And Now, The War Against Giving Birth at Home
July 13th, 2008Mmm hmm.
Via: ABC News:
The American Medical Association has agreed to support proposed legislation that, some physicians say, could make make having a planned birth in one’s home difficult, to virtually impossible.
As of now, no actual legislation has been drawn up, but the AMA has agreed to back a measure called “Resolution 205,” a request to support the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) position that home births are not safe.
“We are against home births, period,” said Gregory Phillips, an ACOG spokesman.
Women who give birth outside of a clinical setting risk putting themselves and their newborns at risk, Phillips told ABCNEWS.com.
In an e-mail to ABCNEWS.com, AMA board member Steven Stack, MD, wrote that the AMA “stresses that the safest setting for delivering a baby is in the hospital or a birthing center within a hospital complex.”
The influential medical groups — AMA and ACOG — now find themselves at odds with those who say women should have the choice to give birth at home or in a hospital.
The American College of Nurse-Midwives has issued an unequivocal statement in support of planned home births, citing a study in the British Medical Journal that showed home births to be no riskier than hospital births.
Although only about 1 percent of babies born in the United States are born outside of a hospital, the debate has been framed in some circles as a battle between our country’s troubled medical system and mothers-to-be who want to break free of it.
That war’s been waging for a while; looks like their ratcheting it up to the next logical level. I know they’ve been harassing midwives for a long time now (centuries, in one form or another). We had a midwife for our 3rd child, and the local medical establishment went after her for “over stepping her bounds” (don’t remember the exact wording), their usual tactic. Like all powerful organizations, part of keeping their power is harassing those who’d try and horn in on their good thing.
A friend of mine had her daughter at home, just she and her husband. The child and mother were fine, zero complications. But when word got out, the ironically named “child welfare agency” threatened to take the kid away, simply because no “authorities” had been involved in the birth.
Remember, the state always knows best.
Another thought:
“Women who give birth outside of a clinical setting risk putting themselves and their newborns at risk, Phillips told ABCNEWS.com.” (Forgetting for the moment about the risks involved in simply walking into a modern hospital for a moment…)
IMO, the trend toward embracing “risk-free” life is one of the most insidious and dangerous ones there is. The logical end of such a movement was aptly illustrated in the movie, The Matrix: everyone was as safe as could be in their little perma-wombs, but no one was really alive or free. If I remember right, the machines who tended them were said to have “taken over”, i.e., against the will of the people. I think that the “real” story was that millions saw it as the ultimate safety, and submitted to it completely of their own free will.
The Nazis’ name for the homes was Lebensborn. What they were was birthing homes for breeding children of the Reich. I am sure that Michael Chertoff (the modern day Goebbels) will somehow link the program to “Homeland Security” and, of course, OberReichSturmFuhrer Bush will relate it to the “War on Terror.” What this will really lead to it the Ultimate Terror: All children bred for and the property of The State. Mothers and fathers need not apply. The State will be their Mother and Father.
The irony is that (according to New Zealand Ministry of Health Stats) homebirthing gives better outcomes than hospital birthing.
In Alabama its all ready illegal to give birth at home. They can throw both the mother and the father in jail and take the kid.
Um, I’m going to go with the establishment on this one. People who think “the system” is a bad place to give birth in are forgetting the high rate of infant and mother mortalities in times past.
There are a ton of things that can go wrong, and having modern medicine RIGHT THERE is well worth the “harsh” bright lights and noises and other things birth-at-home fans highlight as reasons to steer clear of hospitals.
Gbell, actually, most of mother and infant mortalities are easily preventable, even without a midwife. One thing I read suggested that many of the fatalities in the past were caused by lack of adequate sanitation -i.e, the baby catchers not washing their hands!
A trained, qualified midwife can do just about anything that can be done at the hospital, save for the epidural (which is dangerous anyway).
The vast majority of pregnancies have nothing go wrong with them, and of the ones that do, most of those problems were preventable. I’ve looked into this because I hope to have my future children either at home or at a midwife center.