Michelle Goldberg has an excellent story in the Daily Beast about the growing backlash against the burgeoning home birth movement:
For many parents, home birth is a transcendent experience, and they’re profoundly grateful to have been able to have their babies on their own terms. Yet as the number of such births grows, so does the number of tragedies — and those stories tend to be left out of soft-focus lifestyle features. Now, a small but growing number of people whose home deliveries have gone horribly awry have started speaking out, some of them on a blog, Hurt by Homebirth, set up by former Harvard Medical School Instructor Amy Tuteur. “These people are beating themselves up over this,” says Tuteur, perhaps the country’s fiercest critic of the home birth subculture. “They did it because they thought it was safe, and it wasn’t safe.”
As feminists, we can all agree that women have the right to deliver as they see fit. Women have the right to make decisions about pregnancy and delivery that increase the risk of death or serious injury to themselves or their baby. If a woman wants to deliver alone in her bathtub, as some proponents of “unassisted birth” recommend, I will defend her right to do so.
However, informed consent is essential to free choice. Some home birth advocates falsely claim that giving birth at home is as safe, or safer than, delivering in the hospital.
Planned home birth increases neonatal death rates threefold. How could it not? Sometimes, an instant c-section is the only thing that will save a baby’s life, and you can’t do that in a living room. Yes, delivering at home reduces the mother’s risk of an c-section that turns out, in retrospect, to have been unnecessary, but it also cuts her off from a snap c-section if she and the baby desperately need one.
In a guest post on Dr. Amy Tuteur’s blog, a pediatric ER doc explains in meticulous and terrifying detail why being just “five minutes from the hospital” won’t cut it in a real emergency.
Futher kudos to Goldberg for stressing that, for some women, home birth is less of an empowering choice and more of a financial command performance. One subject, Mindy Bizzell, an uninsured woman from Washington State, opted to deliver at home because the midwife cost $3000 and a hospital birth cost $10,000. Something to think about this week as the Supreme Court is poised to rule on Obamacare.
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