There is an interesting article in today’s NYT by Adam Liptak entitled “Prosecution of Midwife Casts Light on Home Births.” It is fairly simple to make connections between the regulation of midwifery and home birthing with other reproductive freedom issues like abortion, though the article does not do this. The article also fails to address one of the reasons that women opt for home births: lack of health insurance.
There is a fairly good novel called “Midwives” by Chris Bohjalian that dramatizes some of the issues that home birthing can raise. The women I know who used midwives, either for home births or in the context of a hospital birth, did so either for financial reasons or because they did not fully trust their doctors. That second part sounds terrible, but in my experience, women who have given birth who did not feel like their physicians paid adequate attention to them, or respected their views about childbirth and their own bodies, are fairly common. So are stories about doctors who used chemicals to induce or speed up labor, or tongs or vacuum extractors, or even caesarean sections for reasons related to the convenience of the doctor rather than the health and safety of the birthing woman. And then there are the anecdotes about doctors who didn’t even manage to show up in time for a birth, leaving the job solely to nurses, but still charged the patients thousands of dollars for the alleged service. This tends to be described with great hilarity by people who have good health insurance, but is not funny at all for women who have to pay birthing charges out of pocket, and are forced to enter into pitched battles with ruthless hospital billing departments. This may make it sound like I harbor huge grudges against the medical profession, which isn’t the case at all, but I definitely come down hard on the side of giving women the freedom to make their own birthing choices.
–Ann Bartow
