"Why are we fetishizing doing it at home?"
From today's Guardian, While women in the developing world are dying in childbirth, why are we fetishising doing it at home?, by Catherine Bennett:Even if earthly arrangements were, in every other respect, irreproachable, human parturition would be fatal to the theory of intelligent design... Whatever the reason - divine malice, or the evolutionary conflict between big brains and pelvises tilted for walking upright - the consequences for at least 529,000 women a year are fatal. The World Health Organisation has estimated that this may be only half the true number...I suspect that the same pressure to hold down costs that leads the NHS to deny life prolonging drugs to cancer patients is at work here as well. The government thinks that homebirth will save large amounts of money, and the NHS is utterly broke (and broken). Noisy and vociferous homebirth advocates are being used as cover for the government to take away services from the majority of women.
... [T]he principle that - for western women - satisfactory childbirth involves far more than a safe delivery has long been mainstream. It ... was repeated this week, with Patricia Hewitt's offer of home births for all: "We want it to be as safe and satisfying for every woman in every part of the country as it can be."
An insincere promise, obviously, given that many maternity units are still appallingly understaffed (as well as dirty and ill-equipped)...
So long as their babies are safe, there is, of course, no reason why Britain's birth fetishists should not attempt, and then advertise on dedicated websites, their prodigious feats of home-dilation ... There seems no reason, however, why this peculiarly middle-class form of self-absorption should be indulged by the rationing, supposedly rational NHS. Merciless when denying life-prolonging drugs to cancer patients, indifferent to pensioners who are still being humiliated on mixed wards, Hewitt has instead prioritised the demands of that limited group of women who believe that state-funded childbirth should be tailored around their own lifestyle choices, as set out in bossy, novella-length birth plans ...
While terminally sick and elderly patients are dispatched to die among strangers in medic-free wards, Hewitt has accepted that our sturdiest, most articulate primigravidae should be encouraged to summon medical staff to their sitting rooms, for reasons which, when they are not to do with the sacred, or personal self-esteem, seem largely to relate to convenience ...
There are no plans of any kind to implement the right to choose homebirth. There is no indication that the government will shift resources into the training and hiring of appropriate personnel. This is entirely about saving money and reducing services. It is cynical in the extreme, and homebirth advocates have made it possible.
Labels: NHS
<< Home