Invite them to a midwife visit. I can honestly tell you home birth skeptics make the greatest advocates. Once a skeptical family meets your sweet and skillful midwives, it dissolves their fears and in its place establishes a sense of comraderie and safety. Because midwives are truly dedicated to YOU, your family will sense this and be put at ease. Because midwives are ACTUALLY skillful and knowledgeable (not the drunken hippies people may be imagining ;) families feel SO MUCH BETTER when they leave the midwives visit with you - knowing you are in safe and loving hands. That's all they want for you. And their baby-to-be.

5 - There’s a lot of birth trauma out there. American women have, by and large, experienced birth trauma for at least 3 generations. Your grandmothers were literally knocked unconscious and had their babies pulled out of them. That means your mothers were often pulled from mothers who couldn't hold them or breastfeed them or nuzzle them right away. This means those babies (our mothers) were SCARED at their births beyond anything we can imagine. It means they came into a VERY DIFFERENT world from the one you want to bring your babies into. Theirs was totally shocking and scary. Your home or birth center birth will involve your baby coming right to your chest, being nurtured and connected and made to feel safe, at this pivotal and impressionable moment of birth. Our mothers (my mother anyway) may have been shaved, given an enema, an episiotomy or told breastfeeding was disgusting. All of this is still "back there" for many of our mothers - unresolved. So the prospect of you choosing something "scary" for them, culturally, on top of the unresolved fear they feel around birth - makes this a particularly vulnerable conversation for them. Keep that in mind if they have a strong reaction or "can't" see what you see when you view your upcoming birth. You are healing 3 generations of trauma - which is a miracle- an absolute MIRACLE of resilience and love.

The cesarean (c-section) rate in the U.S. is around 33% since the late 1980's. This means 1/3 of your friends aunties cousins etc also had births that were traumatizing. Again, keep your love for them and your compassion for them at your forefront as you share your ideas and keep in mind they may not be able to understand your choices. If they do- GREAT! They will be lovely allies in the new parenting time!