It is not difficult to find a doctor who will respect your desired level of medical intervention. If you don’t trust your doctor’s decision making, or think the doctor may be making decisions based on their own convenience, you are using the wrong doctor!!! But that’s not a reason to turn away from the whole field of obstetrics. The wonderful doctor who delivered my children was ethical and responsible, as well as being a top-notch doctor. She is known to work very hard to avoid c-sections unless absolutely medically necessary. I even know of a case where one of her patients was already prepped for an emergency c-section based on certain test results and she reordered the tests at the last minute just to make sure she couldn’t wait any longer. Based on the new results she decided they had a bit more time to wait, and she pushed off the surgery. The woman ended up giving birth during that time. As far as the reference to how women gave birth in the 1800’s, that seems to be simply silly. The infant and maternal mortality and complication rates in the 1800’s were astonishing — it was almost routine! Of course there are numerous reasons for that, but the bottom line is childbirth was extremely different then, as was life in general, so I don’t see what that has to do with a decision today to have a hospital vs home delivery.
Bottom line, IMHO, I feel very strongly that I would never have a home delivery for the simple reason that although home delivery may be perfectly fine most of the time, what if your delivery involves unexpected complications? As mentioned above, unexpected heavy bleeding by the mother or a baby not breathing properly can be quickly dealt with in a hospital, but not at home — why would I want to take that chance?
frumladygit — BTW, I have a very close relative who nearly died of placenta accreta, and it is very scary. However you are wrong that it cannot be detected prenatally. Nowadays it would almost always be noticed in prenatal sonograms (my relative’s situation was over 20 years ago). But there are many other things that may go wrong or cause unexpected bleeding.