Ep 210: Opting Out of the Hospital and into Homebirth with Jamie Murphy

Happy Homebirth

What do you consider a normal pregnancy and birth? And how does your idea of normal stand up to the routine birth procedures we find in the industrial-medical complex? Same? Different? And today we're speaking with Jamie Murphy. Jamie is a fertility awareness educator with a passion for body literacy and menstrual activism. Through her work, Jamie teaches others to understand their menstrual cycle and use this knowledge to either avoid or achieve pregnancy. Following a medically managed first pregnancy and hospital birth, Jamie realized her experience was common but not normal. This prompted her to seek out a more traditional model of care for her second pregnancy and led to the first home birth in her family in generations. You are going to love this encouraging episode, and everything about Jamie. She shares tons of wisdom in Instagram, so we've got her handle linked in the show notes. Outro Wow, what an incredible and thought-provoking episode. As we head into this week's episode roundup, I've got a few thoughts

1. Common does not equal normal. Unfortunately, the cascade of interventions offered--forced-- at the hospital under the guise of safety are anything but and so disempowering to the mothers who realize... wait a minute, I didn't need that.... And the vast majority of the time, that's absolutely the case.
2. Jamie realized that this second time around, she was ready to get into the deep work of preparation. As her husband stated, homebirth is a lot of work! And the truth is-- yeah! Taking responsibility after generations of handing over responsibility means that we have to do a lot of additional work. But you know what's so cool? Because Jamie and her husband bared the brunt of the hard work.... their daughters WON'T have to work so hard. They'll grow up in a family that understands and appreciates birth as a natural, beautiful process, and they'll likely feel far more confident and prepared without having to do nearly as much work to ready themselves for birth. What a gift.
3. And finally, your body is amazing. Jamie's body is amazing. It knew exactly what it needed to do to get her daughter unstuck, and despite being tangled up in the cords, she was birth just fine and just beautifully. I love Jamie's beautiful perspective of how her birth was perfect-- rescue breaths and long-holding placenta and all. The beauty of birth is in the variations, and the fact that our bodies are capable of handling them.

Be sure to check out Jamie's work at @followingmybody. Resources:

FREE Homebirth Essentials Guide

The Homebirth Collective