OBSERVATIONS & COMMENTARIES I. ‘It’s Your Body, Your Baby, Your Birth’: Planning and Achieving a Home Birth

An article in this issue, ‘Childbirth, Complications and the Illusion of “Choice”: A Case Study’, by Michele Crossley, presents the author’s personal experiences of childbirth, highlighting the disjunction between her initial antipathy to hospi-talized, medicalized childbirth and her eventual caesarean section. The author concludes that her ability to exercise ‘choice ’ in ‘the actual birthing encounter was minimal’. There are a number of similarities between Crossley’s experience of childbirth and the experiences of those women with whom I conducted my doctoral research. My doctoral research analysed 80 calls to the Home Birth helpline, which is a (British) telephone service offering support for women seeking to arrange a home birth. The research looked at the problems women encountered in trying to arrange a home birth, as these happened ‘on line ’ during callers ’ pregnancies (as opposed to retrospective interviews after the birth), and at the ways in which call-takers addressed the issues raised by callers. My research, like Michele Crossley’s, adds to the evidence that many women don’t know how to go abou