"Nothing, dear, you're NOT QUALIFIED."

Through most of human history, childbirth was kept strictly in the realm of women and the home: mothers and midwives working together in the same home the baby would grow up in. This changed drastically in the United States in the 20th century, as the perception of giving birth outside of a hospital setting morphed from the norm into unsanitary, unsafe, and unwise. In 1938, roughly fifty percent of American women gave birth at home, but by 1955 that number had dwindled to a shocking low of less than one percent. By the 1960s, homebirth and midwife advocates were staging a comeback, raising the number of midwife-attended births to over six percent of all U.S. births in 2008. However, a revival of home birth has remained dauntingly out of reach, as the percentage of women choosing to birth at home continues to hover around one percent of all births in the United States.

Why all the hate on home birthing? Partially, societal expectations can be to blame. Most people, upon hearing a woman announce her intention to have a baby in a non-hospital setting, denounce her as crazy and immediately set about to dissuade her from her dangerous decision. This line of thinking, though well intended, can fall victim to two very large flaws. First, most people currently living in the United States have been raised under a barrage of memes connotating the act of giving birth as not only excruciatingly painful, but exceedingly dangerous. Reality TV shows like "Birth Day" tend to depict the most dramatic, absolutely worst-case-scenarios possible. Fictional sources aren't much better. Think back to the last mainstream film you saw that depicted a birth (and no, "The Back-Up Plan" can't count). Most likely it was in a hospital and either depicted lots of painkillers, or lots of screaming, or both. Sound familiar? Now think about the last midwife-attended home birth you heard about. Drawing a blank? That wouldn't be surprising - as discussed above, home birthing and midwife-assisted births continue to be in the extreme minority in the U.S.

Another possible explanation for America's rejection of out-of-hospital births comes from the medical institution itself. The American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both came out against home birthing in response to Ricki Lake's documentary, "The Business of Being Born," calling it a dangerous, celebrity-inspired trend that ignores the potential danger in birth. Despite these high-profile protests, midwife-attended home birth nevertheless continues to present itself as a viable, safe alternative to hospital birth. In 2000, a study conducted by Kenneth C. Johnson and Betty-Anne Daviss found the rate for successful, healthy deliveries for planned low-risk home births in the United States and Canada to be equal to that of hospital deliveries. However, home births come without many of the trappings - or burdens - of a hospital birth. Pitocin, epidurals, episiotomies, Cesarean-sections, etc. - all these things occur commonly in hospital births. Most notably, C-sections are currently performed in over thirty percent of American hospital births, a rate that falls far above the World Health Organization's recommended rate of five to ten percent of total births. In the case of a difficult or dangerous labor, these procedures can be positive tools that help women deliver their babies safely, but are they really necessary to have available for all births?

The home birthing movement has responded with a resounding "NO." Documentaries such as Deborah Pascali-Denaro's "Orgasmic Birth" and midwife communities like Midwifery Today explore the proposition that when it comes to normal, healthy pregnancies, less may actually be more, and the evidence appears to be on their side. The rate of safe vaginal delivery without pain medication is significantly higher in midwife-assisted and home births, and proponents argue that a natural childbirth allowed to proceed at its own pace outside of a hospital's time restrictions is ultimately better for both the baby and the mother. So why the hate by AMA and ACOG? Perhaps it is because, as the home birth and midwife movement grows in popularity in the United States and more women discover that their labor doesn't have to be a screaming pain-filled movie scene, they recognize a true threat to their financial and institutional stability and are unwilling to allow women true control over their birthing experiences for fear of the impact on their wallets.

This brings us back to Monty Python. Beyond its humor, it raises some very good points. The machine that goes "PING," along with the others, is really extraneous in this birth, but are used anyway because that is what is expected. The doctors, overly confident in their hyper-medicalized approach, ignore any possibility of the woman's participation in an event that ought to be most intimately of her body, and the result is a impersonal, overly-sterilized birthing nightmare where the mother no longer maintains an ounce of control and is left dazed and empty. Hopefully, through the work of midwives and home birth advocates, the American medical community as a whole will come around and realize that women need options that fit them, whatever their needs are, and that when it comes to giving birth, the mother really is the most qualified for the job.