Last night my wife and I went to a timely talk titled "Discernment". It focused on discernment in the model of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and was presented by a nun who resides in our parish. It was very thorough for the short time frame. Interestingly, in light of my adoration hour the night before, a particular aspect of her talk came into better focus for me. My prayer the night before had pointed it out, but the talk gave a name to it:

Indifference

This might be better defined as objectivity or total surrender to the idea that whatever the outcome of the decision, you are OK with the path that takes you closer to God. Ideally you do not care which of the outcomes He leads you towards so any of them need to be acceptable if it is His will. After all, His ways are not ours. To point this out let me point out some information that I *was* focusing on in our decision to homebirth or not.

ACOG supports contraception. In fact, OB's almost universally distribute them.
ACOG supports abortion and most OB's recommend testing that aims to terminate the lives of unborn children. In fact, ACOG opposes any restrictions to abortion.
OB's typically support methods of artificial fertilization which violate the unitive act of marriage in conflict with Catholic teaching
Inhibitors to natural child birth and breastfeeding are strongly encouraged by doctors and support staff thus violating the right of children to receive parental care within the effective natural processes intended by God to bring children into the world and nurture them.

Now those are likely true for most doctors. They may EVEN be true for OUR doctor. The problem is, we control the decisions our doctor makes that apply to our faith. We do not contracept. We will not use aritficial methods to achieve conception. We will not engage in testing in order to procure an abortion that will kill our unborn child. The relative stance of the majority of doctors does not apply to us. To that end, the majority of the statements above only cloud the decision and foster bias in favor of the homebirth decision. Of them, only one directly affects our birthing process -- hospitals typically are places that discourage, by their policies, natural childbirth. There are Catholic NFP-only doctors who adhere firmly to the teachings of the Church and there are midwives who support the same stances that I question above. If we were going to choose a care provider based on whether they share our Catholic beliefs we would be limited to only a few options. The real questions we need answers to regarding doctors and hospitals are more like this:

Can our doctor peform the tasks for which we hire her to perform?
Will our doctor undermine our faith by choices she makes? (from experience we know that she will not)
Is the hospital an acceptable, comfortable, nurturing place to give birth to our child?
etc.

Through prayer I have been led to consider things in a different light and in a manner that removes a strong bias I have that might have caused me to choose a provider of lesser skill based on the fact that we would be able to have great rapport swapping conversion stories and devotional tips. Who loses out on the benefit of superior care?

It seems logical to consider the items listed at the beginning and give them high weight in the decision making process but in this case they are clouding the real issues. It is difficult for us to rip down biases, especially those crafted in the guise of following our faith more closely. The fact is, we live in the world and we cannot preach Christ to the world if we spend the rest of our lives avoiding the world we are supposed to live in.