Birth is a normal physiologic process. For healthy low risk pregnancies, home birth is a safe and loving choice.

Benefits of Home Birth for Mom:

  • Empowerment: It is your birth. You are the one surrendering, opening, birthing. The energy of all creation courses through your body as you birth new life. We can't birth for you, but we can support you to embrace the birthing power within you. Your soft, vulnerable, trusting, enormous birthing power that brings your baby out and initiates you as a mother.
  • Hormones: Home birth supports the full expression of natural birthing hormones, which ease labor and create feelings of euphoria and love. See the Biodynamic Birth page for more.
  • Privacy: Birth is incredibly intimate. Most mammalian mothers retreat to a hidden, dark, protected area to have their babies. Having midwives you know and trust and having the privacy of your own bedroom can facilitate smoother, swifter births.

Benefits of Home Birth for Baby:

  • A loving, respectful, and gentle welcome: We recognize that newborns have just gone through the intense experience of being born and are in a totally new environment. They are incredibly open, tender, and present. We honor this and make every attempt to ease their transition to life outside the womb. After birth, baby goes right to mom's chest and stays there, where he can smell her familiar smells and hear her familiar heartbeat. We leave the cord attached until it stops pulsing. We don't mess with babies unless we need to. We treat babies as fully sentient beings, because they are.
  • The Microbiome: The microbiome refers to the millions of bacteria and flora that inhabit our bodies and assist in our digestion, development, defense, and other bodily processes. During pregnancy, babies receive antibodies to common microbial pathogens in mom's environment. At birth babies are inoculated with microbes from everything they touch. At home, the blankets and clothing, air, and people carry familiar micro flora, and baby already has antibodies to the common pathogens from mom. Furthermore, babies born at home avoid exposure to the unknown and potentially harmful bacteria commonly found in hospitals. Home birth supports the development of a healthy microbiome.

What the studies show about the safety of home birth:

  • Outcomes of planned home births with certified professional midwives, BMJ 2005; 330:1416 (18 June).  This prospective study looks at over 5000 women planning home births with Certified Professional Midwives in the U.S. and Canada.  It found that outcomes for mothers and babies planning home births were the same as for low-risk mothers giving birth in hospitals, but with far less interventions.
  • New Studies Confirm Safety of Home Birth With Midwives in the U.S. Midwives Alliance of North America; January 30, 2014. This article discusses the outcomes of a large prospective study following almost 17,000 planned home births with midwives in the United States. The study shows that planned home birth with midwives results in fewer interventions, without increased risk to mother or baby.