To think free birthing should be entirely banned

[StandFirm]

I have come across this article earlier which made me feel so very angry at the cynical extremists who brainwashed a mum into an entirely avoidable tragedy: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation
If I'd listened to similar cretins, I would have died in childbirth aged 19 and none of my three DCs would have been born alive or at the very least without severe disabilities. 'Pearls of wisdom' which gave me the rage include:
-ultrasounds are not safe
-women’s “bodies do not grow babies that we cannot birth”
Such ignorant perfidious lies. I hope the cult leader gets sent down for a very long time. That poor little child was robbed of a healthy body and many more actually died. I really hate the internet's ability to spawn dangerous cults entirely unchecked.

You know what though I was already arguing on your side yesterday I’ve only just read the guardian link you posted and wow it is so much more fucked up than I thought.

I remember the thread on here months ago about home birthing and someone said it’s fine if you’re healthy, young, good weight etc and I mentioned how with my second (after a straightforward delivery with my first) I was a healthy weight, young with no health conditions and still it went wrong and luckily I was in hospital.

But these online grifters were telling women with gestational diabetes and pre eclampsia it was fine to give birth at home??
The part about people’s babies dying and then their comments being deleted and the grifters telling them it was basically their fault for listening to the grifters was very chilling.
I went and checked their instagram page it reminds me of the raw fruitarians who ate nothing but raw fruit and fed their kids that way.

Do you mean send them to hospital to improve staffing levels there and not attend home births ever?

or do you mean rather than be on call from home after working all day have the on call home birth midwife rostered to work as an extra midwife on the labour ward. But to leave the labour ward and go to a home birth if called?

Thus ensuring that firstly she’s not knackered, secondly she’s keeping her intrapartum skills up to date and also improving staffing (most nights) on labour ward?

Because that needs to be a model which is adopted by all hospitals I think. Which will cost money. Which sadly the govt aren’t providing.

I had a shitty hospital birth with DS and an even worse experience on the hell that is the post natal ward. Fortunately I knew I didn’t want any more children, but if I had I probably would have been tempted by the idea of a free birth.

My hospital birth made me feel like I was on a conveyor belt, if I wasn’t at a certain point at a certain time then I was failing and was told there would need to be ‘interventions’. Drips to speed things up, painful internal examinations, threats of an instrumental birth etc. DS eventually arrived via emergency c-section at nearly midnight, when I’d been awake for the best part of 72 hours.

Then I got told off because I was too tired to try and feed him. I didn’t even know what day it was by that point.

In total contrast, I was born at home with no medical staff present, just my dad and the family Labrador in the room. My mum said it was a world away from her hospital birth with my older sister the year before. Oh and apparently the dog was more useful than my dad!

Screenshot from comments on that Yolande with the 11 kids instagram page. Very cult like

I would even say it is racist because it ignores all the evidence if how dangerous unmedicalised birth can be because it mainly comes from outside the white Anglosphere.

Why should someone have to pay for a private midwife?
Not everyone can afford private midwifes.
Would you pay private for something you are entitled to in the NHS?!

Reminds me of the two videos I saw on FB just this last week of two different women in America both in labour not being listened to by the hospitals. One was screaming in pain and a nurse was just asking her questions typing on a computer instead of rushing her to the delivery ward and her baby was born with having swallowed meconium because of the nurse and another woman was just wheeled back out of the hospital in a wheelchair and she ended up giving birth in the car!

Wow so first you're telling women where they should give birth and now you're trying to tell them not to have anymore children!
You're acting like you are the one personally paying for the homebirth midwifes!
Women can have as many babies as they want and birth where they want!

Why woukd they need 2 separate ambulances for a mum and baby? They would both go in one!

Choosing your post as it is typical, rather than personal.

The thing is no-one is FORCED to take antibiotics, have surgery or have treatment for cancer. Plenty do refuse. It's called choice. Women simply should not be compelled to have medical intervention purely by virtue of being pregnant.

Should all women be taken into care on conception to ensure they don't drink, smoke, take drugs or eat the wrong food? Theres a baby to think of, you know. How many women take their newborns home in the car without giving a second thought to the risk of a car crash? Why, if a pregnant woman is murdered, is the perpetrator not charged with the murder of the unborn aswell?

This.

And the whole concept of banning a woman's choices regarding her body...?

A big problem for women who had a baby in hospital and had problems is that those problems are then blamed on having a baby in hospital. .
Nature is unpredictable

Giving birth is the most dangerous moment in our lives and babies lives .

Babies and women die with the best care and equipment .

It’s interesting that we leap immediately to criminalisation as a solution. In fact if a woman deliberately chooses to give birth without any medical intervention and the baby dies or is severely injured there are already possible legal penalties (in the UK).

I think a more useful approach though is strong social disapproval. Women who deliberately choose, & plan for, birth without any medical support are no different from women who drive their kids drink, or from say Constance Maarten & her partner, who took steps that resulted in their child freezing to death. In each case they are putting their own autonomy (we’re all allowed to drink or go camping in winter) above their children’s safety and lives. It should be seen as being an arrogant, self-indulgent denial of their helpless child’s right to safety & care.

This is of course free birth I’m talking about, not home birth. Home birth with a midwife isn’t something I would choose (& thank god I didn’t because one of my births developed into an emergency), but it’s not the same as free birth at all.

