Dear God in Heaven, when are these people going to wake up to what is right in front of them? Homebirth kills babies who didn’t have to die.
The latest needless, senseless, utterly predictable and totally preventable homebirth death is currently being discussed on the Birth Without Fear Facebook Page, which links to the original story and a picture of a beautiful baby who looks to be sleeping but who is actually dead.
I had the most simplest pregnancy, and the healthiest baby boy, decided at 8 months to ditch my OBGYN and go with a midwife and home birth to welcome my son into this world as calming and peacefully as I could. I did chose to go with an unlicensed midwife, as licensing is not required in the state of Oregon, but the greatest mistake of all was not seeing the warning signs for myself. his being my first born I put all my trust and faith into two midwives, who in the end made some bad decisions and proved to be quite negligent. After a full 8 days of labor I delivered my son at home with no heart beat. After all I had done to prepare him for his peaceful arrival, instead of living he rests peacefully….
Well she showed that obstetrician didn’t she? She “ditched” him for an unlicensed midwife AND labored for 8 days AND at no point called for an ambulance to take her to the hospital where her her baby could have been saved with an “unnecesarean.” Now she’s a birth warrior … with a dead baby.
And of course, there is the usual willful blindness on the part of many commentors including Nichol Miller-Doula:
I had a dear friend have a similar situation happen, baby lost at birth and the community rallied around her w/o blame seeking and I believe it helped her. I just hate to see this tragedy spread to ruin the lives of women who may have not been willfully negligent, to cause legislation that would disallow women choices in birth, or create situations where our currently birth friendly state becomes less so.
If I could I would ask doula Nichol Miller:
Exactly how many babies have to die before you get the point that homebirth is dangerous. You’ve already heard of two. Does it need to be 20? 50? What will it take for you to figure out the obvious?
Do you really think that our priority should be the feelings of the midwives as opposed to their competence?
How many dead babies is it worth to make sure that women have choices?
And what choices are we talking about anyway? The choice to let your baby die at the hands of grossly undereducated, grossly undertrained, utterly incompetent unlicensed women who “enjoy” birth?
By my informal count, this is the 8th preventable homebirth death that I have written about so far this year, and that doesn’t count the deaths on Hurt by Homebirth. That means that there have already been twice as many homebirth deaths as should occur in the entire country in an entire year!
The old adage is true:
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
