Conflicting Reasoning of Homebirth and Anti Vaccination

[spenceee]

And, unless you want to sound patronising, I suggest you concern yourself less with the 'delicate emotions' of expectant mothers.

Please - Im merely recognising that pregnancy is a time of high emotion and hope and fear and everything else. Our parents only had their immediate family and friends to share their information and knowledge about birth and parenting wheras our generation faces an overload of information regarding the "best" things to do to have the healthiest and happiest children which in the end is what all loving parents want regardless of the path taken. Further to that, any supportive partner would and should absolutely be concerned with the emotional health of their pregnant wife/girlfriend as the alternative is ignorance and complacency.

[meow]

Okay, so from what I understand your focus is whether an action results in you living or dying. I think that is possibly the first issue that wont make these points of view match well as the focus of home birthers and non-vaxers is generally not just surviving, but thriving.

Looking purely from a survival standpoint though, medicalised birth still doesn't have good outcomes. As you say, in an emergency, hospital care can be life saving. Surgery is beyond the scope of the resources available at home so if it was needed then it could be more quickly accessed if at a hospital. However, these life threatening situations happen more often in hospitals due to the interventions in birth. A home birth has less risk of needing emergency surgical care given that the birth is unhindered. And then there's the fact that homebirths can actually transfer to a hospital if the birth isn't progressing well. Perhaps you may like to look more into US data showing the high level of birth intervention, high c-section rate, high level of access to medical care and yet a very high rate of maternal mortality.

Emotional trauma is a very important aspect of birth. Suicide is the highest cause of maternal mortality so we do need to include the effect that birth care has on mothers. This isn't just a new phenomenon with wider access to information. There are women today, our mothers and grandmothers, who STILL cannot speak of their birth experiences because they are so traumatised. When we consider thriving and not just surviving, these aspects also become important to the discussion.

The second area I think you are focused on is evidence based information. We need to consider how we frame our pursuit of evidence though. Why should birth with a skilled midwife outside of a hospital and non-vaccination need to prove themselves as safe? These are the historical and biological norms of the human race. Would it not make more sense for the new technology to be proven safe?

I know that many people feel medicalised birth is proven safe by the fact that maternal mortality has declined, but could this not be a result of increased maternal health and nutrition? How does the high maternal mortality rate in the US factor into this argument? The studies do find vaccinations to be safe in terms of their immediate effect on mortality (people rarely instantly die from vaccination), but again the issue of looking beyond surviving comes into play. Whether vaccinations impede a person's ability to thrive really hasn't been well researched. We still don't fully understand the effect they have on long-term health outcomes.