People accuse me of being insensitive for writing about homebirth deaths, but I can’t hold a candle to homebirth advocates. They are giving new meaning to the term “blood money.”
We already know that they don’t give a damn about the growing pile of tiny dead bodies. Their credentialing organizations have no safety standards; they crowd source life and death decisions among their Facebook friends, and there isn’t a death that they can’t justify (to themselves). But do they have to grind their hideous lack of sympathy right into the weeping faces of the parents of those dead babies?
Apparently they do.
If there ever were a case where the homebirth midwife deserved to be disavowed by her colleagues, the latest homebirth death to hit the news in Utah would seem to be it.
Police say a lay midwife in Cedar City refused to take a laboring mother of premature twins to a hospital, falsified emergency medical information, and tried to stop the hemorrhaging mother from leaving the midwife’s in-home birth center in an ambulance as her infant son died.
But police documents connected with the investigation go farther, indicating that other babies died under the care of Vicki Dawn Sorensen and her daughter, Camille Wilcox, and reporting allegations that the midwives were burying infants’ remains in clandestine graves…
The mother began laboring in December 2012, at 32 to 33 weeks of pregnancy. The mother and the twins’ father “became greatly concerned” that the twins would be born premature outside of a hospital — Sorensen allegedly told them she would not try to deliver the babies before 36 weeks — but Sorensen allegedly told the parents not to worry because they could go to a hospital if problems were to arise, police wrote.
I hadn’t written about this yet because the existing details make the midwife sound mentally deranged and I wasn’t sure whether this was an example of the pitiful education and training of self-proclaimed “midwives” or an example of psychiatric illness. Homebirth advocates apparently don’t care what the proximate cause is, whether it is the ignorance of homebirth midwives or deranged behavior. If she calls herself a midwife, they are on her side.
Check this out:
Yes, you read that right. Families for Birth Freedom would like to start a fundraising campaign for Vicki Sorenson. So let me see if I get this straight: Sorensen has allegedly presided over the death of a very premature baby after insisting that homebirth would be fine, interfered with an ambulance crew trying to rescue a hemorrhaging mother, lied on medical records, and MAY HAVE MULTIPLE DEAD BABIES BURIED ON HER PROPERTY, and homebirth advocates want to send her money? Really?
What would it take for homebirth advocates to disavow a midwife. Would she have to shoot the baby in cold blood?
How about the grieving parents. Surely homebirth advocates are raising money for them, right? Not so far as I can tell.
So there you have it folks, the homebirth midwifery trifecta: ignorant, negligent AND heartless.
Don’t let them get away with it this time.
Please share this post on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you can think of, and include the hashtag #notburiedtwice.
Women need to know that when they choose homebirth, they are choosing practitioners who not merely abandon them after presiding over their babies’ deaths, but will actually give money to the midwives responsible.
And for any woman thinking about homebirth, you ought to think again:
This could be you, left with empty arms, a broken heart and midwives raising blood money to protect one of their own. Apparently homebirth midwives are more interested in their “birth freedom” than whether your baby, ANY baby, or MANY babies live or die.
