What would have been the out-of-pocket cost of a normal birth without health insurance? It's still your choice to go without.
I had to read again 3 times. Are you serious?
If there is any complication, you're risking 2 lives.
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.
Midwives are medical professionals who have the equipment and expertise to intervene in the most common scenarios that require it.
So - no pain relief, and if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child?
And you actually pay for this?
> if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child
Of course not. This wrong in two important ways. Midwives are medical professionals. They can administer medicine. Most notably they can administer Pitocin to stop hemorrhage after the placenta is delivered. This is the most common cause of maternal death during labor.
The other way this is wrong is it ignores the option of transferring to a hospital in an emergency. Midwives assess medical risk and can make the call to transfer. Delivering mothers who are overwhelmed can also make the call.
> And you actually pay for this?
The midwife model of care has many advantages over common OBGYN practices. As one example midwives are often delivering 2-3 babies a month instead of many every day. As another example the person delivering your baby is someone you have actually met before and have built a rapport with. Some hospitals try to make this happen with doctors but it is commonly not the case.
Overall the tradeoff is worth it to many people -- it's about 1% of births in the US.
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)
They rather try their luck at home than leverage a thousand years of medical research that culminates in hospitals.
Not once but 3 times. I'd be pissed knowing my parents put me through such unnecessary risk.