According to the CDC, 1 in 5 women are mistreated during maternity care in the US. 1 in 3 if you’re Black or Hispanic. 45% of pregnant women are held back from asking questions or sharing concerns.
Birthing mothers are frequently deprived of self-agency. When a woman gives birth, everyone starts assuming they know what’s best for her without ever asking for her opinion or consent.
If you know about the husband stitch, or how women are made give birth while reclined for the doctor’s convenience, or how frequently women’s complaints of abnormal pain are dismissed, or how often women are yelled at while in labour, or they are threatened and withheld treatment, or how little their privacy is respected, you would know why women are turning to home births.
This isn’t an issue of women being silly and brainwashed on social media. Women are being actively failed by a medical system that refuses to treat them like people and not just walking uteruses.
Everyone like to talk about how stupid women are dying in childbirth to preventable causes, and yet no one wants to talk about how suicide due to post-partum depression is a leading cause of death in the perinatal period.
So before you belittle women for choosing a home birth, ask them what kind of shit they have been through at a hospital that they would rather risk death than go back there again.
Those are all very valid points. I didn’t feel the article was critiquing home births at all tho.
To me that article was about two con artists who have made $13 million + by amplifying those valid problems you shared to the point many women wouldn’t even take suffocating babies to a medical professional. There are dozens of babies who died of perfectly preventable causes but those two influencers just pocketed the money without remorse.
A maternity ward head nurse used to frequent the bar I used to work.
Her stories convinced me that childbirth is not a trivial matter and there’s quite a lot that can go wrong where assistance of a seasoned nurse is essential.
Most of the times everything goes well, but there’s very specific rare things that can go wrong that are very dangerous for mother and child.
Giving birth is the final act in one of the nost extreme thing that the human body can do. It is not a medical procedure, but it can devolve into one in so many ways, that medical awareness will save lives.
And it goes wrong SO FAST. You couldn’t convince me to birth anywhere but a large tertiary care hospital with the stories I’ve read and heard and seen. Wouldn’t even get an ultrasound at a smaller hospital. I’ve seen a couple of things missed that ended up with difficult consequences, and I think it was the quality of the ultrasound.
Also, listen to your care providers. If they say you need the glucose challenge do it, if you have gestational diabetes listen carefully to the advice, if they say you need to be induced they aren’t saying that lightly, a placenta ages like milk and your baby WILL die if you go overdue. Don’t listen to people on the Internet about vitamin K and vaccines and all that crap, they are recommended with good reason, and you don’t want a baby with a bleed with permanent consequences.
I want everyone to have a peaceful successful uncomplicated birth, but be prepared for anything to happen. Don’t gamble with your baby’s life for what some jackass on Facebook says. They’re idiots.
Isn’t going overdue super common and not necessarily anything to worry about, saying your baby WILL die if you go overdue seems wild to me.
Common, but if your placenta stops working baby is gone.
It is common, to a point. And part of why it is seems as not necessarily something to worry about is due to the widespread intervention of medical professionals requesting the patients to be induced.
There are far too many variables in placental health and viability, and the risk increase after the 42nd week is SHARP. Plus, we don’t have the technology required to live monitor the placental health closely enough to take chances.
So, it is a lot like measles and polio, we don’t think much of them because of how prevalent immunization has become, but if we lower the protocols, that is when death counts start rising fast.
Yeah from my experience mothers-to-be assume they’re being asked to be induced as a standard procedure so the hospital can organise their schedule better. Not because of a particular medical necessity.
That certainly happens too. But it is not 100% schedule, at least where I have worked, they use a risk matrix based on multiple factors including risk, pregnancy length AND personnel availability, to keep themselves from overstaffing, and that way keep the spending and budget margins under control.
I can’t speak for every hospital, of course, and also there are psychological factors at play, such as the fact that telling a patient vs asking a patient gives far better and more streamlined processes.
Even if done with good intentions, often times it is not productive or time efficient to explain everything to patients, so they don’t have time to argue. And while that is absolute bullshit, in my opinion patients should be informed of all relevant information, most people are not logical and rational while they’re at the hospital, and this does not limit to expecting mothers.
Patients when given a chance, don’t always choose treatments by success or survival rate, they might choose riskier, more expensive alternatives when faced with amputation, and the psychological effects of this on medical personnel are massive. Most doctors, when they lose a patient, lose sleep and confidence, they spiral into “I could have done this”, “I should have done that”, and often times letting a patient choose against what them as doctors consider the best option, and getting a bad outcome, makes them psychologically vulnerable for a while, because the medical professionals feel they weren’t convincing enough, and that even if it was the patient who chose what procedure to have, it is still their own fault.
