Freebirthing Profiled in Washington Post – Updated

The Washington Post has a fairly lengthy piece on unassisted home birth, or “freebirthing” – typically delivery at home with only family members present, but no docs, midwives, or medical interventions.

To Rothman, the nurse-midwife, Shanley’s [author of Unassisted Childbirth] beliefs underscore a more fundamental problem with maternity care. “To me the really interesting question is, Why would someone go outside the system?” Rothman said. “What is so broken that they don’t want to use it?”

I’ll have more commentary on this later, but wanted to go ahead and throw the link up for your perusal. Try BugMeNot if you have trouble with the registration.

Updates:
Womon and Sprout has an interesting response to the Washington Post piece, and further discussion is happening on the Mothering discussion board. There is also a Q&A transcript from the Washington Post.

The bit of the WP article I’m least fond of:

“Obviously women are adults and can make their own decisions, but do they really understand what the risks are?” asked Kilpatrick [chair of the OB-GYN department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the committee on obstetric practice for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Nice assumption that women are going to this completely uninformed. Although I’m sure freebirthing isn’t for every woman and every pregnancy, from what I’ve read, the women who are choosing this are choosing it because they are informed, because they know what happens in a standard hospital birth and don’t want to participate in that process. Does it sound like Kilpatrick thinks of these women as “adults who can make their own decisions?”

Rothman, a spokeswoman for the American College of Nurse-Midwives, was interviewed for the story and said, “For a healthy woman, the overwhelming likelihood is that unassisted birth will be fine. But a woman having a baby is not in a position to be monitoring herself.”

It would have been nice if Rothman had explained why a woman is “not in a position to be monitoring herself.” What are the barriers to monitoring one’s self or having a spouse or partner do it? Rothman provides no explanation of what could specifically go wrong monitoring-wise, or the WP didn’t include it. Simply telling women, “No, no, sweetheart, we don’t do that,” does nothing to improve safety for those women who prefer a less medicalized birth, and convinces nobody.

The article reports that “Of the 4.1 million babies born in the United States in 2004, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that more than 7,000 were born at home without a midwife or physician.” It does not, however, seem to provide statistics on how many of those resulted in neonatal or maternal death as compared with attended home births or hospital births. The CDC may have this data, and I’m going to attempt to track it down. It seems like a rather important point of comparison, no?