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WARNING: this article contains pictures and graphical photos of a birth, labor and delivery. You may be chocked by their explicit nature.

I’m proposing today a set of pictures taken during a homebirth. In order to protect the mother and family’s privacy, I’ve made sure that there was no way to identify neither of them, and as a result it may not be that easy to guess that this is happening in a home environment .

I want to draw your attention on to one particular fact: although the mum is giving birth laying on her back, a position that in my opinion is unnatural and unadapted to labor, you’ll see that there is barely any blood. That is because in a physiological birth there is no need for episiotomy -a horror close to torture and hardly ever needed (only when pathology is involved and at that stage, yes I believe you should be delivering in hospital. If a mum to be has  been followed properly during her pregnancy, it’s usually easy to tell if she’s facing a  physiological or risky birth)-; most of the blood you can see in a birth comes from the mother after the episiotomy has been done. Of course, there is some blood coming from the placenta and other parts anyway, but nothing comparable.

The laying down on back position puts a huge amount of stress on the perineum, and it’s important in these cases for the midwife to help support the pressure with one hand to avoid heavy tears. This is done by applying gentle pressure with the palm and fingers between the vagina and the perineum area, allowing for extra resistance and support (as you can see in picture 2).

Other positions let gravity do its job reducing pain and tear risk. 

But the reality is that even in this position, homebirths actually have a much smaller tear ratio than hospital births, and this is one of these testimonies: