Defending the right of Mums to have a safe home birth
The two greatest experiences of my life occurred in a birthing suite.
The birth of a new baby is an exhilarating experience that produces emotions from deep within your soul.
Yet somehow I think the emotions that child birth produces in woman are even more significant. Obviously pregnancy causes massive physical change but less obvious is the enormous emotional change having a baby ushers in.
My wife and I were very lucky with both our babies. High quality medical advice mixed with relatively easy births (that comment is sure to get me into hot water) meant that our experience was everything we could have hoped for.
It was a very intense and private experience.
That is why I was surprised when I saw the Federal Government’s reforms to maternity services, in particular I was very surprised by a small but concerning provision in the legislation that bans a range of medical professionals from delivering babies at home.
As it stands now, you are able to legally choose to have your baby at home, in fact there is quite a passionate group of parents who have chosen this option.
I have been speaking to some of these mothers recently, many who are outraged by the Government’s unwanted intervention.
They argue (with merit) that they should be able to choose to have their babies in their home with professional medical care.
Many have had horrific experiences in state run public hospitals and simply refuse to risk that experience again.
The new Roxon plan will ban these women from having professional assistance during their home birth. It will not prevent the practice of home birthing, it just proposes to outlaw health professionals from assisting with the birth. It has the potential to make these home births much more dangerous.
It would seem to me that banning health professionals from assisting with home births is more likely to increase the danger by pushing the practice underground, where some parents will still want to have their babies at home but will not have trained professionals to assist.
Now this is just crazy. The Government is not suggesting that birthing at home is dangerous, indeed there are Government funded programmes that operate home birthing services.
The evidence suggests that the health outcomes from home births have not led to increasingly dire outcomes, to the contrary it appears that many parents who have chosen to have home births have healthy babies and then recommend the experience to others. Does anyone seriously believe that parents would want to endanger their unborn child?
It appears that this provision may have been included to resolve an insurance difficulty not prevent a health problem.
If that is the case, it is policy written for the bureaucrats not the people.
In addition surely banning home births is going to put more pressure on our already stretched hospital system.
I support parents having a choice of maternity services with the best possible medical assistance they can access.
Maybe if the Minister and her bureaucrats thought harder about how to resolve the insurance issues, this Bill would not sacrifice parental choice.
Home births are not for everyone; we did not choose this option nor will we in the future. But I don’t believe removing this choice will help ensure that the birthing experience should be as safe and special as it can be.