Six weeks before she was due, Rona Mallinson assumed her first daughter, Piper, would be born in a hospital.
Then, at an appointment 32 weeks into her pregnancy, a midwife presented her and husband Sam Tomkinson with an alternative: the hospital could deliver their baby at home.
Rona Mallinson and Sam Tomkinson, with their four-week-old daughter, Piper, who was born at home rather than in a hospital. Credit: James Brickwood
“Given she [Piper] was the first, I wasn’t sure whether that would be the right route,” Mallinson said. “But we live five minutes from the hospital, and that gave us the confidence to consider it because if we needed to transfer for whatever reason, at least we’re close by.”
Piper was born at 1.44am on October 7 in the bathroom of her parents’ apartment in Maroubra, in Sydney’s east. She was the 250th baby delivered through the Royal Hospital for Women’s home birth program.
The recent death of nutrition influencer Stacey Warnecke from complications following a “free birth” has strengthened the case for expanded public home birth programs staffed by qualified midwives and linked to hospital support.
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When it began in 2018, the Royal was the only Sydney hospital offering the option to birth at home. Today, only three other public hospitals in Sydney and seven in NSW have a home-birth program. Women wanting a home birth outside the public system pay between $3500 and $10,000 for a private midwife.
Dr Andrew Bisits, the hospital’s former director of obstetrics who led the rollout of the program, said affordable and well-resourced home birth options ensured women were not driven towards alternatives with little to no medical support.
“Often it’s done because they have various perceptions about care in hospital, where they think that all their preferences will be trampled on,” he said. “The [public] home birth set-up … is a way of saying that that doesn’t need to be the case.”
