I think the folks posting here should travel to a Third World country where home birth is the norm – and where people are clamoring for decent hospitals and trained obstetricians to save them from the horror of dead babies and dead mothers. Maybe that would wake some of you up to how “good” the good old days really were.

That wouldn’t happen in this country, you say. We have good sanitation, trained midwives and yada, yada, yada, excuses, excuses. Situations arise that cannot be predicted beforehand. Cord prolapse, abruption, meconium aspiration, an undetected congenital malformation … there is a long list of potential catastrophes where life or death can be decided in a matter of minutes. These events are manageable in a hospital setting, but deadly at home.

I’ve personally seen a baby that developed Group B strep meningitis after a home birth. The baby’s illness wasn’t recognized until he started seizing. The mother had risk factors that, in a hospital, would have resulted in her being treated with antibiotics during labor, almost certainly preventing this child’s infection. Instead that child is now deaf, epileptic and has significant developmental delays secondary to the meningitis. Preventable … entirely preventable.

This trend toward increasing home birth is INSANITY, and the AMA is absolutely right to advocate for tight regulation of this practice.

Why don’t you work to get hospitals to reform their practices and facilities to make them more mother and baby-friendly? That would be far more constructive than advocating for Russian roulette with the lives of women and children.

Making home birth illegal would bring about a whole new round of outlaws. What are they gonna do, put a new mother and her tiny baby in jail?