Perhaps not the best item for the childless girl in the crowd to comment on, but I tend to agree with this:
We need to celebrate birth as a normal event, not a surgical condition in waiting,” he says. “We need to give pregnant women the care and the support that they rightly deserve in this country.”
I’m not saying we should go back to home deliveries. But I don’t think we treat pregnancy like a normal event these days, either. By wanting to control absolutely everything, do we actually make it harder for everyone?
_____________________
Véronique adds: Being allowed to give birth at home is not considered “going back” in any way. In fact, when I moved from Quebec to Ontario and was able to give birth at home with a qualified midwife – as opposed to the “self-taught” midwife my Quebec friend had to use. Call me over-regulated but “self-taught” is not something I want to see on any of my healthcare professionals’ resume – I saw it as progress in healthcare. I had three children at home and three in hospital (one baby with a family doc, one with an Ob-Gyn and one with a midwife). Each experience was unique but the home births were by far the most beautiful and empowering experiences of my life.
In any case, I find it interesting that we are now talking about giving women freedom of movement during childbirth to reduce our ridiculously high c-section rate. My oldest daughter has seen the birth of two of her siblings: one at home with no medical interventions and one in hospital with induction and constant fetal monitoring. The attending obstetrician, when it was all over, asked her what she thought of witnessing the birth of her baby sister. Without missing a beat she said: “It looked a lot easier when she wasn’t lying on her back!” She told me recently that when she saw the hospital bed her first thought was: “How is she supposed to move around on a bed that small?”
So basically it makes perfect sense to a 13-year-old girl with no medical training but gynecologists are still wondering…
by 
Nice article. I have a friends who work on both “sides”, midwives as well as L&D nurses and they both say the same. Sounds like hospitals really treat childbirth like it’s some sort of medical emergency (not that those don’t occur in the process, of course) rather than something that has been occurring naturally for centuries. I like the birthing centre idea, a more homey environment without having to give birth in your own bed (sorry, but eew!). It would be nice to see hospitals integrate with that idea so that if something does go wrong in the process they don’t have to throw mum and baby into an ambulance and rush them to the hospital, but would already be there, which did have to happen to a friend of mine.