Birthing Spirit

Go to the Homebirth Australia website to see what you can do to support women’s choices and keep homebirth with a midwife an option.

Health Minister Denies Women their basic rights

NEWS RELEASE
Wednesday June 24 2009

Contact: Justine Caines 0408 210 273



Homebirth Australia today slammed the exclusion of homebirth from insurance schemes for midwives announced by the Health Minister Nicola Roxon in parliament today.

“Effectively two pieces of legislation will outlaw midwives providing homebirth care from July 2010” said Justine Caines, mother of seven and secretary of Homebirth Australia.

“Women will continue to homebirth, but will now be forced to do so without the assistance of a qualified professional.” said Ms Caines.

“It is unacceptable and unsafe to force a woman into a choice that is not optimal for her, whether that is a hospital birth or a birth at home without midwifery support. It is absolutely impossible to understand the government’s position on this, other than to say that they have bowed to political pressure from medical lobby groups.”

The National Maternity Service Review received submissions from hundreds of women wanting access to homebirth services. The vast majority of homebirth services are provided by private practice midwives. Removing this option is likely to end access for most women to homebirth.

Ms Caines called on all ALP members to declare their view on a woman’s right to self determination of her health care needs. “If the ALP is so hell bent on preventing women from accessing homebirth as an option I ask all ALP members to publically state their position on this.

It appears that having a Health Minister who is a woman, a recent mother, and a lawyer understanding consumers’ rights, is not proving to be an advantage for women. Removing women’s rights to the point where we are back providing care in dark alleys or in back rooms is ridiculous in 2009.”

This will pretty much be my main theme until the government does something about it. Even if you would not choose homebirth for yourself please think about supporting a woman’s right to choose this option for her birth. I won’t rehash the issues which have been explained so beautifully elsewhere (see Clare Bowditch’s open letter) and check out this superb video:

Ever since the SBS Insight program on Birth Options I have been nurturing a crush on Clare Bowditch which is now a major love affair (one way, obviously ). Her Open Letter on the current Australian Homebirth Crisis is just brilliant. Here is a taste below, but do go and check out the whole thing…

The Australian Government’s attempt to ban homebirth – are you serious?

You know how, when you’re doing something very intimate and beautiful, you usually prefer not to do it in a very bright room with a drip in your arm, and a massive belt around your waist attached to a machine that goes BEEP BEEEP, with lots of strangers waltzing in and out of the door, turning up the houselights, using instruments to prod and measure your private parts, and asking you if you would mind if their students came in to watch?

Well, not surprisingly, same rule applies for most women when they’re giving birth.

Fact; some women just do not want to give birth in a hospital. Call me “craxy!!!’, but fair enough. Birth for them is too special, too intimate, and too precious a thing to occur in a hospital. If your child is sick or your pregnancy is high risk (as in the case of twins), a hospital is the probably right place to be. Normal pregnancy and birth, however, are not illnesses, and Australian women deserve the right to choose for themselves whether they give birth in hospital or at home.

Today, Minister Nicola Roxon proposed a bill that removes this right from Australian women, by excluding homebirth from insurance schemes for midwives. More on this later. The point is, this is beyond belief and deserves a strong rising up from those of us who care about protecting who who are at their most vulnerable.

One of my lovely doula clients sent me this great link with lots of info on the Breast Crawl, including answers to theses questions:

1. We have neither heard of nor seen this happen before. How did you discover the ‘Breast Crawl’?
2. If the Breast Crawl is evidence based, why is it not being practised?
3. In many places, if initiation is not being practised by the Breast Crawl or a similar process, how is it practised?
4. What advantages does early initiation offer? How is the ‘Breast Crawl’ superior to other patterns of initiation in terms of getting these advantages?
5. Do all babies move like this? We would like to try this in our maternity service. Can you give us some tips?
6. What is the significance of ‘cheek to cheek contact’ shown in the video?
7. Why make the baby go through the entire process of breast crawl? It might be logical to help the baby to take the first breastfeed as soon as it shows readiness to suckle.
8. If the baby has successfully completed the Breast Crawl and taken the first breastfeed, does it ensure successful establishment of breastfeeding?
9. Have you tried the Breast Crawl with premature or low birth weight (LBW) babies? What are the contraindications?
10. Is the ‘Breast Crawl’ possible if the baby is born by Caesarean Delivery?
11. There are many people around the mother in this video. Is it right?

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Group B strep (GBS) is a bacteria that can live quite harmlessly in your vagina. It comes and goes and is thought to be present in about 15-30% of women at any one time. There are no issues with it being there until you are nearing the end of your pregnancy.

Whether you are birthing at home with a midwife or in the hospital you are likely to be offered screening for GBS in the last weeks of pregnancy. If you test positive for GBS and are birthing in a hospital it will be recommended that you be given IV antibiotics during labour. Before you make decisions about that I suggest you read up on it first, so here are some links to help you understand the issues. Several of these links provide incredibly comprehensive information and you may feel you can make your decisions after reading just one.

