Natural Hospital Birth

As a birth doula serving clients who live primarily in Brooklyn and Manhattan, I work with many women who see both OBs (often low intervention practices) and midwives in the hospital setting. However, many of my clients are looking for a holistic birth experience, or a natural birth experience, within a setting that typically is not set up to accommodate un-medicated births. The odds are generally stacked against women hoping to have intervention-free births in a hospital. BUT, as a doula, I have witnessed many women successfully do this! Here are a few resources on how to work towards, or achieve some version of, a natural hospital birth:

Video

Book

US C-Sections Rate: Too High

If you've been or are pregnant in NYC,  probably one of the first things you did was to figure out who your doctor would be and where you would give birth. You may have spent hours googling something like "NYC OB low cesarean rate," or "NYC hospital low c-section rate." And you may or may not have found the answers you were looking for. Consumer Reports just released an article reviewing the current state of cesarean births and rates by hospitals around the country. Many of the hospitals in NYC that my clients have given birth in do not release their statistics. Considering that your biggest Cesarean risk might be the hospital that you give birth in, withholding c-section rates by hospital (and even by practice or doctor) just doesn't seem ethical.

You can read the full article here: http://www.consumerreports.org/doctors-hospitals/your-biggest-c-section-risk-may-be-your-hospital/