the feminist librarian reads

instead of talking about home-based births are “unsafe”…

…we could talk about making them safer for birth parent and child.

We could talk about making home birth more widely legal, so the practice wasn’t driven underground.

We could talk about making insurance for midwives affordable, so that they could actually practice their craft.

We could talk about encouraging doctors to see midwives as allies, not rivals.

We could talk about how low-intervention births yield better outcomes for low-risk pregnancies.

We could talk about how adding fuel to the fire of antagonism between home-based birth advocates and hospital birth advocates is irresponsible.

We could talk about how the fear-mongering around midwives has been institutionalized in law, has never accurately reflected practice, and is symptomatic of a much bigger problem with the way we have over-medicalized birth to the extent that it is damaging the health of pregnant women and babies.

The division is as spurious as the one between “stay-at-home” and “working” parents.

Hospitals and ob/gyns are important to have when things go wrong in a way that requires surgical/technological intervention. But midwives and doctors who have good working relationships can facilitate home births that have fantastic statistical outcomes.

And having journalists and bloggers I mostly respect treat the home-birth decision as a crazy-pants magical thinking sort of option is just making me feel depressed about the whole feminist blogosphere today :(.