• Group B Strep and Homebirth
• Midwife Lisa Barrett’s thoughts on GBS
• Comprehensive information on GBS from gentlebirth.org archives
• Group B Strep Protocol & relevant research
• Midwife recommended management options
• Treating Group B Strep: Are antibiotics necessary?
• How to treat a vaginal infection with a clove of garlic

Many people have been asking me what is going on with all the media frenzy over homebirths and midwives so I thought I would provide a quick summary of the main issue which is not about the safety of homebirth or midwives vs obstetricians but about a woman’s right to chose her caregiver and place of birth and right (if she choses) to refuse medical intervention.

Currently in Australia midwives are registered at a state level. In July 2010 national registration will come into effect. As part of registration, midwives will need to have indemnity insurance. Currently midwives practicing in hospitals are covered by the hospital insurance but Midwives in Private Practice (MIPPS) have been unable to get insurance since the insurance crisis in 2002. This is not due to their risk profile, they actually have a very good risk profile (very few claims) but because they are so small in number – there are only a couple of hundred MIPPS Australia wide which makes them not a viable commercial option for insurance companies.

Currently, without the ability to get insurance MIPPS will be practicing illegally from July 2010. But there will still be women wanting to give birth at home which is their CHOICE. They should be able to chose this option and to be attended by a qualified professional. Medical practitioners and their clients currently enjoy indemnity protection at an estimated cost of $500 million.

If you are passionate about women’s rights or even just basic human rights and would like to do something to help you can sign this petition, email or visit your fereral member: http://apps.aec.gov.au/esearch/

And write to:

Nicola Roxon
Minister for Health and Ageing
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600

Please don’t believe anything you read in the media – they are just trying to sell papers, not tell the truth so do the research for yourself. There are large and rigorous studies on homebirth showing it is not only as safe as hospital birth for low risk women but that there are less c-sections, inductions and episiotomies which has a flow-on effect on postnatal recovery, breastfeeding and postnatal depression rates. The developed countries with the highest levels of homebirth have the lowest mortality and morbidity rates – doesn’t that tell you something?

A Student midwife took a photo of her cervix every day for a month and has put it on the web for us all, it’s fabulous: beautifulcervix.com

Treesa’s Midwifery in Bali Blog is great. It’s wonderful to hear about the acupuncture clinic at the birth centre in Bali which I have posted about before.

I’ve been doing a little shuffling of info around the blog and there is now no home for my Wise Women list, so I thought I would post it until I know what to do with it.

WISE WOMEN

• Dr Sarah Buckley
• Heather Bruce
• Henci Goer
• Jeannine Parvati Baker
• Sara Wickham & Lorna Davies
• Susun Weed
• Sheila Kitzinger
• Marina Alzugaray

I have been busy settling back into Sydney and have started practicing Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine from The Ambaa Tree Natural Health Centre in Frenchs Forest.  I am specialising in pre-conception, pregnancy, birth and beyond and will soon be offering the calmbirth® preparation course which I am so excited about.

My lovely friend Kate has supplied me with a list of great parenting resources which are below. If you have any other suggestions please leave them in the comments.

Australian Association for Infant Mental Health Inc:

• Position Statement 1: Controlled Crying
• Position Statement 2: Responding to infant cues

From Robin Grille’s Website:

• What your child remembers: new discoveries about early memory and how it effects us
• Good children at what price?: the secret cost of shame

Books

• Helping your baby to sleep: Why gentle techniques work best - Annie Gethan and Beth MacGregor
  
• Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain – Sue Gerhardt
• Sleeping like a baby: 100 ways to calm the crying and other books by Pinky McKay
• Nighttime parenting: How to get your Baby and Child to Sleep and other books by Dr William Sears
• No-cry sleep solutions for Babies & No-cry sleep solutions for Toddlers and other books by Elizabeth Pantly
• Heart to Heart Parenting – Robin Grille

Articles

• 15 ways to help your baby sleep – Pinky Mckay
• Parenting, Nighttime and Sleep – Kellymom
• Cluster Feedings and Fussy evenings – Kellymom
• FAQ about co-sleeping
• 10 reasons to sleep next to your child at night

Research

• Infant emotional and cortisol responses to goal blockage – Lewis M and Ramsay D
• Why babies should never sleep alone: a review of the co-sleeping controversy in relation to SIDS, bedsharing and breastfeeding – James J McKenna* and Thomas McDade

*James McKenna is the world’s number one sleep expert – University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, IN 46556, USA.  Mother-Baby Behavioural Sleep Laboratory

Support Networks

• Natural Parenting
• Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children
• Sydney Natural Parenting – Playgroups link
• Natural Parenting Melbourne Inc – playgroups