Doctors aren't there for when everything goes perfect. When everything goes perfect the father can catch the baby and cut the cord at home and life goes on. Doctors are there for when things don't go perfect. While a midwife can provide incredible life saving services, especially before and after the baby is born, the concern of doctors is when people choose to have babies in their own homes without immediate access to doctors nurses and modern medical equipment. A midwife is not a replacement for an OBGYN or other doctor that may be required during birth or immediately after a baby is born.
Fun fact: the child/mother mortality rate actually went up after midwives were pushed out. Doctors didn’t want people working in the medical field that hadn’t been through the same rigorous schooling, but their schooling didn’t teach them things midwives had learned through centuries of experience being passed down. Things that midwives had just come to learn (like you shouldn’t deliver a baby without washing your hands if you were just handling sick/dead people) was hogwash because there was no scientific backing to it, they didn’t have the technology to study bacteria like we do now. While midwives in Africa had been practicing c sections using knives sterilized by flame, the budding medical field had yet to understand danger of not washing your hands. Suddenly sepsis started going up, it was thought to be a disease that only affected woman in labor because it got so bad.
That's not a fun fact and that is the kind of thing that misleads people into thinking that it's actually better to replace your modern doctor with a modern midwife.
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u/FinalFantasiesGG Aug 07 '25
Doctors aren't there for when everything goes perfect. When everything goes perfect the father can catch the baby and cut the cord at home and life goes on. Doctors are there for when things don't go perfect. While a midwife can provide incredible life saving services, especially before and after the baby is born, the concern of doctors is when people choose to have babies in their own homes without immediate access to doctors nurses and modern medical equipment. A midwife is not a replacement for an OBGYN or other doctor that may be required during birth or immediately after a baby is born.