And that is only one of the reasons why healthcare worker burnout is so prevalent and risky. Most people lack the emotional fortitude not to carry those decisions with them, and that is why medical professionals are taught to be professional, clinical and distant, and can be read as them being aloof and uncaring. Because the more one connects emotionally to a situation, the harder the emotional recoil will hit us if it has a bad outcome.
This is one of those situations where China has (in my opinion) nailed it. It is against the law for any influencer to post content about things like law, medicine, finance or education without having a degree in said field. Not a doctor? Stfu about free births and vaccines.
I wish I lived in a society thats values truth more than the indivudial right to say whatever you want for any reason. And if that reason is profit, then you’ll never get in even the slightest trouble.
That’s actually a great idea. Why should any asshole just get to make shit up and influence people to make bad decisions?
Although those fuckers at Facebook and the like could do their jobs and actually moderate too.
No problem. Just bring those concerns forward to the College of Internet Influencers, and have their license to practice Internet Health Advice pulled.
Then go after the malpractice insurance money that the College of Internet Influencers make influencers renew every year, in order to practice internet influencing in a legal and regulated manner, to protect the public.
At least that’s how it works for actual regulated Healthcare professionals.
Absolutely wild ride of an article. Unusually long for The Guardian, but totally worth the read, regardless of your personal interest in birthing methods. Went in expecting medical woohoo beliefs, left with a better understanding of the growth and formation of radical online movements. Make sure to read to the end!
Currently anticipating the inevitable sequel once they get hit with manslaughter charges.
There have been midwives in Australia prosecuted for not transferring to hospital, and this lunatic woman in Canada who was dismissed from practice but still attends births, and recently a baby she attended died. I kind of get it in the US simply because of lack of public health care probably driving this due to cost, but in countries with public health care and so many midwife options it’s insane. I’m glad finally someone is shining a light on this, perhaps it’ll save some babies. A nurse on the medicine subreddit once said she had seen complications and deaths from home birth and freebirth that are in the triple digits.
Even when they do successfully get baby out, there’s SO much they don’t know, and when they take them to ER because baby is breathing funny (because their lungs are wet) or came out stunned or they didn’t wrap them up warmly and now they’re cold, or they turn blue because mom has untreated gestational diabetes and their sugar has crashed or whatever. It can be temporary but it’s just so not necessary.
Midwives here are licenced, I had most of my kids at home and the midwife could handle slight complications, and did. Babies die in hospital births too, I’m sure all experienced OBs have lost moms and babies, birth is not always safe. Midwives have better outcomes here but can (and are required to) turn down high risk clients so it’s not an apples to apples thing.
But they certainly aren’t like you are characterizing, they are very good specialist medical providers- is Canada so different?
ETA: with the first two we did not have insurance, midwife did a sliding scale billing according to income, with the second set I had insurance but preferred home birth. With two of them (the first and last) they would have come at home or in the car anyway, I had very short and intense labor, am close to hospitals but midwife got to me in 5 minutes, time to set up and catch the baby. With one I had to be induced so she still attended but at birth center not home.
Registered midwives here have university degrees and a professional college to answer to. The US seems to have “lay midwives” which is pretty much nothing more than a doula, and certified nurse midwives. The level of education is very different.
https://www.floridahealth.gov/licensing-and-regulation/midwifery/index.html
Not nurse midwife - those deliver in hospital here. Certified licensed midwife.
Science isn’t out to get you. Trust people who are more informed than you are (still think critically, though)
We’ve had two kids.
The first one was in a major birthing hospital, huge building that pretty much did only maternal/ob&gyn/neonatal.
The second one was a small suburban network hospital.
Without a doubt, hands down, no questions, even if we were in the parking lot of the other when she went into labor…we would choose the second one.
The first one literally treated us like we were buying a car. Just, constantly upselling us everywhere. Talked her into an unnecessary C-section because he had a large head and shoulders. Treated us like bad parents when she struggled with breastfeeding (seriously, the breast-is-best folks, and the LLL, can all get fucked).
The second one…the kid was trending larger and they were incredibly supportive of a VBAC. Which went very well.
All this to say…I really do not get surprised when people get skeptical of the medical industrial complex. In this particular instance, they did it to themselves. And of course that has rippling effects in other healthcare (i.e. vaccination).
Bonus story, A year or so after the birth of our second, my wife met a woman with two little kids at a COVID playgroup (like, an outdoor playgroup during COVID…not like a pox party), the same age as ours.
Over time they (and our kids) became best friends. We come to realize and piece stories together…she was one of the overnight maternity nurses taking care of us with our second.
Glad you explained that COVID playground. I was about to be even more dejected about humans.
