What a hateful thing to say.

Pretty sure I would have laughed in his face and told him that he is obviously poorly informed.

That’s basically what an OB told me when he found out I was planning an HBAC….I burst into tears right then. It’s a disgusting thing to say to a mommy.

Terrible, because, ya know, a mom MUST choose between a hating their baby and having a peaceful birth versus a high-stress, high-intervention birth where their stressed baby is miraculously saved in an emergency c-section after 10 hours of pit and an epi *roll eyes*

That’s odd. Because I distinctly recall planning my homebirth because of newborn issues caused by the procedures and interventions I received at the hospital.
Homebirth seemed to be (and was) the safest thing I could have done for my baby and myself.

Im pretty sure this is the most horrible one I have seen on this website so far.
As a woman who had a homebirth with complications, I can tell you that midwives have more expertise in dealing with issues which might arise during labour and delivery than most OBs do. OBs just try to throw technology at problems (usually with little success), whereas midwives actually possess the knowledge to fix the problems peacefully. My son had shoulder dystocia and my midwife successfully used the Gaskin Maneuver to remedy it. OBs just don’t even acknowledge the Gaskin Maneuver, despite the fact that it almost always works and without injury.

I think I’ve heard this gem elsewhere, too. I’m thankful no one is sitting with me next to the computer, because you’d see me practically foaming at the mouth, I’m so disgusted.

I blogged about this subject – no one I know decides, on the day of their due date, “I think I’m going to have a homebirth!” WTF. This doctor needs to educate him/herself, and I’m glad to OP stood up for herself and knew how to respond to such ridiculous drivel.

It goes along the lines of Dr. Amy’s incendiary “birth is inherently dangerous” bullshit – birth is, and just about always HAS been, “dangerous” because of all the @*^%&^@$% stuff the DOCTORS do to women. Childbed fever? Yep. Most badly positioned babies, due to Pitocin overload? Yep. I wonder if she includes, in her list of ‘statistics,’ those mothers whose doctors blatantly disregarded common sense and put their patients’ lives, and their babies, at risk, often with disastrous results. Yes, no wonder women don’t want to give birth in hospitals. Can you freaking blame them?

I wonder if they know that when God created Adam and Eve, He didn’t create a hospital for them to give birth in on the 7th day!

I’m trying to imagine this coming from the GP my whole family has seen since I was a wee one. While I could see him being leery of me doing a home birth, I can’t fathom these word leaving his mouth. If they did, I wouldn’t even know how to respond, I’d be so deeply shocked.

I’m so sorry for the OP having this spouted at her.

It’s disgusting that so many medical professionals are ignorant enough to truly believe this. Thankfully some are coming around, my sister has a great OB who provided backup care for her 3 (so far) homebirths.

Amazingly enough, countries like the Netherlands where midwives are respected and homebirth is much more common have significantly lower rates of maternal and infant mortality. But of course the low intervention rates have NOTHING to do with that…Those people just all get lucky that their babies lived. / sarcasm

I had a bad outcome with my last homebirth. My baby was footling breech, and did not make it. The exact same outcome can, does, and has happened to women who planned a hospital birth.

The location of the birth was not the deciding factor in the outcome. And no, I am not just telling myself that to “feel better” as if that were possible. I have had 5 years to process and research my situation.

So, here I am. A mother whose baby died after a homebirth/transfer situation and I still 100% support home birth with a trained and experienced midwife.

This kind of statement is the same kind of statement that Gavin DeBecker talks about in his book “The Gift Of Fear” (which is about personal safety, nothing to do with birth.) He says it’s the kind of statement that a criminal/manipulator mind will come up with because once the accusation is out there, a person who is good-hearted will want to prove it wrong, and therefore will do the opposite of what the statement says and put herself in danger.

DeBecker’s example is of a woman who is approached by a pushy man who is trying to get her alone, and he says, “Oh, are you the kind of woman who’s afraid of EVERY man?” and the woman then says, “No,no, I’m not like that” and lets him get her alone and he attacks her.

And this doctor says something like “Homebirth is only for mothers who don’t care if their babies die” with the intent that the mother will then try to prove she is a caring, loving mother by saying, “No! I’ll have a hospital birth!”

It’s a fear-inducing accusation that’s the height of manipulation.

Either that, or it’s just ignorant and hate-filled. But either way, the proper response is, “Can you show me a study proving that? Because that wasn’t in any of the books I’ve read about homebirth,” with a smile, because if the doctor sees his hate-speech hasn’t affected you and you react with logic to his emotion-laden statement, he’s going to feel like an idiot.

