Comment by projektfu 2 days ago
Fair, he's lucky enough to have not been in a major car accident that year, so he can attribute it all to the cost of giving birth.
What would have been the out-of-pocket cost of a normal birth without health insurance? It's still your choice to go without.
My wife had to have an emergency C-section the first time around when they lost the heartbeat on our first baby, so we've stuck with planned C-sections - so yes, we are somewhat constrained in terms of our choices there.
Maybe we're living in a failed society if we cannot provide the basic, bare minimum of pregnancy care for women. Like I assume you're the same kind of person that would be equally baffled as to why the fertility rate has been going down and can't connect the two dots. As well as the child mortality rate in the US skyrocketing.
Father of 3 here, first two were home births, the third had complications and ended up being a hospital birth. I was initially skeptical for the same reasons but the first meeting with the midwife convinced me that they were taking every precaution and had the training to deal with whatever might come up.
The majority of births are simple if you let them be and the midwives go to great lengths to make sure the conditions are right for a successful event. In the case of our third we hit some conditions leading up to the delivery date that disqualified us for a home birth so we seamlessly transitioned into the hospital system (where the midwife still delivered the baby)
Home birth is absolutely a rational choice in many cases. The author had a very strong reason to require hospital birth but in scenarios with lower risk it is safer in some respects to avoid the hospital.
It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.
Why are you paying to give birth at home when there's a hospital right there, that has all the equipment in case anything goes sideways?
Yes, it's routinely done. The NHS has this to say: https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/labour-and-birth/where-to-give-...
No one is forcing you to give birth in a hospital. Rational people do it at home all the time to this day.