Oh Tegam! You didn't say! I had no idea. I'm so sorry honey. I'm glad it was ok in the end and that his birth was just about you. But I am sorry they treated you like that. That just isn't ok. My mw was happy and confident enough to have a feel and we trusted each other that my baby was head down. If they arnt confident of their palpating skills, what the hell are they doing practicing independently. All women don't need a scan at 40 weeks to check babies position. What a load of rot! So sorry love.

Kellbell, we have no publically funded programs here. And I for one am not devastated by it. Only because I don't want publically funded ones to push independant midwives out of practice. When we have public ones, they can call them the 'safe ones'. The ones that have all the restrictions that don't allow mothers autonomous choice will be considered the only safe ones and then it will be thought that only eligible Mw's who work in a system that doesn't support choice are able to safely practice independently. Then the insurance issues will be brought to the fore. They will cover the publically funded homebirths and so they will tell us we have options, even tho most of the women on this thread would be risked out of a public hb program, or like me, never let in in the first place, but they will point and say, "look, there are choices here". Even tho they will never allow me access to those choices and they will stop my preferred carers from caring for me on pain of fines..... I can see where it is headed, and Mark my words, until we enshrine a woman's right to chose in our culture and our midwives duty of care to their women, regardless of those choices, then we are going to loose our best and brightest and we will make collateral damage of any woman who is too fat or too old, who has had too many babies or by the 'wrong route', or who had an elevated bsl once...... Sighhhhhh...... Sorry for the rant. I'm not against the hospital funded programs as such, just of where they are leading us...