I’m so sorry for your unimaginable loss, Kat. I also thank you for researching. By no means do I want to diminish what you went through or sound insensitive, so if I come across that way, I beg you to please forgive me. No matter where we are, horrific things can, and sometimes do happen. Because of the lack of unnecessary interventions, homebirth is safer…and much more peaceful – which in and of itself lends itself to a more productive, safe birth. It irritates me that the facts can be completely disregarded like a child plugging his ears so he can’t hear. It literally makes me ill. My own dad is an EMT and the fire chief of our city. I mentioned to him that I’m hoping by the time I’m certified as a midwife, we’ll have progressed enough to cover midwives on all insurance (our state medicaid has covered it at least 11 years, but only at a birthing center). He said they won’t do it because it’s so dangerous and there could be complications. Ugh. He couldn’t be more wrong, yet to argue with him is pointless. He’d just plug his ears and I’d be left standing here ticked off. Sometimes it feels like an exercise in futility.

Mothers not caring about whether their babies live or die must be why homebirths have such wonderful natural birth success rates when compared to hospitals. Not having all that added stress works wonders apparently!

To echo everyone already, what an idiot to say something like that.

You know, it probably also correlates with the higher breastfeeding rates for mothers who choose natural birth. Because we all know nursing is such a selfish choice.

Sorry for commenting again, but this statement just really irks me.

Out of all the things I’ve heard about what ignorant doctors say or do this has to be what makes me the angriest. I am 17 weeks pregnant and planning a home birth. According to this moron I don’t care about my baby. How the hell can someone say crap like that after my husband and I spent 15 months trying and hoping to get pregnant? We’ve been trying to have children for 6 years, we’ve had 2 losses and 1 living child and now pregnant with number 4. To anyone who actually thinks that home birth mommies don’t care about their babies well, you can just go jump in a creek.

So, the way to persuade a woman to birth and feel safe in the hospital is to bully her? I personally do go to the hospital, but can see why women birth at home because of the treatment they may receive in emotional blackmale and also in interventions they do not need. Don’t doctors know there is a population of women that might choose hosptial birth if it weren’t for attitudes like this?

Part of the problem is that we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the idea of minimising risk. This in itself is a laudable attitude, and we shouldn’t moan about it. However, we have gone from minimising risk, which is achievable, to eliminating risk, which can never be achieved. This attitude has led to idiotic ideas like bushes being removed from parks in case paedophiles use them to lurk in, or Sweden considering banning motorbikes because they are an inherently dangerous form of transport that doesn’t fit with eliminating road danger. Childbirth is risky, as is all birth for all mammals. Babies will die whether they are born in hospital or at home. It is no comfort to anybody, but in most cases it will be nobody’s fault. it will be, tragically and awfully, ‘just one of those things’. that, of course does nothing to assuage the parents’ grief, or help the caregivers deal with it. None of us would like to be involved in a case where a mother or baby die, and so we seek to make the chance of it happening as small as possible. However, this ideal has become an obsession such that womens’ and midwives’ autonomy has been eroded. I had the great privilege to be taught by the late Tricia Anderson, a truly great midwife who did an awful lot to empower women and midwives, and promote normality. One of her lectures started with a story I hope will fit in here, which sums up far better than I can where and how this situation began.
Out of the laboratory: back to the darkened room?
Tricia Anderson was recently asked to speak at a MIDIRS Hot Topics study day on homebirth. Ironically, she was needed to attend a woman giving birth at home and wasn?t able to give her talk! So we are reproducing the text of her presentation below.
Everyone knows that cats need to give birth undisturbed in a dark, secluded place – perhaps preparing a softly lined box in the darkest corner of the furthest room underneath the bed. And everyone who knows about cats understands that you must never disturb a cat in labour or a newly delivered cat and her litter of kittens. Otherwise the cat’s labour will stop or she may reject her kittens. Everyone knows this.
But just imagine that one day, quite a long time ago, a group of well-meaning scientists decided that they wanted to study how cats give birth. So they asked anyone who had a cat, that when she went into labour to bring them to their laboratory – a brightly-lit, noisy, modern scientific laboratory where scientists could study them, by attaching lots of monitors and probes, surrounding them by strange technicians constantly coming in and out with clipboards…. In the laboratory, the labouring cats could hear the sound of other cats in distress, and there were no private dark corners for them to retreat to, but only rows of brightly-lit cages under constant scrutiny of the scientists.
And the scientists studied the labouring cats in their brightly-lit cages for many years, and saw that their labours were erratic, how they slowed down and even stopped, and how heart-breakingly distressed the cats were. Their mews and their cries were terrible. They saw how many of the the kittens were deprived of oxygen and were born shocked and needing resuscitation. And, after many years the scientists concluded: ‘well, it seems that cats do not labour very well’.
Then, because the scientists were caring people and wanted to help the poor cats, they invented lots of clever machines to improve the cats’ labours, to monitor the oxygen levels in the kittens; they invented pain-killing drugs and tranquillisers to ease the poor cats? distress, and drugs to make labour become regular and stop it slowing down. They even developed clever emergency operations to save the distressed kittens’ lives.
The scientists wrote scientific papers which told everyone about the difficulties they had observed and how cats do not give birth very well, and all about the clever feline birth technology they had invented. The newspapers and television spread the word, and soon everyone started bringing their cats to the laboratory in labour, because of all their clever feline technology and of how many kittens? lives they had saved. Looking round at all the complicated technology, people were heard to say: ?This must be the safest place in the world for cats to give birth in?.
Years passed, and the workload at the scientists’ laboratories grew busier and busier. They had to take on new staff and train them in their feline labour techniques, and slowly the original scientists grew old and retired. But sadly the new up-and-coming technicians didn’t know about the original experiment; they didn?t even know it was an experiment. They had never seen cats giving birth in softly-lined boxes in the furthest, darkest corner of the furthest room ? why, what a dangerous idea! They were absolutely convinced that cats do not give birth very well without a lot of technical assistance – why, think of all the years of scientific evidence they had collected – and would go home at night feeling very pleased with themselves for all their clever and good work in saving cats’ and kittens’ lives.
Sadly most midwives and doctors working today have trained and worked for most of their lives in that laboratory: and in that laboratory ? which is of course, a modern consultant maternity unit – childbirth is in a mess.

