'Free birthing' AIBU to think this woman should not be encouraging people to do this

[WilliowGreen]

In this guardian article this woman boasts about her wonderful birth experience by rejecting all care including scans because "it was not empowering".
Before I had my baby (she is 2 weeks old) I would probably have thought her lack of self awareness was funny. Now it quite irrationally fills me with rage.
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/28/experience-i-had-a-free-birth.

why not Badger?

Badgers have hairy arses Tabby.

You would not wish that on your daughter.

tabbykitt:

I don't agree with the assumption that women need to be protected from information. This is something that happened. She gave birth at home without medical intervention. As a person who is interested in the world around me I want to hear about that. I don't want it censored because I am so stupid that I might decide to make a perfectly legal decision and people would rather I was protected from the knowledge that I am allowed to do this.

This woman didn't have a 'homebirth'
She had an unassisted birth without ante natal care.

That isn't a 'home birth' so can we stop putting her in the same category?

It is so unsurprising that she's in my neck of the hipster woods

Well I'm going to get splinters in my arse from sitting on the fence on this one TBH!!

I can totally see her point. I had a horrible pregnancy experience, with lots of intervention that led to nothing, and then ignored dyring the birth itself to the point that I coukd have been at home and had an experience like this lady and been much happier!!

I think that refusing medical intervention is a valid choice, and one I believe every individual should be able to make. As long as the risks are clearly explained, I'd fight for every womans choice to make the decision about what happens. There are plenty of countries in the world that don't have the medical system we do, and plenty of babies born there every year! Its all about weighing the risk of something going wrong and I don't have a problem with someone making that choice themselves, once talked through the risk.

Her body, her choice. Isn't this the mantra we live by? I Wouldn't want to go down the route of qualifying times when this should and shouldn't apply!

However, I do think that the article is irresponsible by not considering these risks, and setting that out. As it stands now it does read like propaganda, by not adequately showing the balance of the two sides.

She doesnt have any midwife friends. Otherwise she'd know that the scan is partly to detect if the placenta is over the cervix.

All I can hope is that this silly, smug, self-involved woman reads through the comments under her article, as she breastfeeds Fox, and starts to feel just a little more insecure (on his behalf) about whether her choice was really the right one.

Then I hope she gets his fucking vaccines done and doesn't play Russian roulette a second/ third time round.

As long as the risks are clearly explained, I'd fight for every womans choice to make the decision about what happens.

This.

Just Googled "Freebirthing gone wrong". There are some horror stories there.

I cant read it🙁

If I had followed her advice my children and I would have died. Pre eclampsia, rocketing high blood pressure and a true knot in the cord. Both emergency Cs. Thank god for the NHS and the fantastic staff.

My 'friend' did this - no scans as they were 'untested' and harmful to the foetus. She did attend midwife appointments but only to avoid attracting social services attention. When she went into labour (home birth) she deliberately left it too late for the midwife to get to her home in time. Her baby had breathing problems, luckily all was well in the end but I was appalled at her stupidity. We're not friends any more.

That said, in theory, I respect people's rights to made medical decisions for themselves as long as they have been informed of the consequences (and they are Fraser/Gillick competent). And I feel that the rights of a foetus should not be put before the rights of the mother.

So in short, my thinking on this issue is a mess and I am a massive hypocrite . Still think she was a fucking idiot though.

If you don't have Iain relief it doesn't necessarily follow you will scream either.
I didn't scream or make noises when I had mine.
In fact with one of mine I must have been crowning at the point of the consultant team visiting me but I had a sheet over me and no one bothered to look. It took my DH to go investigating after they left the room to find ds head!

I've read books a out free birth before as it was something that appealed to me at the time but i always thought that scans are important, just in case, if your going to be doing it at home surely it's a good idea to know that you're low risk in the first place?

Also from what I've read free birthing isn't just giving up on ante natal care but just doing it yourself, it's easy to buy blood pressure pumps and those urine test sticks online and that's literally all that ever happened at the appointments with my 5 pregnancies.

Her husband learned to find the heartbeat with his ear... wtf!??
I've never rolled my eyes more! They actually hurt!
This woman was lucky.
If everyone took her approach we would return to the infant mortality rates of the Victorian era.
What an absolute dick

I am all for less medicalisation, but what this women did was totally selfish and irresponsible. Like many previous posters have said it wouldn't have been as empowering if her baby had got stuck and been starved of oxygen and died for instance.
At the very least she should have had a qualified midwife present in the background to step in should anything have gone wrong.

A commenter called: IdiomSavant comedy genius in the comments section.... hilarious!!!

I’m 32 and a yoga teacher, so yoga and mindfulness have allowed me to understand and trust my body.

Does it allow you to sense Breech Position, Placenta Previa, Meconium Aspiration, Nuchal Cord, or Cephalopelvic Disproportion?

I’m also practical.

No, you are not.

I looked at all the things that could go wrong, then all the things that could go right – and chose positivity.

Of course you did.

At the beginning, I went to the GP but it wasn’t empowering.

That's because they are a medical professional, not animal spirit guide.

We attended our first midwife appointment but found ourselves questioning a lot of protocol,

Of course you di-....actually, no, this is too painful. I'm out.

my opinion she's self indulgent, neurotic, hippydippy treehugger type for whom life has always been really just pretty lovely. Hugely irritating.

I know it is trite, but I can't get over the prospect of this poor child (and then woman) going through life with the name 'Fox'.

Foxy lady... vixen... oh no.

I think when you have undergone a traumatic c section it can alter your psychological state.
I think HCp need to be more understanding of that. Insisting a woman goes to hospital / has midwifes in attendance is about as unrealistic as calling someone selfish because they won't go out of the house because they are agrophobic .

I've just found her Instagram page and can report that she is indeed, the first person to ever have a baby.

Does she really expect to be taken seriously when she says she decided to choose positivity? Does she really think that's why she was lucky enough to have a problem free pregnancy and labour? So all of us whose babies wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for medical intervention - it wasn't really the medical intervention, we just weren't positie enough??

It makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall.

Shitty cosseted first world privilege at its worst. 830 women a day die in pregnancy and childbirth.

I worked briefly at a hospital in rural Uganda. There's a lot of pretty much free birthing which goes on in the village with traditional birth attendants. The TBAs do their best and some have had very basic training but it's pretty much free birthing. Women would sometimes arrive at the hospital after being in labour for days, normally no fetal heart on arrival. They're the luckier ones, the unlucky ones I guess we never got to meet because they would die at home. Which wasn't uncommon.

I will respectfully agree to differ with the author of the piece.

11 years ago a large number of people in an operating theatre, working very very fast, made sure my DS1 got out in one piece and that his Mum was OK. On Thursday just gone, a large number of people in exactly the same operating theatre did exactly the same again, this time for his twin brothers.

I do not really want to think about how it might have gone if we had attempted to do all this ourselves.

Monumentally stupid. Fortunate thus far.

I'd have had a second stillbirth and would have died myself if I'd have taken this freebirthing approach. Thank fuck I have more common sense than that. So glad that when I said to the medical/mw team that something felt wrong they listened, checked, monitored and acted. Glad also for the emergency O- blood I received following the massive PPH in theatre.

I do hope Fox doesn't have any of those anatomical issues that antenatal scans can pick up. You know, the ones we can do something about before things get really serious.