I wrote Thursday that nothing demonstrates contempt for babies, mothers and truth like the picture of Dr. Robert Biter speaking at the appallingly misnamed Human Rights in Childbirth Conference. But the picture above is a close second.
The picture appeared on Twitter with the caption “persecuted midwives panel.” Imagine, these women are being “persecuted” just because a bunch of babies died. How important could that be, right? I’ve reviewed everything I could get my hands on from the Conference including the web announcement of the conference, blog posts and tweets, and I couldn’t find a single mention of the dead babies.
Marcene Rebeck, Sister Morningstar (Sandra Mountjoy, 5th from the left), Jessica Weed were charged in connection with homebirth deaths.
Diane Goslin, and Ireena Keeslar were arrested and charged with practicing without a license.
As what is the “persecution”? They’re being held accountable for their actions and if there is one thing that homebirth midwives are absolutely, positively sure about, it is they should never be held accountable regardless of which laws they break and regardless of the carnage that results.
Which gets back to the question I asked a few months ago. Human rights in childbirth: does the baby have any?
The baby? You remember the baby, the other individual whose life is at stake during the process of birth? What about the baby?
I’m not talking about legal rights. Children have virtually no legal rights before birth. I’m talking about moral rights. When a mother makes the decision to take a pregnancy to term, does the baby have a moral right to receive appropriate and life-saving medical care? …
Simply put, an unborn term baby has a moral right to receive potentially life-saving medical care, and that moral right is not trumped by something as trivial as the mother’s desire for a specific birth “experience.” This is analogous to a right of a child already born to receive life-saving medical care. That is a legal as well as a moral right. The parents’ desire to avoid medical care, to substitute prayer, or to simply ignore the child’s distress pales into insignificance next to the child’s legal right to life-saving care.
And the birth junkie midwife’s “right” to entertain herself by attending births and getting paid for it doesn’t even exist.
The Conference was not about human rights in childbirth. It was about birth junkies’ “rights” to pretend to be midwives, to break the law and to preside over preventable homebirth deaths. The organizers may have picked a title for the conference that is a successful public relations gambit, but this picture is a public relations disaster and these women are apparently so clueless that they don’t even realize it.
