The death rate of homebirth with American homebirth midwives is appalling. Indeed, it is so appalling that the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), the organization that represents homebirth midwives, hid their death rates for 5 years. When they finally released those death rates, they refused to compare them to the death rates for comparable risk women giving birth in the hospital, because that would have shown that homebirth midwives have a death rate 450% higher.
This is part of the homebirth campaign to bury babies twice, first in tiny coffins in the ground, and then again by erasing their existence from websites, blogs and message boards and by refusing to accept responsibility for those deaths.
Enough is enough! Several months ago, Jan Tritten, the editor of Midwifery Today crowd sourced a life and death situation among her Facebook friends while the baby was dying; then she deleted the thread and any mention of what she had done. The #notburiedtwice campaign was started in response. There’s a Facebook page, numerous tweets, and now, courtesy of doula Danielle Repp, there is a YouTube video. The video includes mothers of babies who have died at homebirth and other women who care passionately about babies who didn’t have to die.
Watch the video. When you do, you will never feel the same way about homebirth again.
Please join our campaign to make sure that the babies who die at homebirth are #notburiedtwice.
