"I can't understand freebirthing when you can have a perfectly good midwife present, even if she's in the other room (and for free on the NHS)."
Can I qualify this statement with the fact that it depends on the relationship with the midwives and previous experiences one has had on the NHS.
In my experience the care I received in hospital during labour, delivery and on the pn ward was so bad I suffered PND and PTSD. I have detailed it enough times on MN so I don't want to cover old ground again and risk boring anyone.
In my second pg it surfaced as a phobia of going to labour in hospital so I, in what I thought was a sensible move, requested a home birth. I had my assigned midwife coolly lie to me about the option for a home birth. She spent another 20 minutes shroud waving hypothetically suggesting every thing that may go wrong in a home birth to dissuade me. I was like inside but continued to let her talk to see how far she'd take this nonsense. Eventually she said: Well, what does your husband think about it? I replied: If my husband cannot talk me out of a home birth then you don't have any chance of doing so. End of appointment.
I then spent the next week going from depressed to angry and researched my options again. I wrote to the SOM requesting a different midwife with was granted. At the second appointment she (team leader of the community midwives) regaled me for ten minutes with promises that they would attend my birth anywhere then finally add that if they were busy then I would have to come in (to the labour ward). At that point, every single drop of trust and hope drained away.
I felt I could no longer trust these women who were willing to lie and obstruct their way into getting me to do what they wanted.
I told her that my first experience of labour was so horrific that I can only relate to it now as a (long) episode of rape. And the suffering continued on the PN ward for my daughter due to poor breastfeeding knowledge in the staff.
From then on, (about 19 weeks) I started to understand what drove some women to free birth. The availability of midwives and home births go a long way in providing safe birthing options in the UK and I would never advise women to free birth as a life style choice. However when even this avenue is closed off by lack of support from those who are paid to give support, then some women feel driven to consider the previously unthinkable.
I began to visualise a birth without (these) midwives. I could not afford an IM and I couldn't find one practising in my area anyway or I would have considered a bank loan. I could not ask my husband to support the possibility of an unassisted birth so I just kept visualising no midwives a birth before arrival of the midwives. I chose a WB so that I could limit them touching me and was ready to tell them to wait in the dining room depending on how amenable or overbearing they turned out to be.
They were called and I immediately had this wave of panic that they would get here and have to wait around for me to give birth (yes, it sounds like crazy talk) so I crawled into the living room and began in my mind a race to get dd out before they arrived. I wholly agree that this is not a normal thing for a woman in labour to consider but it gives an insight into my anxiety, desperation and mistrust brought on by a poor experiences with the staff.
As circumstance has it, they arrived 5 minutes late, helped by the taxi driver pulling up in the wrong street and dh and I being too busy to answer the phone when they rang for directions.
as it turned out the senior of the two midwives was a bossy old cow so I am glad they could only touch my baby until I was ready to hand her over to them.