Why must we feel guilty?

Four weeks ago I gave birth to our third child. We had him at home in a birthing pool in our front room, just as we had planned. It was an amazing experience. Painful (all childbirth is) and emotional but, as my partner Michael and I gazed at our newborn son, tiny and tucked up with us in own bed some hours later, I thought whole experience was miraculous.

It wasn't all plain sailing, however. Infact, his birth was rather traumatic. Although I had a short, relatively easy labour, Jeremiah wasn't breathing when he was born. I hadn't realised it at first. When our second son Leonard, now 18 months, was born in the same circumstances, I immediately scooped him up and held him in the water for a long time.

This time it was different. As Jeremiah came out, my midwife, Lynn, who had also delivered Leonard, told me very calmly that she would catch the baby and pass him to me. "His umbilical cord is wrapped around him," she said. Then, as she passed him to me and I gazed at him thinking, "Oh God, a third boy," I realised Lynn was rubbing him rather vigorously and asking me to get out of the birthing pool. I then saw that Jeremiah was motionless. I had thought he was sleeping but he wasn't breathing. He was also blue. He looked lifeless. I started to panic. "Is he dead?" I asked.

Everything then went into free-fall. It was all very blurred but I remember Lynn helping me out of the water and Michael pouring sweet tea down me. I remember Michael's face. He had gone chalk-white. I held Jeremiah skin-to-skin. I think I even prayed for him to breathe. Lynn worked on, rubbing him and ventilating his lungs with a handheld machine. She kept putting my hand on his heart so I could feel he was alive, despite his lack of breath.

She was incredibly calm. I was crying. After 10 long minutes, Jeremiah finally breathed. It was only then that I realised Lynn was sweating. Later, she told me that if he hadn't taken a breath within the next minute, she would have called an ambulance.

When I tell this story to friends I'm berated for having what they naively think of as a cavalier attitude - "You're crazy not to go to hospital, that's the safest place," they say. "He could have died just because you wanted to be at home."

My response, of course, is that he didn't die, and that what I did was the best thing for him. I tell people that I totally trusted Lynn. What she did was no different to what would have happened at hospital. But most people think that being in hospital is safer. They say Jeremiah would have been better looked after. Hospitals have reassuring machines that bleep when things go wrong, with luminous squiggly lines that can tell you everything you never knew about your and your baby's bodies.

They have teams of surgeons and specialist baby-care units and incubators and ventilators. What on earth were you thinking, Lucy?

But I'm not mad, or selfish or a New-Agey hippy. I know I made the right decision. More importantly, I was allowed to make that decision. Which was why I was stunned, indeed incensed, to read last week about Paul Beland, the community midwife who was sacked because he refused to stop offering women the right to have a home birth.

Women, he said, should be given the choice; his bosses at Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Trust kicked out its principled staff member because home births are against its new policy. Dangerous and costly, I assume they mean, ignoring the fact that giving birth at home could well be the best possible start in life for mother and child.

When it comes to childbirth, it seems that women are at the mercy of rules and regulations, drawn up, no doubt, by teams of male lawyers who haven't the foggiest what we go through. Expectant mothers are constantly told what they can and can't do and where they can and can't give birth by people who seem to have no interest in their well-being or the so-called policy of patient choice.

This has, of course, set me thinking.

Why did Michael and I decide to spend £2,500, the cost of hiring Lynn, an independent midwife, in order for me to give birth as I wished? And why shouldn't women be able to have what I had on the NHS, especially if midwives are prepared to offer it?

I only decided to have Jeremiah at home because the NHS could not provide some continuity of care. When I was pregnant with Leonard, I was told by the local midwife that she could not guarantee to be at the birth. "You won't care who's there when you're in labour," she said.

But I did care. I really cared. I didn't want someone I'd never met before telling me how to give birth. So we opted out. I found Lynn on the internet and that was that. Once we'd hired her it seemed more natural, and infinitely preferable, to give birth at home even though she does hospital births as well. I had asked my local practice about the chance of a home birth and was told it was not possible. I think the words they used were "not recommended for someone of your age". I was 35.

But hospitals seem an alien environment in which to bring a baby into the world. They are full of germs and people-and bright lights and interfering doctors. They are for the sick, not for women who are giving birth.

Childbirth, for me, is a private experience. I like feeling in charge. I like being left to just get on with it and I trust myself that I can do it. I like the peace and quiet and the sense of feeling emotionally cocooned by my family. It doesn't feel terrifying being at home. It feels wonderful. I wish more women felt confident enough and supported enough to try it.

This last birth was, however, a tough decision. My first and second pregnancies were textbook. But during this third one we had a couple of scares. Jeremiah was breech virtually up to the end. This meant that we were strongly advised by my doctor to go in to hospital - and that meant a Caesarean, as is current NHS policy.

I had my first child, Raymond, now seven, in hospital at the Chelsea and Westminster and found the whole thing, birth and beyond, bewildering and depressing. I didn't like being hassled into making a decision on having an epidural because the anaesthetist was only available at a certain hour. I didn't like being put back on the ward at 2am with no help or guidance-And it was so busy during the day! People popping in to examine me and asking me to fill in questionnaires about what baby products I was intending to use and did I find the epidural I ended up having a success? I left within 12 hours and vowed never to go back to hospital again.

Still, a few weeks before this latest birth, we trooped off to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford to look at the birthing rooms. It was a miserable experience. They seemed so small and airless. The delivery beds were tiny. The loos were an excruciating public walk down the corridor. The wards were packed and noisy. When we left the hospital I started crying. "I don't want to give birth there," I wailed.

In the end, the baby turned and we didn't have to make the decision. But would I still have given birth at home?

Now, after the emotional rollercoaster of Jeremiah's birth, I'm not sure hospital would have given me any benefit I didn't already have. Nothing can be better than lying with my family surrounded by scented candles, looking at a sleepy newborn who can just stay where he is, in the arms of his family, for days on end.

That is the undeniable advantage of it. Well, that and the sense of achievement I now have of giving birth to two children, drug-free and at home. I can, for once, stand up and say, I feel quite proud of myself. I only wish more women had that opportunity.