Without fail, every time I’ve strongly held a belief, life has served me a painful lesson to aid me in loosening my grip. I wanted a home birth, a natural birth – the ideal. Instead, I wound up with a code blue emergency caesarean.
The gulf between these two realities served up a unique kind of insight. One in three Australian women will experience birth trauma. Credit: iStock I had concerns about hospital setting interventions, and with good reason.
According to a recent inquiry into birth trauma in Australia, one in three women identifies their birthing experience as traumatic, while at least one in 10 women experience “obstetric violence” in hospital settings. Expensive and fraught with its own risks, I opted for a home birth. While the medical health system approach seemed to focus on everything that can go wrong, homebirth practitioners almost glossed over birth-associated risks altogether – each vying for a coveted “I told you so” crown.
My homebirth midwife was a wild-eyed political animal who fiercely believed in the right to an autonomous and natural birth. What she lacked in sensitivity, she made up for with grit. Her activist edge seemed reasonable when faced with the extreme medicalisation of birth at the other end of the spectrum.
Loading When my baby presented as a footling breech, my pro-home birth midwife found herself in a clinical hospital environment with an equally obstinate pro-intervention obstetrician. The circumstance sparked an ideologic.