It was really I just couldn’t see any reason why I needed to go to
hospital and it was just the confidence that my own body would be able
to do it. And that from what I understood very quickly about home births
that the midwife would be there and if anything went wrong it tended to
go wrong slowly and they would get me to hospital. […] It
wasn’t because I felt that [large hospital] wouldn’t have been a
particularly good hospital.
Other women chose not to have a home birth due to safety concerns
(either their own or those of health care professionals). For instance,
one woman stated that she preferred to deliver in a location with access
to a range of care in case of complications: