Doing It At Home - The Home Birth Podcast

Doing It At Home is a weekly show about home birth, and after several hundred episodes it has become something like an oral history of the choice. Sarah and Matthew started it out of frustration. Planning their own home birth, they found the available resources thin, and little of it honest or empowering. So they began recording other families instead. The format is simple. One family, one birth, told at length. What makes it work is that nobody rushes. A guest can spend several minutes on the logistics of borrowing a water tank, because she wanted a water birth, her house had no running water, and a tank left outside would freeze. She posted on a local Facebook page. A man who worked at the water facility offered to deliver a hundred-plus gallons whenever she called, at any hour, and she kept checking in with him for weeks to be sure he meant it. That kind of detail rarely survives a tidier interview. Fathers are in the room too. Episodes with couples let both sides of a birth surface, including the parts that were confusing or funny in hindsight, like trying and failing to remember the name of a homeopathic remedy someone ran out to buy mid-labor. Fear comes up constantly. The hosts tend to slow down when a guest describes working through fear, and they will list back the specific things that helped: following positive birth accounts, tending to the body, finding a midwife who builds community around her clients. Interviews branch out from birth stories now and then. Debra Pascali-Bonaro walks through building a birth environment deliberately, asking what a person wants to hear, smell, see and feel, and noting how strange it is to expect intimacy in a standard hospital room. Jessicca Moore discusses the documentary Why Not Home?, including the awkward truth that birth data will always be imperfect and what a person can reasonably do with the studies that exist. Repeat guests give the archive a long memory. Lindsay first appeared around episode twenty, pregnant with her second, and came back later to tell that birth's story alongside advice on squats as preparation. The register throughout is warm and neighborly rather than authoritative. Guests are validated, not cross-examined. Digressions are allowed. Listeners should know that difficult and challenging births come up as part of the territory, and that sexuality and intimacy in pregnancy are discussed frankly. Advertising is heavy at the top and tail of episodes. The substance sits in the middle, and it is generous.