Thought I’d share this lovely ad which features a homebirth. It’s so beautiful….imagine if ad’s like this aired in Australia?!?

Recently, I’ve been attending monthly meet ups with fellow birthworkers and getting so much out of it! It is truly wonderful to just been in the energy of such passion and there’s always a brilliant conversation about birth to be had of course!

I’ll be soaking up more wisdom soon at a weekend workshop run by Jenny Blyth. It should be fantastic and I’m very excited! So, stay tuned!

For more information contact Lisa Barrett

I literally had a love hate relationship with placentas – I suffered two post partum hemorrhages with my daughter and then a partial detached placenta with hemorrhaging with my son, so you could say I have “placenta baggage”….which has led me to be pretty darn interested in them!

So, because of this I  (with a little help) have been following a bit of a self directed study on the magnificence of the placenta.

How amazing are these organs?!?!

I got the chance to have a really good respectful look at a beautiful one yesterday and I cannot tell you how blown away I am!

In the funk of my last birth I really didn’t get to connect with Leo’s placenta in the way I probably should have but seeing this well, it was just great!

Wow!…the beautiful branching tree of life pattern, the membranes (how thin but tough!), the shape and texture of the cotelydons, the  strong cord, the insertion of the cord, the smell…..

Pure raw beauty, which so perfectly  kept a sweet baby living for many moons, tucked up inside her mama.

Some days I cannot believe how perfectly designed women are to bring life forth into this universe.

Amazing.

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Have your say (again!!)!!!

The Maternity Services Review report, released last weekend, was an attempt to delivery continuity of care and midwife-led services to more Australian women. In so doing, it has stripped that very same care and service from the only women who currently have it – homebirth mums.

The fact that it did this in the face of having received the majority of its submissions from homebirth parents is galling and speaks volumes for the way “public consultation” occurs in this country. But the fact that the report’s recommendations, if accepted by the Government and made law, would criminalise the high quality care currently delivered to women who choose to give birth at home by registered, professional, independent midwives to their clients is radical and dangerous.

Good intentions have paved the way. The MSR was established partly in response to rising birth intervention rates and widespread concern that women were being poorly served by a maternity care system that was fragmented, expensive and increasingly medicalised.

But the process became hijacked by professional lobbying, deal-making and perhaps a strange reflex of governments to favour institutionalised power over the rights of individual constituents. The report is fairly forthcoming about this:

“In recognising that, at the current time in Australia, homebirthing is a sensitive and controversial issue, the Review Team has formed the view that the relationship between maternity health care professionals is not such as to support homebirth as a mainstream Commonwealth-funded option (at least in the short term). The Review also considers that moving prematurely to a mainstream private model of care incorporating homebirthing risks polarising the professions…”

So as long as the AMA and RANZCOG are hostile to homebirth -ideologically, not evidentially – the government is not prepared to stare them down.

In the next paragraph, the Report notes the existing small-scale state-funded public homebirth schemes, with no evidence that such models were polarising, or that they were being undermined by a poor relationship between maternity health care professionals, or that there were any justifiable safety concerns. But the MSR is not engaging with the evidence, it’s playing politics.

The public consultation process is made farcical when over half the submissions are lightly dismissed without reasons of substance. Such deal-making reveals a government prepared to bend to the powerful medical lobby even against the weight of public submission and international evidence.

The Review concluded that, “while homebirth is the preferred choice for some women, they represent a very small proportion of the total.” Since when has being in the minority constituted an acceptable reason for discrimination? The fact that only a small proportion of the population will need heart transplants is no reason to ban them or block public funding to them. The small minority of families who choose private education due to religious beliefs are still supported by Commonwealth funding. And of course homebirth will be unpopular when it is the only way to give birth in Australia that receives no public funding whatsoever.

The report notes that in countries where homebirth is publicly funded – New Zealand and the United Kingdom, for example – homebirth rates are ten times those in Australia.

But the MSR report goes further than merely continuing to deny homebirth funding. It becomes dangerous when it takes a back-door route to criminalisation of homebirth.

Under the proposed new National Registration and Accreditation Scheme, to apply to midwives from July 2010, midwives must have professional indemnity insurance to obtain registration. This is not currently the case – hospital insurance schemes cover their employed midwives; homebirth midwives work uninsured. The report notes that this latter situation is unacceptable. Homebirth consumers and midwives agree and have repeatedly sought Federal assistance in obtaining appropriate insurance.

But the report, while recommending Commonwealth-supported professional indemnity for midwives in collaborative team-based models, withholds such support where homebirth is concerned, since “it is likely that insurers will be less inclined to provide indemnity cover for private homebirths and, if they did provide cover, the premium costs would be very high.”

Neither evidence nor logic support this. The reason insurers have not offered coverage to privately practising midwives since 2002 is not the risk profile of midwives. It is that the pool of homebirth midwives shrank to an uncommercial size during the insurance crisis in 2002 – which was caused by astronomical compensation payouts against obstetricians, not midwives.

Everyone in the industry suddenly became uninsurable, yet the then government’s bailout package, under the Premium Support and High Cost of Claims Schemes, saved only GPs and obstetricians. So midwives had to work uninsured or give up their practice. Unsurprisingly, many quit attending homebirths.

