I’ll admit that this is a question, I’ve been asking for years. I mean, if natural childbirth isn’t dead then where did it go? I hear from women in my classes and practice all the time, that despite having the medical science behind them, they find that they have to fight hard, too hard, to have a birth that is even semi-intervention free.
I heard a nurse the other day ask on another forum, why did women come to the hospital if they didn’t want the interventions offered, like the monitors, epidurals and cesareans. But let’s really look at this… If a mom says she doesn’t want this and the hospital tells her to stay home to have her baby – can she actually get adequate care by a trained attendant? The answer is no, not even if she wanted, which all women do not want.
Why can’t a woman want to go to the hospital to have her baby, a place where she may feel the safest and yet not be given the chance to pick and choose which interventions she wants or doesn’t want? I mean, isn’t that the basis of consumerism, in absence of medical problems?
So in keeping with this line of thought, I really enjoyed Jennifer Jordan’s blog post on women fighting to get back to a natural birth. Think of everything you’ve read about here at Birth Activist – the people attacking home births, those who want to force you to have procedures you don’t want, women who aren’t “allowed” to choose a vaginal birth… if a woman has a right to select a medical intervention without medical need, why can’t a woman who doesn’t have that medical need be free to make the opposite choice? Read and respond to comments at Jennifer’s post to see the views of many women.
I have often wondered this myself . . . I chose to have my second two babies out of the hospital (free standing birth centers). The bottom line is that if the AMA really wants me to force me to give birth to my children in the hospital then I will show up there in labor and scream “assault” if anyone so much as tries to stick an IV in my arm. Then I will give birth to my child without a hand on me as I did with the other three. If the hospital folks don’t like that, they may want to rethink that ban on home birth.
intervention Great post! The problem with the interventions “offered” is that so often it isn’t a matter of choice at all when it comes to the woman giving birth; not only is this choice the basis of consumerism, as you put it, but that agency should also be the absolute right of the mother, as far as I’m concerned. And yet, doctors all too often completely deny the self-knowledge and requests of women who know what they want and need giving birth.