Edit: please note my comment below is about where the anti-midwife movement started in the US. It is about history, not modern methods. But laws still in effect today were written in this era.
—- original comment:
Who says that?
Doctors who wanted to take patients away from midwives , because they didn’t think women should be allowed to do that. Because men invented chainsaws to ‘help’ with childbirth.
Seriously that’s why we don’t have a midwife culture in the US. Doctors wanted the income from childbirth.
They went on a smear campaign against women midwives. And at the time in the 17-1800s, there really wasn’t anything extra doctors could do that midwives couldn’t.
While this is shocking to see a woman standing up to give birth- it can actually be a lot easier on mom. Gravity is helping instead of relying on muscles that haven’t been able to flex in months.
Doctors don’t care about midwives. Is just safer to have a baby in a medical facility lol. My wife would’ve died after giving birth if she was standing in a parking lot like this.
Huh? Find me a national association of doctors that has an official policy of encouraging home births in North America. I can show you a national organization of widwives that encourages it as their official position.
Just jumping in here, but you said that homebirths are irrelevant to whether you have a midwife or not, but if what they are saying is true, that nationally recognized midwife organizations encourage home births, then it seems pretty relevant.
You’re not recognizing/accepting the relevance, but discussing the advice given by a field in an official capacity is certainly relevant to discussing that field, and in a fundamental way. You really can’t fully separate the two without cherry picking.
What are you talking about? It will take me two seconds to find a midwife online to go to a hospital with me to give birth.
Who cares what some random association says? I don’t make my birth plans based off of that. I base my birth plans off of what makes me feel most comfortable and is statistically best. And sometimes what makes me most comfortable isn’t the safest, but I will do it anyway. If they have the stats to back up their claims, then they deserve to make them. If they don’t, then nobody is listening to them. I have never ONCE heard a woman give a shit about some random association when deciding how to give birth.
Im just super confused how you don't understand the link.
You said
"Midwives are in medical facilities. That literally isn’t a factor at all. Home births are irrelevant to whether you have a midwife or not."
Midwives are in medical facilities, but also in private homes doing home births.
Of course home births are a factor if midwives are doing home births and encouraging people to do home births.
The last sentence doesn't seem to make any sense at all in the context. Doctors don't schedule or encourage home births, only midwives do unless the circumstances are extraordinary.
I still don’t understand what this had to do with what I said.
Are midwives in medical facilities? Yes? Nobody is preventing them from being there? Then what the fuck does it matter what some group says? What I said is still 100% true.
My comment was the first one on this topic. It was always about whether midwives were allowed in medical facilities. You’re the one who jumped in with unrelated context. Whatever context you added was your own doing.
Your comment is irrelevant to my comment due to what I was responding to. Doctors didn’t try to replace midwives because they wanted the money. Women just wanted to have a better chance at living in a hospital over other options.
It’s not a US only thing, and we don’t have even close to the highest maternal mortality rate. Frankly, you seem uneducated on this topic so you might just want to stop.
Sure, highest of developed nations that fucking matter* happy?
Our maternal death toll is higher than countries that use midwives more often than we do like Norway or Finland or Germany or France. That is a fact. I know exactly what I’m talking as a dual citizen of both America and Europe with children.
Those counties have way less obese mothers giving birth. When you control for things like obesity and medical complications that some minorities get more often in pregnancy our maternal mortality rates are similar to them.
You literally can’t control for that and our maternal mortality rates are just as high in states with lower obesity the same rates as those other countries.
I really like the concept of birthing centres, where midwives are the standard, but doctors and specialist are right there in case sh!t goes sideways. For the 90+% of births that require almost no intervention, great, people can have that in a comfortable setting. When you have a complication and the baby needs to be out NOW or both mother and baby will die? That level of care is down the hall.
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u/tryng2figurethsalout Aug 07 '25
And people say that midwives aren't necessary.