According to an article in this morning’s Globe and Mail, unassisted childbirth – giving birth without a doctor, midwife or other trained assistant – is becoming more “mainstream”.

• “People who wouldn’t have considered this years ago are considering it now,” says Laura Shanley of Boulder, Colo., who wrote the influential book Unassisted Childbirth in 1994 and runs the website Unassistedchildbirth.com.

• Until recently, “I was hearing more from hippie types, people more on the fringe,” says Ms. Shanley, who gave birth to five children without medical attention – including one breech presentation. “I do think it’s getting more into the mainstream.”
• But most doctors and registered midwives strongly oppose the practice. Skilled attendants play a crucial role in identifying problems such as hemorrhages and fetal distress before they become emergencies, they say.

• In a few cases, child welfare authorities in Canada and the United States have investigated parents who planned unassisted births.

I’ve read many birth stories from women who have given birth alone in their bath tubs and my impression was that their first child was born without help because the family had no health insurance and no means of going into debt to secure a hospital birth or the assistance of a midwife. After the first birth, delivery at home, without help, seemed like the “normal” thing to do.

I do think that women know their bodies and I do think that giving birth is a natural process. I also know that being alone while giving birth would make me scared. I know that I lose a lot of blood when I give birth and that I might need help from someone who knows how to stem the bleeding.

Still, I would never use my own experience to discourage others from making their own choices for their own families. What worries me, in a global sense, is that if this practice is considered “normal” the political pressure to provide all poor women, no matter where they live, with good prenatal and obstetric care, will be diminished. That means efforts to insure the uninsured in the USA will be stopped.

In the developing world, the situation could become even more dire. One of the reasons the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had to be stopped was that they prevented women from getting medical and midwife care while pregnant and in labor. As a result, more women and babies died in childbirth. It was more than a man-made epidemic, it was genocide defined by gender.

Giving up the right to the trained childbirth attendant of your choice is a woman’s right. I just wish I could be secure that the choice of unassisted birth wasn’t going to affect women and children with no options in the future.

Post from: Babylune