O tempora! O mores!
Homebirth midwife Sarah Biermeier, CPM bewails the sad state of modern civilization:
To some, at the root of the hospital-vs.-home-birth debate is how labor and birth are viewed.
Biermeier says birth is no longer seen as its own event – it’s seen as “the way to get the baby.”
Thank you, Sarah, for confirming my oft stated criticism of homebirth advocacy. For homebirth advocates (and many natural childbirth advocates), birth is a piece of performance art and the baby is nothing but a prop.
It explains so much about the otherwise unfathomable selfishness and self-absorption of homebirth advocates.
Consider:
Just because your baby died at a homebirth doesn’t mean you had a bad experience. Since birth is a piece of performance art, whether the baby lives or dies is secondary to your satisfaction with your own efforts.
Just because your baby died at homebirth doesn’t mean that your midwife was anything other than awesome. After all, her role was not to save the baby’s life, it was to insure the integrity of your performance.
And that explains why women who have C-sections are such losers. Instead of worrying about the integrity of their experience, all they want to do is have a healthy baby.
The same thing applies to the losers who have pain relief in labor. The point of labor is to avoid the pain medication, stupid, not the pain. Duh.
According to Sarah:
“The doctors seem to think that it’s their birth, their baby and their placenta,” she says.
Now that’s funny. The majority of obstetricians are women and (clearly this is going to come as news to Sarah), we have had our own babies and births, and have no interest in owning yours.
The difference between obstetricians and homebirth midwives has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with the way we view labor and birth.
We view it much more prosaically as “the way to get the baby.” And therefore, whether the baby survives the experience intact is our highest priority.
If you value process over outcome, then homebirth makes perfect sense.
For the other 99+% of women, hospital birth is the safer, better choice.
