Why Should All Birthers Care That Homebirth Is Being Outlawed?

I give you the words of a brilliant doula named Julie who left this comment on another blog:

"Any decent dictatorship knows the secret to absolute power is to eliminate any dissent. The essence of democracy is to have a opposition group. In a healthy marriage, there is a checks & balance system that helps keep both people in the relationship accountable. When this balance is destroyed, you have oppression and abuse. I believe the majority of women who birth in hospitals will be impacted negatively by out-lawing homebirth, as much as the 1%who are currently somehow able to access homebirth (no thanks to the government), because destroying homebirth will destroy the last remnant of anything approximating the midwifery model of birthing care, leaving the obstetric model of birth as the only reality the majority of women have ever been exposed to.

An absolute, uncontested monopoly of obstetric control over the field on childbirth, and the successful elimination of the last vestiges of the midwifery model, that exist in homebirth services, means the counterbalance to the obstetric view is removed. There's no checks & balance system. There's no accountability. There's no dissenting voice. There's no opposition party.

North Korea shows us how much an oppressed people will worship their leaders in power when there is NO other reality allowed. That is what the women of Australia will be like when homebirth is eliminated. We will lose normal birth skills. We will lose our knowledge and confidence in what normal is. Pathologising and institutionalising birth will be our new reality.

If the only dissenting voice we have left is "criminalised", it will be open season on the rest of the birthing population. Birth here will not be like birth in the UK or Sweden. It will be like birth in USA or Brazil.

That is why I feel that the majority of women birthing in hospitals stands to lose as much from this misogynistic legislation as women who actually desire to homebirth. They just might not realise how much they've lost for a few decades.

Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've lost till its gone. They paved paradise"

As it stands the most effective way to enjoy a normal physiological birth experience if you or your labour deviate from the textbook case is to birth at home with a supportive team. Hospital maternity care is so informed by fear of litigation and the assumption that doing anything and everything is better than not that rates of interventions are high and the policies and protocols staff are bound by are excessive. This means that variations of normal often end up with surgical deliveries that could have been avoided or other interventions that could have been avoided (forceps, ventouse, episiotomy, augmetnation and inductions etc.). This culture of fear concerning birth is so pervasive that even some midwives in private practice refuse to support women in homebirthing non-textbook births like breech and twins. Already we are losing the skills to care for birth and her variants. And it's a slippery slope to automatically booking caesarean sections well in advance of due dates for all non-textbook births.

As it stands a mere 1% of Australian births happen at home (and yet obstetric groups were not satisfied with owning 99% of maternity care?!). When the obstetric model of birth has a complete monopoly over maternity care and there no one to provide an alternative viewpoint (such as the midwifery model of care) or speak of an alternative experience without facing the threat of legal action, obstetricians and hospitals will become even more unaccountable for what they do to women and babies during birth.

This is terrifying given that already Australia's rates of intervention during birth are ridiculously high (for example Australia has a caesarean rate double that of what the World Health Organisation deems "medically justifiable", and even the term "natural birth" is meaningless these days and really only means "got the baby out the vagina in the end" but can include all kinds of interventions like those listed above as well as; external foetal monitoring, IV drips, restricted movement, denial of food and drink etc. etc. etc.)

Never has it been more clear that when the freedom of one group is under attack freedom for all is attacked. It's not Australian homebirth the government is destroying, it's birth!

Too true to make me laugh