I found it very difficult to have sympathy for the mothers in that terrible article , any more than I did for Constance Maarten. At best, they deliberately shut their eyes - over months of planning, months! - to the fact they were risking their child’s lives.

They wouldn’t. Not locally anyway. I’m a midwife and I’ve always known two ambulances if both mum and baby are unwell. Because they’d both need a paramedic and someone needs to drive. If baby is ok then mum goes in ambulance and dad follows in the car with baby.

Wow no ambulance shortages in your area.
When I had my unplanned home birth after the hospital sent me home the ambulance arrived a few minutes before the baby came out and we were told it was because it was harvest and there had been several accidents with agricultural machinery and a farmer having a heart attack that day!

They then wanted us to go into hospital to be checked over properly and we both went in the same ambulance, I was strapped onto the bed and holding the baby.

Of course neither of us was ill but if we had been they couldn’t have magicked up a second ambulance given that they only just managed to get that one to me.

I dont think free birth should be criminalised but your argument dorsnt make sense as abortion is not allowed at full term.

Ambulance shortages are one reason I’d never choose a home birth, and definitely not a freebirth. (I realise sometimes they’re unplanned of course.)

If id have freebirthed I wouldn't be here and possibly my son would have died. That means I wouldn't have had my other children , and my grandchildren wouldn't exist.

Plenty of ambulance shortages in my area. We’re a very large county and I’ve been in an ambulance on a transfer before and the tech has said they’re the only available ambulance in the county (as we come back into the county).

So just because you call for an ambulance or even two ambulances does not mean they will come. The midwives will do what they can while they wait. Often a fast response car might arrive. I see at the home birth which has had the recent inquest in the media where mum and baby died it was two ambulances. First ambulance took the baby and left. Second ambulance hadn’t arrived at that point.

the big difference in your case is neither of you were ill. You can’t have a paramedic trying to resuscitate a baby and stop a mum from bleeding to death single handed

Saying that it would still have been safer for them not to take baby and make your partner take baby. If you’d started haemorrhaging or had an eclamptic fit en route to the hospital who’s going to hold the baby while you’re unconscious?

There are so many separate issues here.

Freebirth is not a wise decision but people who have mental capacity are allowed to make unwise decisions. Sometimes it is more unwise than others (a woman who has had 1 or more completely uncomplicated births and a low risk pregnancy freebirthing is very different to a first time, IVF mum aged 41 with gestational diabetes freebirthing).

Homebirth with a qualified midwife is normally a perfectly safe and valid way to choose to give birth.

Allowing women with mental capacity to make all the decisions about her birth right until the moment her baby is born - even if it results in death - is better than the alternative of forcing medical interventions on a non-consenting woman.

There are compelling reasons why some women (particularly women who have faced terrible hospital care for previous births) would want a freebirth. We should not downplay obstetric violence and birth trauma. We should also recognise hospitals are not always the safe places we like to think they are.

All that said, people who lie to women and groom them into dangerous freebirths (particularly for high risk pregnancies) should be criminalised. The things they have done which are already crimes (encouraging mothers not to seek medical attention for ill babies which have been born, lying to law enforcement about whether the baby was born alive, and envouraging illegal burial of newborns) should be severely punished. These people are not friends of women.

To explain what I thought was fairly simple to understand ...

The OP or PP said that the practice should be banned because we should be thinking about the vulnerable child (or similar words).

The argument for abortion is that its not a vulnerable child, just a foetus or a clump of cells (as is a full-term baby, or an adult).

There's a hypocrisy there. When pro-lifers talk about that foetus as a child/person they are derided.

And I was pointing out that in both cases the mother takes an action that resulted in the baby dying in the womb and then being evacuated.

You say abortion is not allowed at full-term but effectively that's what these women did.

And my major point is that it seems arbitrary to argue for protecting the child against the mother in one situation, but the mother against the child in the other.

Once abortion existed to protect the life of the mother. Now it's used to select a preferred sex, killing female babies in the process (which reeks of misogyny to me).

I can see the logic of supporting the primacy of the unborn child and arguing for a ban on both freebirth and abortion.

Similarly I can see the logic of allowing both freebirth and abortion.

But why would anyone argue to ban freebirthing but support abortion? There's no rationale for it.

I am aware of the differences between freebirthing and home births. I still don't think freebirthing as a practice should be banned. If a women chooses to give birth without a medical professional in attendance, that is her choice to make. No it is not a choice I would make for myself, but it is a choice that can be made from an informed and risk-managed position. And no woman should face criminal investigation for a precipitous birth (possibly freebirthing without choosing to), which seems an inevitable consequence of banning the practice.

What could be regulated is the information or advice FBS gives, from this article it looks like they gave biased, ill-informed and actively harmful advice masquerading as a professional expert service - Imo that is what is most dangerous here.

And until about 100 years ago, the rate of neo-natal death and birthing mother death was horrific. In early industrial Britain, the neo-natal mortality rate was so high that the mathematical average life expectancy was age 5. The sole reason those figures changed was the medical profession. What really irritates me is that there are always unqualified people who think they know better than we do, but expect us to pick up the pieces of their botch job, and in a significantly worse situation than we would have been faced with had we been brought in earlier.

I don't agree with the OP about making freebirth illegal, I'd said that in a previous comment. I'm all for people having choice, but that choice needs to be fully informed. To say we would be extinct if medical intervention was needed for birth is misleading and ignores the fact that many mothers and babies would die without medical intervention.