"Mother Freebirths While Father Surfs The Web"

would have been a more apt title for Slashdot's: post entitled "Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki":

"A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry"

Any member of a birth support team worth their salt knows that nobody "delivers" babies. Mothers give birth to them, plain and simple. The original article from The Sun states: "And after following the detailed guide on the internet's wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith...." crediting the healthy outcome of this unplanned freebirth to a man's ability to use a search engine when it seems rather obvious that it didn't matter whether or not he was online, that baby was coming then and there!

What makes this story interesting is that the mother had been planning for a homebirth and visited by her midwife before the labour. Surely at some point earlier in the pregnancy the father might have shown some interest in what to do at a homebirth or considered the possibility that they might have a fast freebirth (it was their fourth baby too, one would think the father would have learned how to support his wife during labour slightly before she went into it for a fourth time! But instead he spent those precious moments in front of a computer screen).

Concerning the representation of accidental freebirths in the media, Gloria Lemay notes that

"What is missed is that birthing a speedy baby without any professionals around is actually a safe process. I have read these stories for 30 years and have never seen a single one that involved a true complication."

She also notes that the majority of these stories involve two factors which help contribute to these births being uncomplicated: the umbilical cord is left alone because of a lack of clamps at the scene, which enables baby to stabilise breathing and the mother holds her newborn continuously. She says it best when she says:

"I’m sure that the newspapers will continue to write these stories with all the drama laced throughout them but, remember, birth is a healthy, normal elimination process of the body that happens smoothly, easily and quickly for some women and their babies. It’s an emergence, see?"

I like to think of birth like pooing, two elimination process as Gloria notes. But I can't imagine a fast-moving freepoo by the side of the road making it in the news and I certainly can't imagine anyone trolling the internet for tips of safe poop-before-arrival!

Related Posts:
Emergency Deliveries - Stand and Deliver
Treatment of Baby in a Hurry Stories - Gloria Lemay