More expensive doesn’t necessarily mean the best.

There are plenty of examples and if I use my $5 block of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate versus a box chocolate truffles for $25.99 I will probably cause offence.

Because I’m talking about having babies here. And what type of chocolate you prefer and what type of hospital you have your baby in are very different things.

(Still, I’ll take supermarket Cadbury Dairy Milk over imported chocolate truffles any day. Just saying.)

I’ve had three kids and three very different birth stories. All of them were brilliant because they resulted in a healthy, beautiful baby, but one of them was different to the others.

On our Hello Bump podcast we ask Public or Private hospital for you and your baby.

For my first two I went private and had an obstetrician.

He was the calmest, loveliest man, but as anyone who has had a baby will tell you his job was the delivery of a healthy baby and mother not the emotional care of a woman during pregnancy.

Added to this when it came to the pointy end of my pregnancy where I was in labour I only saw him at the very end – for the very stingy (I don’t want to scare the children) delivery part.

But I was very glad to see him and he did actually catch the baby – both times. He did his job well and two healthy baby girls were delivered. The first coming in at 4.4 kgs and the second smaller at 3.9kg. I was healthy too.

A healthy baby is all you want. Image via iStock.

By the time it came to my third child, five years after my first, I had started to question a few things and think more critically about babies, birth and me.

With two (thankfully) uneventful pregnancies and labours I decided I mightn't need an obstetrician and a private hospital and I couldn't help weighing up the very different costs involved in both scenarios.

So the third time, I ended up going public. A midwife delivered my baby and it was a brilliant birth resulting in another girl weighing nearly as much as her eldest sister. 4.3 kgs, beautiful and I was healthy - and very happy - too.

So what is the moral of this story? Every woman is different and requires a differing level of care during her pregnancy and birth, but for me the public system didn't work just as well as the private - it worked better.

These are the key differences (for me):

Hospitals are not chocolate. Babies are not chocolate either, but they are delicious. At the end of it all, as with all births, I had three babies and three very different birth stories.

Would I recommend going public with a midwife? Absolutely. It was exactly the birth I needed.

What have been your experiences of public vs private health when it comes to maternity care.

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