Freebirthing: the debate continues

The Washington Post published an article on Freebirthing recently which is being talked about all over the web as if freebirthing (unassisted childbirth) is a new concept. I find it frustrating that every article about the ostensibly positive/empowering aspects of freebirthing inevitably has to be 'balanced' by the its horrors. Women giving birth by themselves is just too damn threatening for obstetrics. In the article, the journalist writes,

'Some experts worry that vulnerable or gullible women will be misled into thinking that giving birth alone at home is a viable, even reasonable, alternative'.

Vulnerable? Gullible? This kind of language makes me so angry. The whole point of freebirthing is to reinforce the point that although women can have safe, enjoyable assisted (hospital) birth experiences, the available options for birth are actually quite a bit more wide ranging. Women are not simply passive dupes of biomedicine or culture. Why wouldn't homebirth be a reasonable alternative? It is the the cultural/biomedical discourses of childbirth that suggest that birth is dangerous and women should constantly be aware of their 'risk' that encourage women to fear unassisted birth. In Australia, for instance, only 1% of women give birth at home. What really bothers me is that journalistic diatribes weighing the pros and cons of freebirthing inevitably render the complexities of birth null and void by failing to find a middle ground between doctors, midwives, doulas, and the actual women who are giving birth. Why do women have to choose one or the other? And why does the journalist have to use feminist health organisation, Our Bodies Ourselves, to perpetuate and substantiate the idea that somehow all feminists see freebirthing as inherently dangerous?

If the most negative aspect of freebirthing is unpredictability as numerous obstetricians suggest, these claims only reinvigorate the historical and 'patriarchal' constructions of women's reproductive bodies as chaotic, closer to 'nature', wild and in need of control. It is precisely the 'unpredictable' nature of women's reproductive bodies that has led to birth control pills that eliminate menstrual periods completely, that has given rise to obstetrics as a profession, that suggests that in pregnancy women are not capable of managing their own bodies but must be monitoried endlessly right down to the type of food they consume. Perhaps we should worry less about women subverting the dominant social expectation that birth must occur under a clinical gaze and instead seek to halt the biomedical/cultural insistence that women's bodies are passive, weak and in need of management.

Sources: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072702164.html?sub=AR