HomeBirth Journey
Freedom is why people come to America. The Bill of Rights is what people stand on in this country. Without those rights Americans would feel conformed, restricted, and regulated. I enjoy having freedoms. Waking up in the morning to my own place, food, vehicle, children, husband, and just life. The things that makes us pure human beings. The Internet has gotten us to the point where we can share so much information so much quicker than before. Anything new is a learning experience. To involve a new idea, task, or endeavor is something that involves change.
Home birth you can say for me was a new idea at one point in time. It was something that grew with me as I become older. When I left home at the age of 21 I realized that my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri was not where I wanted to spend the rest of the my life, so I packed up my things and traveled down south to Orlando, Florida with the love of my life Anthony. I remember the day we left our sweet home and our true journey was sure to begin with each other.
In Florida is where I was introduced to a more natural way of living and birth. I followed Erykah Badu a lot during that time in my life and she would always talk about on interviews about her views on home birth and eventually wanting to become a doula or lay midwife. Being young and in my early twenties I had no idea what a midwife was. So I did what most people do, Research. I found many articles on the subject. My understanding grew so much as I grew and became older.
Young, pregnant, and 22 years and in Florida I eventually found a woman by the name of Jennie Joseph she ran The Birth Place Birth Center. The thing that initially drew me to Jennie was her being an African American Woman. I always dreamed of having a doctor that was in my image. We planned my birth and I had regular appointments. The set up was just like a regular OB clinic setting you would have never known you were at a birth center.
As I grew pregnant times began to get very hard for Anthony and I. It costs more to live in Florida than we thought. With a baby on the way and money slipping away quickly we made a decision that we had to move back to St. Louis. It broke my heart to leave Florida while I was pregnant but I had to do what I had to do. The cost of living in Florida was way more than what we were use to. So I moved back home and packed away my home birth idea.
I eventually had my daughter Abayomi Simone Smith on January 29, 2009 at Gateway Medical Hospital in Granite City Illinois by Dr. Wasserman. I had no complaints about this hospital. The only thing that I hated was being induced. They broke my water but I still had my daughter natural and unmediated. I held the idea of a home birth in the back of mind for so long because my heart still found it's way to Jennie Joseph and the way they birth babies in Florida. In Missouri from year 2009 until I had my son Akin in 2011 I researched and researched home birth in Missouri I couldn't really find to much information on the subject for Missouri. I had my son in St. Louis Missouri at Barnes Jewish Hospital natural and unmediated but because I fought so much to have him natural and unmediated they gave me a very hard time in the hospital. They made my hospital visit rough forcing procedures on my son that I didn't want so on and so on. I told myself If I were to get pregnant again I would never go through the hospital system again. Although I had my children as natural as it gets in the hospital I had to fight to hard. They want to give you this and they want to give you that. They want you to sign this and they want you to sign that. They make you feel inferior to their degrees and when it feels wrong. I can honestly say I'd chose hospital harassment over a horrific home birth any day. I will take the risk at the hospital any day than the risk at home. When the scenario plays out over and over again. What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. Women talk about the risk with hospital births and the accidents that happen there and I do agree things do happen to people but at least you have the dignity to be somewhere where officials can try to help then to be at home when it all goes wrong and now your forced to get to the officials that you were trying to stay away from in the first place. Most women birth at home because they don't want to go through an assembly line of interventions and neither do I but if at the end of the day your have a fair equal chance of having a healthy live baby then why not?
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