Protests over amendments to maternity services.

On Monday the 9th November 2009, women and supporters of maternity services reforms gathered around the country to protest the latest attacks on womens' right to choose a midwife- attended homebirth. Outside Kevin Rudd’s office in Brisbane, 400 passionate protesters gathered to tell the government that they were in danger of losing the electoral support of those women who believed in the right to choose where and how they birth.
The protests followed a recent announcement that maternity services reforms are to be amended so that midwives can only have access to the Medical Benefits Schedule, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and Commonwealth professional indemnity insurance if they worked with a doctor.
Australian College of Midwives president Associate Professor Jenny Gamble, believes that this amendment will give doctors the choice about how women give birth. "Doctors who support homebirthing are as rare as hen's teeth," she said.
Melbourne based birth attendant Julie Bell says “ it's not about safety - it's about control, profit, litigation-protection and misogyny.”
So why do women want to birth at home in the care of a midwife anyway?
Women who choose a homebirth do so for many reasons and often because of the very high rates of unnecessary intervention that accompanies a hospital birth. The chance of having a natural birth diminishes as one procedure necessitates another, culminating in a chain of events, known as ‘the cascade of intervention.’ An example of a birth procedure that is increasing in usage is the caesarian section which in 2006 accounted for 31% of Australian births. According to David O'Callaghan, chairman of the obstetrics committee at St Vincent's Private Hospital in Melbourne, the increase in caesarians are occurring because women are requesting them; often because the mother is older and more fearful of birthing complications.
Amazing when you consider that for the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, babies were born without the help of medical technology. As to the risks of modern day homebirth, according to Hannah Dahlen from The Australian College of Midwives, 708 women had planned homebirths in Australia in 2006 and there were no deaths reported amongst these births. In this same year 2730 babies died - most of them in Australian hospitals.
As a woman who birthed alone in a cold and sterile hospital ward in the early 1970s, I support the right of women to continue to have access to the private midwife who takes the woman through her pregnancy and enables her to birth naturally in her own home. I am justifiably angry that such a right was denied me and in its place a cold technology dominated the intimate and potentially wonderful human moments of birthing. We need to understand that birth is what a woman's body does as she is giving life to her baby and there is nothing pathological about it. The momentous understanding of this female beauty has been stolen from most of us but its memory is alive and well in the homebirth movement which needs our support.