Even if the risk profile of homebirth practice did make premiums too high, that would only put midwives in the same boat as GPs and obstetricians, who receive substantial government support under these schemes. The simple, obvious answer is to extend the schemes to midwives.

Instead, by cutting midwives loose on insurance, the government is effectively outlawing homebirth, since by mid-next year uninsured midwives will be unable to obtain registration, and unregistered midwifery is a criminal offence. There is no surer way than this to make homebirth unsafe.

Consumers rely on registration to ensure that they are choosing a skilled and professional carer. To remove this indicator of quality away from consumers, not on the basis of professionalism but on the availability of a suitable insurance scheme, puts women at risk. More women will birth unattended.

Women are entitled to choose where they give birth and with whom. They are entitled to refuse treatment and to choose it. They are entitled to give birth in a hospital, a birth centre, a home or under a tree if that’s what they want to do. Research shows that a woman is safest birthing in the environment where she feels safest. And to make it illegal for a woman who chooses to birth at home to access appropriate care is surely not the intention of this government.

However you feel about homebirth, whether you’d want it for yourself or not, the removal of a woman’s right to birth where she chooses is indefensible and should be a matter of grave concern to all women, just as if women were denied access to breast cancer treatment, epidurals, or condoms.

The government can’t ban homebirth any more than it can ban sex, but by banning professional, registered midwives from attending homebirths, it greatly increases risk.

Not funding homebirth is just bad policy: cost-ineffective to Australian taxpayers and unfair to Australian women. But making homebirth illegal is paternalistic, internationally isolated and dangerous.

Homebirth with an independent midwife is a great model of care for lots of reasons, key among them that it provides continuity of care with a known carer – something the Maternity Services Review says it wants to see in hospital -based models. So why is it killing off the only model that reliably delivers that care?

Giving birth at home with a highly skilled and qualified midwife is not new or radical. Outlawing it is.

Alison Leemen is an Editor of Birthings, the quarterly magazine of Homebirth Access Sydney, and sits on the committee of that organisation. She organises community support and advocacy for homebirth in the Sydney region and seeks fair financial support for homebirth from state and federal governments. The mother of one and a half, she is passionate about improving maternity care and birth outcomes for all women in Australia, not just the one per cent who are currently fortunate enough to be able to access homebirth.

I’m not going to write to much right now as I am seething and utterly disappointed about the Maternity Services Review that was released by the fat cats yesterday. What a HUGE step backward! No changes. No reforms. What an awful result.

Please read it and think about it. Think about what it means to women, babies,families, midwives, birth workers and those folks who really want to make a change for the better in this universe…..

Off to have a bit of a cry

On another note, I think John has had to listen to about a million rants and raves from me about various birth related matters. He’s such a wonderful sounding board though and very supportive.

Last week, I caught up with two brilliant midwives and chatted all things birth. They were demonstrating and having a play with the art of  using a rebozo for birth and beyond. Here is a lovely transcript about rebozo work, sourced from Midwifery Today. Also, this video shows a partner using these techniques on a labouring woman for relaxation.

It was just so inspiring to soak up there wisdom and knowledge and I’m very grateful for their willingness to share with such a green thing like me!!

So, I haven’t really come down off the high yet!! So much to learn!!!!

I’ve always been a champion for informed choice and have long held a passion for providing information to those in need. This led me to work in libraries for a number of years….but after two varied (but non the less incredible in each it’s own way) birth experiences, I was finally who I am today….me. A woman in many different guises.

I came to the realisation that being ‘with’ birth and supporting women and their families in this amazing time in their lives was meant for me….

My belief is that women are INCREDIBLE, perfectly divine and perfectly designed to give birth in the way nature intended. Birth is a miraculous journey for both mother and babe. An utterly amazing catalyst for change in life…..a birth of not just a new, pure being, but the birth of a woman and the unfolding dynamic family.

Birth is NOT a medical emergency. Birth should not be intervened with, augmented or treated with anything less than sheer reverence. Women should be supported, nurtured and completely loved in this precious time and beyond. They should be respected above all. They should be safe.

I won’t go into the politics of birth at this point of time and the extreme crisis maternity care is in right now…..but these are key reasons as to why I want to support women and help hold the space in birth. I have experienced the extremes of medicalised birth and blissful, transcendental birth in a safe, supportive and loving environment (at home).

It is my wish that ALL women have the freedom to have a gentle, raw, empowering, awe-inspiring and completely beautiful birth. It is my wish that ALL women be respected and safe in birth, that women are informed, supported and are nourished in the journey of motherhood. It is my wish that families are supported. It is my wish that ALL babies are given their birthright of a gentle, unhindered entrance into their world. You are creating the future in your birth. If this sounds huge, it’s because IT IS.

A safe and empowered birth is not only  incredibly important to the mother’s physical and emotional  self  but obviously, the development of every aspect of the child, it’s family, community and society. Birth is the beginning. I could go on and on…….

Let us respect birth. Let us respect mothers. Let us respect our precious new life. Let us respect the importance of family.

It all starts here.