Prosecution of Midwife Casts Light on Home Births

[HuckleB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/us/03midwife.html?_r=2&hp&ex=1144036800&en=444434122f775ac8&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

"Angela Hendrix-Petry gave birth to her daughter Chloe by candlelight in her bedroom here in the early morning of March 12, with a thunderstorm raging outside and her family and midwife huddled around her.

"It was the most cozy, lovely, lush experience," Ms. Hendrix-Petry said.

According to Indiana law, though, the midwife who assisted Ms. Hendrix-Petry, Mary Helen Ayres, committed a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. Ms. Ayres was, according to the state, practicing medicine and midwifery without a license.

Doctors, legislators and prosecutors in Indiana and in the nine other states with laws prohibiting midwifery by people other than doctors and nurses say home births supervised by midwives present grave and unacceptable medical risks. Nurse-midwives in Indiana are permitted to deliver babies at home, but most work in hospitals.

..."



As an adjunct to this story and any possible discussion, I'll add...

Home births safe for low-risk pregnancies: North American study:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2005/06/16/midwives050616.html

[shoelace414]

1. and in Wisconsin we had

a midwife talk a woman who had like 3 emergency C Sections into using her, and she ended up killing the baby because it was a high risk pregnancy (like all her other births). she also talked them out of calling an ambulance for way too long.

(she also took the video tape of the birth on her way out the door)

[ret5hd]

2. Link?

[shoelace414]

3. link here

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=411530&date=3/28/2006

[rox63]

4. I know several people who've had home births with midwives

And a few others who wanted them, but ended up having to go to the hospital. The midwives were the ones who told them they needed medical intervention. If these states would license midwives, they would be sure that the people attending these home births were competent.

Women were giving birth at home for thousands of years before there were hospitals and a medical industry.

[Orrex]

6. "Women were giving birth at home for thousands of years..."

That's true of course--and in fact we can stretch it to millions of years with little effort, but it's not as though newborn mortality was rare back in those good old days.

If the price of higher infant survivability is that people are urged to work with actual licensed medical personnel, then I'd say that it's a pretty small price to pay.

[trotsky]

7. Damn right.

Sure, women were giving birth at home for far, far longer than we've had hospitals.

They, and their babies, also DIED at alarmingly high rates.

[HuckleB]

8. Indeed.

As the other link I provided shows, home births performed by competent health care practitioners are as safe as hospital births for those with few risk factors. Licensing and oversight is necessary, and states who refuse to offer that for their citizens are (indirectly) helping to put people in harms way. There is no viable reason for any state not to do this, as the research clearly indicates. In fact, in this country, one can look at the data from "inustrialized" nations and make a very sound argument that hospital births lead to many unnecessary interventions that come with their own risks for mother and baby.

[thecrow]

5. My father, a first-born, was born at home in INDIANA

Of course this was over 80 years ago...
The only problem he had was in getting his social security.
They claimed there was no hospital record of his birth.
Well, duh.

[Warpy]

9. You know, I always thought home birthing was a crazy idea until

I went through nursing school and found out what hospital birthing, even in the shiny new birthing suite, entailed.

A good friend of mine was a lay midwife with a great safety record. I thought she and her clients were taking awful chances until I got into those maternity classes. Yeeeow.

Now it's one of those things I can't actively discourage even though there is a slightly increased risk in using a midwife instead of an OB-Gyn in a stainless steel delivery room. For women under 30 whose pregnancies are completely normal and for whom all the tests have checked out the safety is comparable with hospital safety. It's just that if something does go wrong, there's a need for a fast ambulance ride to a hospital and a lot of explaining to do, since it's illegal in most states.

OB-Gyns hate the whole thing since it cuts them out of the high profit, low risk births.

The best of all possible worlds would be midwives with OB-Gyn backup. Perhaps we'll get to that place eventually. Until then, women who choose home birth will be taking a chance. Some will feel that chance is worth it and I won't try to talk them out of it.

[MountainLaurel]

10. Interesting that you mention that

I was with some friends yesterday meeting some new people (it's a women's spiritual group), and one of my friends mentioned that she had her son at home. One of the newbies was like "you're so brave." My friend just looked at her and said, "That's funny, to me, giving birth in the hospital is brave. You don't have any control over your body, you're not allowed to do the things that have been proven to ease and speed labor, and the way the process happens makes problems more likely. To me, choosing that voluntarily requires courage."