This is infuriating. For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back and led me to homebirth my third was when a doctor (treating me for a non-pregnancy related illness) told me that HE did not care if my 12 week unborn baby lived or died. (Well, he did a lot of other horrible things to me too, but that was one of the worst.)

I’m actually one of those people who decided to have a homebirth on the day I went into labor. I called my midwife’s office and she wasn’t on call that day. They refused to call her and the only OB on call was the one I hated, so I decided, “I’ve had two babies already. I can do this at home.” And I did. I don’t recommend unassisted birth, but it worked out well for us. I would definitely do it again. My first labor was secretly augmented by pitocin (I wasn;t informed of the “fluids” the nurse gave me), my second was completely natural in the hosptial, and I just knew I wouldn’t get the birth I wanted without my midwife being there to fight for me.

http://messageboards.ivillage.co.uk/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-ukpbhomebir&msg=2962.2

Try this one. It is a link to a discussion board thet has quite a good thread that also references Sheila Kitzinger among other.
Some notes for you non- Brits:
1) Michel Odent is a French obstetrician who pioneered the use of water birth and its acceptance by our medical colleagues. He is also a very vocal advocate of maintaining non- interventionist policies in childbirth.
2) the NMC is the Nursing and Midwifery Council. The new regulating body for all nurses, midwives and health visitors in the UK. You can find them on http://www.nmc-uk.org. You can find all the rules and codes of conduct for our practice, including the midwives rules. You can also search the database for anybody who claims to be a nurse and check their registration (look for Andrew Robbins…) They also have the power to sanction us and investigate our practice. All of this is in the public domain if tou look under fitness to practise.

3)The Cochrane Database is a database of medical research around the world, that is searchable by all professionals. They periodically review research on particular topics and offer a balanced conclusion.

4) Midirs is a midwifery research digest that collates and publishes relevant research from worldwide. It is searchable as a database and publishes a quarterly digest. They have also produced the Informed Choice booklets that offer women evidence based and balanced information for women. You can order them from the site. There are versions for professionals too. Here in Jersey we give them to all the women who come to us for care.

Well of course he told her that, if she gives birth at home, how are the hospitals and drug companies going to get paid? I’m being sarcastic, of course!

This is without a doubt the worst “My OB said what?” quote I have seen.

I had a bad result will be the last home birth. My baby was breech deliveries stupid, and did not make it. Exact same result does not, and shall take the women planned childbirth. Now I wanted my baby born in the safest place possible.

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