This book makes an important contribution to the field of childbirth. When a woman finds herself pregnant, she and her family will explore what type of childbirth best fits their own personal life. For this they need two types of information: valid scientific information on the choices available to them; information from those who have assisted at or themselves experienced the choices.

One of the choices available is home birth and obtaining valid scientific information can sometimes be difficult. Many doctors and hospitals speak against home birth with no valid scientific data to back their attempts to scare women and families. We now have excellent data including, for example, a prospective study of more than 7,000 cases of planned home birth in the U.S. and Canada in the years 2000. The number of obstetric interventions in these home births, such as episiotomy, forceps or vacuum extraction, caesarean section, were far fewer than in low risk planned hospital birth and yet the rate of death of babies during or just after birth in these planned home births was as low or lower than death rates for babies reported for low risk hospital birth. This and many other scientific studies prove planned home birth is a perfectly safe option for the over 85% of pregnant women who have not had a serious medical complication during pregnancy.

It can also sometimes be difficult for the woman and family exploring birth options to obtain information on home birth from those who have assisted at home births or themselves experienced home birth. Here is where this book provides its important contribution as it presents the long experience of an outstanding Israeli home birth midwife, Ilana Shemesh. I have had the privilege of carefully reviewing the statistics on the home births she assisted and to visit her and observe her work in Israel. Her data on home births are similar to that of home birth data in many highly developed countries, confirming that home birth is a safe option also in Israel. Don’t let anyone try to scare you by telling you, as some doctors tried to tell me when I was visiting hospitals in Israel, that because things are different in Israel, planned out-of-hospital birth is not safe. When I asked these doctors to show me the data to validate their claim of lack of safety, they had no data but this book does have data proving the safety of out-of-hospital birth in Israel. And the descriptions in this book of these home births provide families with a deeper understanding of why home birth is an important option, why increasing numbers of families all over the industrialized world are choosing to have their babies in their own homes, and why home birth may best fit the needs of some families in Israel.

The births described in this book are part of an international movement to demedicalize and humanize childbirth. This movement understands that pregnancy is not an illness and birth is a social, family and personal event which in at least 85% of cases does not need to be in a “sick-house”. Planned birth in an out-of-hospital birth center or at home, assisted by an independent midwife, is increasing in many countries including the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Denmark, the Netherlands. And all these countries have excellent data on the safety of these out-of-hospital births.

Women and families will continue to make their choices for the birth of their children and these choices will not be based on fear generated by the scare tactics of those who want to control birth and profit from hospital birth. Rather, their choices will be made on valid scientific data and the equally valid experiences of the women and families who have chosen an out-of-hospital birth and the midwives who have chosen to assist them.

This book should be read by every pregnant woman in Israel. Ilana Shemesh is a living treasure in Israel , a pioneer who is helping to lead the way to the promised land of freedom of choice in childbirth.

Professor Marsden Wagner M.D., M.S., Former Director of Women’s and Children’s Health, World Health Organization