Advocating Homebirth

It's unfortunate that women's choices in birth are diminishing more and more, due to increasing pressures from insurance companies and from the medical community itself!  If your doctor used to support home birth, he most likely knows its value and could cite studies for you.  But the pressure on him are tremendous.  It's unfortunate that ACOG, hospital boards, and insurance companies can threaten to increase or drop their insurance and/or threaten to take away their hospital privileges.

Those of us who have been active in the natural childbirth and home birth movements since the 1970s haven't managed to have much effect on ACOG—they've been issuing poorly constructed studies showing how "unsafe" homebirth is (for example, by including unplanned homebirths in the statistics) and ignoring reports from other countries and the prospective study by the Midwives Alliance of North America showing  that planned homebirth with midwives is both safe an satisfying.

When I first started this work, I was shocked to learn that the medical community was not "scientifically" based—the studies were there showing that home birth could be safe, and yet they were ignored.  Anthropologist Robbie Davis Floyd's work helped me to understand why: the medical model of birth is part of a set of core values that infuse our entire culture.  The desire to control nature and to "rescue" the baby from the mother-baby diad is part of dominant masculine-based paradigm that has dominated all aspects of our culture for centuries.

Even the movement to have "evidence-based care" has not been well-received within the medical community, because it goes against many current practices and interventions.  We need to understand that the institution (hospital birth) has a life or its own and does not want to give up power.  It is not "power" in the sense of wanting to subjugate women, because practitioners within the medical model truly perceive and believe that they are doing what is best for "a healthy mother and a healthy baby"—despite all the studies and rankings showing we're doing (and exporting) the wrong things.

We weren't able to change ACOG—but we were able to revitalize midwifery and make it more available.  But we had to do that, in part, by going outside the system.  Unfortunately, what you're saying looks like the same things—that you may have to go outside the system to get the kind of birth to which every woman should be entitled.  I'm really sorry it's still that way!