The Controversy Over Home Birth
By Tine Reese
September 4, 2009I have recently twitted about two news articles concerning the safety of home birth. For those of you who don’t follow me on twitter, I’ll catch you up on the news.
The Huffington Post article, “ACOG Up to Dirty Tricks,” reports that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has “urged its members to submit anecdotal, anonymous “data” (i.e. horror stories) about women who planned out-of-hospital births. This represents an effort to develop an unscientific case against out-of-hospital birth.” In an effort to thwart this blatant attack on midwives, home birth advocates flooded the system with SUCCESSFUL out-of hospital birth stories. To keep any further success stories from being logged, ACOG now only collects stories from a password-protected, members-only page so that the public can no longer contribute their stories. The article goes on to say, “What is likely to happen is that ACOG will then use the unscientific anecdotal data that it can collect from members to support lobbying campaigns directed at denying access to out-of-hospital birth and the midwives who are trained to provide it.”
What? Isn’t this an organization that’s supposed to be using it’s professional clout to protect the health and wellbeing of mothers and infants? Is presenting only one side of the home birth story to anyone’s advantage except their own??
A day later I came across this USA Today article, “Study: Home Birth With Midwife as Safe as Hospital Birth.” The study, conducted by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, finds that “planned home births may have a lower rate of complications, according to the study published in the Sept. 15 issue of CMAJ… The mortality rate per 1,000 births was 0.35 in the home birth group, 0.57 in hospital births attended by midwives, and 0.64 among those attended by physicians, according to the study.” Of course, this study was conducted in Canada—a country that is more midwife-friendly that the U.S.—but the author is hopeful that these results will have a huge impact in our country where organizations like ACOG are adamantly against out-of-hospital birth.
The article is quick to point out that a lack of certification and regulation of independent midwives in the U.S. is a problem that has been created by the controversy and needs to be addressed to secure the safety of all patients. I hope that the truth about the safety of home births attended by trained midwives will reach every man and woman in America. A home birth may not be for everyone, but it should be an option for those who want one.
I should also mention that the USA Today article features a photo from Dayspring Midwifery, a birth center in Hayden, ID featured here on Bloom. Way to go!
I just heard about the upcoming film, “Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing,” a documentary by childbirth anthropologist Vicki Elson. Please visit www.birth-media.com for more info and watch the trailer here.
« BirthGirlz Featured Mama | Home | Changing Prenatal Care Providers »
Comments are closed.