Watch Sunday night at 6.30 on 7 tonight!!!

[lilmisshavachat]

Congratulations Anna on your HB and thank you for sharing this with us all... I attended the rally in Canberra and this is the first footage I have seen of it anywhere.. To anyone who watched this on Channel 7's site, I just wanted to see if you noticed that there is a poll for whether you believe women should have the choice to HB and I just voted and the numbers were 96% say yes and 4% say no... great outcome in a poll.. Thanks again Anna.. a beautiful birth...

[BhoysGirl]

Anna - such a beautiful birth to watch, thank you for sharing it.

[Smoke Jaguar]

It was a bald-faced lie or plain ignorance on Pesce's part to cite that study - neither trait of which I like to see in a health professional. He kept saying 'planned homebirth' and the stats included more than just planned HB's! They also included high-risk women, high-risk women who just didn't make it to a planned hospy birth, etc. It was a skewed study. He only ever uses the one study and says others arent' relevant because they were conducted in other countries. What he's trying to say is that Australian women are somehow biologically so different from Dutch, NZ, and UK birthing women that the stats cannot possibly be be used to support HB in Oz. We are only systematically different - by using HIS preferred system, Oz women are at a distinct disadvantage! At the Senate Inquiry he tried to say he was for choice, just not HB choice...ummm...listen to yourself!
Anyway, I think the HB gone wrong was also a perfect illustration of an underground HB. THe couple would have been better off freebirthing and going with their feeling that it wasn't going right That would still have been the product of an unregulated system and not fair on the family. Yes, the baby may well have lived had they been at hospy...and had a MW who wasn't scared, who was more skilled than fearful and who had some professional cred to front up to the hospy with.
My DS was a FBC waterbirth with HypnoBirthing and he was born quite like Anna's. The effect of moving from home was on me, and I never want to get into a car during labour ever again if I don't need to
I am really pleasantly surprised at how well Ch 7 produced this piece, and it now is clear to me why we saw the Ch7 people there at the rally and next to no reporting on that night's news...they were making THIS!

[Snacks]

At the Senate Inquiry he tried to say he was for choice, just not HB choice

Good heavens, did anyone take him seriously?!? (I know people must do, but come on. How ridiculous a statement is that?)

[Smoke Jaguar]

I hope not! As I was reading the transcript of him speaking at the Inquiry hearing thingy, I kept laughing and reading it to DP because it was just so stupid - every turn he took he was cornered with very little effort! Why anyone keeps asking for his opinion is beyond me - he has no personal experience with HB whatsoever. At least ask a GP or OB who's attended HB's, puhlease
And this statement from the family in the US confirms all of our suspicions, too:

Jenifer Holloman is the woman from the US who was interviewed on the Sunday Night Show last night. She has sent me several emails this morning and has asked if I can forward this statement on her behalf to anyone who may have been watching the show.



"I would like to impart to all Australian women and their families- that our family is so disappointed with how Australia Sunday Night chose to edit our story down to its most tragic details and infer through their choice of tableaus and pictures of our grieving family, that we somehow wanted to be portrayed as nothing more than victims of bad home birth midwifery where a doctor saved the day.

The doctor is just a part of the story, perhaps if I had used a more negative word instead of "poor doctor" they would have edited it differently- For the record, the same doctor will not help us in our efforts to hold this midwife accountable, he has not even returned my letter and follow up phone call requesting his help in this matter. We have invited him to hold this midwife accountable for her actions that affected him and his staff. As I like to say: "Apparently, home birth lost a baby that day, not our family."

What we would have liked to impart to all home birth parents in Australia is that we never agreed to a story that would play into the skewed and unoriginal rhetoric of doctors, who think a hospital birth is superior to a home birth. In our particular case the crux of the issue is that in our state, midwives have no standard licensure and anyone virtually can call themselves a midwife regardless of whether or not they are astutely trained as out of hospital midwives. The competence and training is our issue, not necessarily the licensure.

We believe good midwives need this distinction and poor providers need to be sanctioned through something that the state provides such as a board of registration of midwives where midwives decide what the credentialing process would be and where consumers can trust that they can get statistics on sanctions, IUFD, etc. so they can choose safe home birth knowing that their provider is trained at the gold standard of out of hospital birth care.

Secondarily, we believe that by doctors and legislators refusal to acknowledge that out of hospital birth is safe and cooperate with home birth parents and midwives, they are saying that mothers and babies are collateral damage for their reckless and dangerous policy of non-cooperation with mothers who birth at home and their trained providers.

Lastly, we said everything we did- which the show of course didn't show - in an effort to try to show legislators and doctors that we are the human toll for bad health care policy. This is for our own family, in our own state. We did not intend in any way to support the myth propagated by doctors and in this case- Sunday Night Australia - that home birth is dangerous. Bad health care policy and non-cooperation amongst professionals in perinatal care- now there is something dangerous!"


Jenifer Holloman

The Emmet Foundation

Offering Comfort to those who lose a baby

This note was sent to Jo Hunter, from Homebirth Australia (google for website).

[onthefly]

Congratulations on your beautiful birth Anna - I want one like that too!

I thought the show was pro-HB, but I WISH they would interview a 'health professional' who is not so anti-HB, at least another opinion from doc or midwife who've actually attended a HB, as lulu says.
For what it's worth, re the segment on the couple that lost their baby, I took it as an indictment of the health system there and criminalisation of homebirth midwives, not as 'proof' that hospitals and doctors were better.

[sunshine_sieben]

All in all, the segment wasn't bad.
Anna, what a beautiful birth! Congratulations!

Dr. Pesce was giving me the heebee jeebies, though. To someone who knows nothing about HB, his strong statements and blatant misinformation would have skewed the whole segment anti HB, I think. He kept saying that an Australian Hospital is the safest place in the world to have a baby these days. What is he basing that statement on?
Unfortunately, to many people watching this, who are likely to have been biased against HB to start with, his "professional" opinion would have held more weight than the opinion of a "hippie" HBing mum.
The more subtle things like the calmer HB baby, etc. would have gone unnoticed by many viewers. To some, a hysterically crying baby is a sign of good health.

However, it was probably the most balanced piece on the topic I have seen on mainstream media.

Sasa

By the way, I have had a FBC all natural waterbirth with DD and she didn't cry initially, then cried a little before being very calm and alert, then fallinng asleep. DS was born at home (was planned as a FBC waterbirth, but we never made it out of the door)) on the loungeroom floor with only my mum and DD present. It was not a peacful experience as such, as it wasn't planned like that. But I was at peace with the idea of him being born right there and then when I realised we weren't gonna make it to the BC. Nobody was stressing. He cried initially, but calmed the moment I put him to my chest.
So, I reckon your baby's state after birth is not only related to where he or she was born. It has a lot to do with the mother's stress levels and if being at home makes you feel relaxed, then chances are, your baby will be, too. Of course drugs during labour have a very profound effect on the baby's alertness.

[Melody7]

I thought the show was pro-HB, but I WISH they would interview a 'health professional' who is not so anti-HB, at least another opinion from doc or midwife who've actually attended a HB, as lulu says.

This is what's really infuriating - they DID interview several other professionals - Anna's independant midwife (seen, but not heard in the segment) and Dr Hannah Dahlen (Assoc Professor of Midwifery at Uni of West Syd; Secretary of Aust College of Midwives), among others. Both would have spoken of the safety of homebirth and refuted the stats quoted by Pesce....