There's some back and forth going between Michelle Goldberg at The Daily Beast and Jennifer Block at Slate about home-birthing. (All the links are here.) 

I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, I come from a big midwifery family. My aunt, a former Midwife of the Year, gave me Lamaze classes in her basement, while I was pregnant with Jonah. I come fertile peasant stock. I figured that I would bend down in a field and my kids would pop out. There are way too many unnecessary, c-sections that happen in this country. Sometimes childbirth requires time and patience, which modern medical care does not provide. 

On the other hand, Jonah would not come out of me naturally. I was two weeks overdue and big as a house, when I went to the hospital thirteen years ago. They pumped me full of petocin for 24 hours. I still wasn't dilating. They popped my water and still nothing. They stuck forceps in me and pulled me across the stretcher. Still no Jonah. I needed an emergency c-section. When they finally dislodged Jonah's skull from my pelvis, Jonah was really pissed off. He had two welts on his forehead from the forceps. He came out swinging and screaming. The nurses laughed that they never saw a newborn hit a doctor before.

We were also surprised that Jonah was a boy; a technician told us that we were having a girl two weeks before that, even though we told her that we didn't want to know the gender.

Then they realized that they had cut my bladder during the c-section. They shoved Steve in the hallway with the baby and bottle and spent six hours repairing my bladder. My bladder is no longer positioned in my body the way that God intended. That's okay. It works. 

So, American medicine sucks AND a home-birth would never have worked for me.