Follow the Yellow Brick Maternity Ward

In the land of Oz, there’s no place like home…

…unless you’re having a baby.

Potential legislation from Australia’s Labor Party (no irony intended, I’m sure), based on a report form the Federal Maternity Services Review, looks to implement the de facto criminalization of midwife-assisted homebirths (and, potentially, all homebirths).

From Home Birth Australia:

The Report proposes an end to women’s access to midwifery care for homebirth, except possibly within state-run services. If the Report’s recommendations are followed, homebirth midwifery could become illegal in 2010 with the introduction of National Registration of health caregivers.

The report reads:

[T]he Review Team has formed the view that the relationship between maternity health care professionals is not such as to support homebirth as a mainstream Commonwealth-funded option (at least in the short term). The Review also considers that moving prematurely to a mainstream private model of care incorporating homebirthing risks polarising the professions rather than allowing the expansion of collaborative approaches to improving choice and services for Australian women and their babies.

The Australian editorializes:

Although the number of women giving birth at home is tiny in Australia – just over 700 in 2006, or 0.26 per cent of all births – this represents a committed group. More than 50 per cent of submissions to the federal Government’s recent maternity services review came from women calling for greater support for homebirthing services, which claim up to a 10-fold greater share of births in some overseas countries such as Britain.

Since 2001, an estimated 150 midwives have provided homebirth services to women, at a typical cost of between $3000 and $5000, but without rebates from Medicare or private health funds, and without insurance cover that would give recourse to compensation should anything go wrong.

I can just imagine that some people around here (paging Charles Anthony) will object to the idea of the government paying for midwives.  And, sure, I can see your point and, in a perfect world, agree with it.  However, in a society that has already moved to a socialized system of medicare, legislation like this is just perverse.

Labor is setting up a system that encourages women to go to hospitals for child birth.  If women are being given “free” hospital births, but must pay for midwives at homebirths, the government is distorting incentives and working against choice, freedom and responsibility.  And the idea that politicians are the best arbiters of birthing decisions is abhorrent.

Further, studies in societies that do not adhere to such a medicalized technocracy demonstrate that giving birth in a hospital increases the rate of interventions, caesareans and complications.  The Australian government is pondering enacting legislation that risks people’s lives and health, increases costs for medicare, and violates personal liberty.  That’s quite a trifecta.

Thankfully, in Canada, we are moving away from the dangerous hyper-medicalization of birth.  It is sad that Australia’s mothers and babies see no such protections.

It’s difficult to click your heels together when your feet are in stirrups.

(H/T: inFORMing birth)