Response to SMH "Are home births safe?" Your Say.

Response to Your Say question on SMH.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of regulation and safety standards not all home births are safe. Preston was prepared, some are not and I'll bet it's the unprepared that skew the figures for home birth. For example, I'd call having a water birth at the top of a spiral staircase attended by a "birth attendant" with meagre medical qualifications ridiculously unsafe.

I would call a home birth with a suitably qualified midwife in attendance plus easy access to medical facilities if required very safe indeed. Safer, in fact, than most hospital environments where my need for a quiet, dimly lit, safe place to give birth is dismissed and often mocked by the white coats.

For most of us "crazy hippy home birth types" the position is a logical one: That the high rate of medical intervention we are seeing now is the result of the high rate of unnecessary meddling with what is a natural process. We believe that if the doctors interfered less, there would be less for them to do.

You can see how this position might mean a significant loss of cash for a certain powerful white coat lobby? You can see it from space.

Sadly, there is a bit of knee-jerk reacting going on with some women choosing to birth without any kind of attendance whatsoever. I believe this practice is a direct result of a public system that is letting women down. This is a difficult belief to prove.

However, the logical position I hold, that less unnecessary medical intervention (drugs to hurry labours, episiotomies, monitoring that restricts the movement of the labouring woman) would lead to less necessary medical intervention is not as difficult to prove. There are new studies appearing all the time: episiotomies, once routine are now known to heal more slowly and increase the risk of anal tears; caesarian sections are not as safe for the baby as once thought - it turns out that squeezing the baby's lungs on the way out is an important factor in the prevention of chest infections in the newborn. There are others of course.

The medical community has been misguided, ethically suspect and downright wrong before, take leeches and no hand washing between postmortems and surgery on live patients for example, not to mention the horrific error that curare was an anaesthetic. It's perfectly possible that they are wrong about home births now, the error would not be without historic precedent.