Watch Sunday night at 6.30 on 7 tonight!!!

Sasa - that was another aspect that got to me, about the state of Oz maternity services...there is absolutely NO evidence that says Australia is even in the top 5 countries for giving birth in safety! It's not just Pesce, it's a lot of Labor pollies spinning out this blatant mistruth. It is simply NOT true. I'm not saying it's a terrible place to give birth, but it's not the best by a long shot. The c-section rate, for one, belies this all by itself. Not to mention other measures of good outcomes (breastfeeding initiation and retention rates, PND outcomes, infant wellbeing beyond the post-partum period etc) that indicate a country with a good maternity service. It's either deluded self-belief or a bald-faced lie. Sadly, though, so many people just accept it as truth and Pesce knows this. He knows it because his profession is based on paying the OB and trusting what that person says - in many cases, disengaging from instinct and paying someone else to use theirs instead.
Why not interview someone like Dr Peter Lucas, who must be the last remaining GP obs who attends homebirths in Melbourne? As a medico, wouldn't he provide more 'balance'? I guess they just needed to have people 'for' and 'against' and not get anyone who transcended perceived boundaries...maybe they think viewers can't handle true balance.

Mayaness, that's exactly what I meant, they should have had a professional on the other side of the argument, too. I found that the argument could have been perceived as "hospital birth is safe but clinical while HB is very dangerous, but more enjoyable" which plays quite nicely into the hands of those who say that HB is a selfish desire of some women who put their own "experience" above their baby's safety. Many people believe what the authority figure says without questioning it, unfortunately. Which is how we got to this state of affairs in the first place.

And although I can't seem to find those stats, I was under the impression that even in regards to maternal and infant mortality there were quite a few countries (like Japan) that had better stats than Australia.

Sasa

Absolutely! Talk to someone who is a trained Dr but still knows something about homebirth! Someone like Andrew Bisits who's the head OB at a hospital which offers homebirthing services.

Never ceases to amaze me that accusation of wanting a HB for 'selfish' reasons! Why else do women have epidurals (in the cases where it's not medically necessary) and pain relief? For themselves - it's not a decision made with the concerns about effects on the newborn taken into consideration, is it?
Was it Pesce in that Senate hearing who said the 'downside' to HB is that women can't access pain relief drugs? If it wasn't him (could have been a Labor MP)it was someone else that week who said it and I laughed so much at the arrogance of that statement! We're 'selfish' then, because we value this way of our children coming into the world and being at our own hormonal optimum to receive that child. Why would a woman choose to ignore the pain relief drugs that men so thoughtfully invented and used to enforce upon birthing women in hospitals? Geez, we must be so shortsighted!
Oh, well, these issues can't ever be covered in a short piece on commercial TV. I'm just glad they had Anna's story with the good outcome, instead of fishing for a bad Australian outcome.

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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.

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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....

i thought that as far as a HB story on a commercial 'prime-time' channel it was fairly open and attempting to come across as scoping the debates.

however, at the end of the day they still only gave us the 'tragic home-birth' example. i'm sorry but the australian hospital system also have statistics, so why do we only get told of the homebirth tragedies? especially, as the US family later wrote in response, when the whole point of them showing their story was cut and edited out only to be replaced with the 'dangers' facing every HB...pffffffft.

sorry, i did appreciate the effort overall, but it still irks me that with EVERY HB story they have to have the personal tragedy (as though it is par for the course).

Mmmmm, I know this is an old thread. But I have had a thought about it recently, sparked by a post Kelly wrote about Breastfeeding.
Her point was that if someone presents both sides of the sory, but subtely (sp?) steers you in one direction over the other, his argument is even stronger. At least that's how I read it.

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Why do the commercial baby milk companies offer pro and con lists that acknowledge some of their product's shortcomings? Because any "balanced" approach that is presented in a heavily biased culture automatically supports the bias. If A and B are nearly equivalent, and if more than 90% of mothers ultimately choose B, as mothers in the United States do (according to an unpublished 1992 Mothers' Survey by Ross Laboratories that indicated fewer than 10% of U.S. mothers nursing at a year), it makes sense to follow the majority. If there were an important difference, surely the health profession would make a point of not staying out of the decision-making process.

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Taken from "Breasfeeding is NOT best" https://www.bellybelly.com.au/forums...-not-best.html

I think this sort of applies here, too.
If they had only shown one side of the story, many people would have recognised the open bias and not taken the piece too seriously.
However, since they made an effort to present both sides, the conclusion that HB is dangerous is "obviously" correct and the argument has much more weight. The fully informed audience is coming to this conclusion all on its own.

It is like the OB who says that he is pro-natural birth and then starts talking c/s at 28 weeks because the baby is too larg, the pelvis too smal or any other arbitrary reason why this particular woman is "not suitable" for a natural birth. Had he said right from the start that he thinks that c/s are the gold standard of birth, the woman could have made the decision to seek out a less biased OB.