Would you hire an architect who told you that you could save lots of money building your new house by ignoring all those pesky building codes?
Probably not. As much as you’d like to save money, you recognize that choices have consequences and the consequences of ignoring building codes might be dire.
What if, in response to your concern that such a house might fall down, trapping and killing your family, the architect responded that some houses are just meant to fall down and some families are meant to be buried alive under tons of debris?
Would you be reassured?
How about if the architect told you that your house wouldn’t fall down as long as you believed in yourself and your choice to ignore building codes?
You’d probably be angry that the architect was treating you like a gullible fool.
In other words, you would be capable of rejecting a plan that sounds too good to be true, even if it might make you happier to believe that you didn’t need to spend money to follow those pesky building codes.
That’s the nature of adult reasoning. You don’t determine if a claim is true by whether or not it makes you happy. You apply reason, and conclude that many claims are not true even thought it would make you happy if they were true.
Unless, of course, you are a homebirth advocate.
Homebirth advocates have a toddler level approach to the world: what makes them happy must be true, and if anyone tells them it’s not true, they fall to the floor, weeping, declaring that they hate the truth teller for being so mean.
If you think about it for even a nanosecond, you realize that is how homebirth advocates “reason.” They always want to do what is easiest and least scary for them, so they simply pretend that what is easiest and least scary for them must be true.
Hospitals are scary. Homebirth advocates prefer to believe that hospitals kill countless babies with dread “interventions,” so staying home must be better. And homebirth midwives are happy to support them in their delusion.
C-sections are scary. Homebirth advocates prefer to believe that no woman needs a C-section unless whatever is happening is so scary (massive bleeding, cord falling out of the vagina, a baby with no heart rate), they are more afraid of bleeding to death or having a dead baby than they are of the C-section. And homebirth midwives are happy to encourage this type of thinking.
Obstetricians are mean because they won’t tell you what you want to hear simply because you want to hear it. They won’t praise you for being “educated” when you are actually ignorant. They won’t tell you that you are a “warrior mama” just because you managed to do what most of the mothers who ever existed have already done (or died trying to do). Homebirth midwives make women much happier because they never tell them anything they don’t want to hear.
Dead babies are scary. They prefer to believe that the chance that their own babies might die is barely higher than zero. Therefore, obstetricians are “playing the dead baby card” rather than trying to obtain informed consent when they tell them about risks as well as benefits.
Needles are scary. Therefore epidurals are “risky” and natural childbirth is “safer.”
Childbirth complications are scary. Therefore, they simply don’t exist; breech, twins, VBAC, etc. are nothing more than variations of normal.
Science is scary, and hard. Therefore they create their own “journals” where any crap they dream up will be published because the criterion for acceptance is not scientific rigor, but rather the ability of the paper to make homebirth advocates happy.
Scientific meetings are scary. People might ask questions! They might point out flaws! They might disagree! Therefore, professional homebirth advocates can never speak in any venue where the audience has not been vetted to remove anyone who might make homebirth advocates unhappy.
The truth is scary. Therefore, homebirth advocates, delete and ban to create “safe spaces” for themselves where they will never be confronted by anything that might make them unhappy. Indeed, there is not a single homebirth website that I am aware of, or a single professional homebirth advocate who does not whitewash her website, not merely to remove uncomfortable facts, but to pretend they don’t exist at all.
Debate is super duper scary. That’s why professional homebirth advocates will never be caught in any debate that isn’t rigged before hand. Being made to look like a fool is always a distinct possibility for professional homebirth advocates and that wouldn’t make them happy, would it?
So homebirth advocates, and women contemplating homebirth, need to ask themselves:
Are they adults who can accept the fact that homebirth kills babies who didn’t have to die?
Or are they toddlers who prefer to pretend that whether or not something makes them happy determines if it is true?
