Sometimes when I am reading the various posts over at Dr. Amy’s Homebirth Debate Blog, I get the feeling when she is dissing those of us who promote homebirth that she thinks we are some organized group of women who all think alike, believe alike, and get together daily to hash out what it means to be an advocate of this type of birth.
I barely have time to talk on the phone to fellow activists, much less spend hours and hours in a smoky back room plotting and planning how to share the good news of home birth with other women.
By lumping us all together as the most naive, undereducated, simple minded people on the planet when the topic of birth comes up, she implys that a conspiracy of sorts is out on the web, manipulating innocent young couples into the dark dungeons of unscientific and indefensible home birth.
Home Birth activism is sort of like Home Schooling…

As an active member of my homeschooling community here in Boulder, for many years I rubbed shoulders with some of the most amazing, dedicated, and informed parents in our county.
Yet I never met a parent who had the same focus, used the same curriculums, and had the same outlook on education as my husband and I did.
We were all different, committed to giving our children the best education possible, but every family had a unique focus and differing take on how best to teach children. What we all shared in common was a sense that something was very off in education and we were better equipped than the education professionals to teach our own children, especially at the elementary level.
Does this mean all I believe all education is bad and the public schools having nothing to offer my family?
Nope. All three of my school aged children are attending a wonderful charter school in our district and I have been thrilled to have them in a public school for the middle and high school grades. I love that they are involved in sports and theatre and have the opportunity to play in the band and sing in the choir.
Did our homeschooling efforts HURT them academically during the five years we kept them home and taught them ourselves? No, all of them have been honor students, my oldest daughter Michelle made the deans list, and all are competing in classrooms with some of the brightest children in Boulder County.
Now plenty of education professionals would consider a mother teaching her own children how to read a travesty and threat to their profession. Yet based on statistical evidence everyone knows the public schools suck at teaching children how to read.
So, who is right?
The educrats who have all the credentials and have come up with a system of teaching that ensures huge swaths of Americans will never move past a third grade reading level? Or parents who simply want children to know how to read, (and for this dedicated reader, LOVE TO READ for the sheer enjoyment of it).
I was not willing to leave it up to chance and so I made certain all of our children learned how to read, and they now all spend hours and hours every week reading for pleasure. This is the mark of an educated populace, and based on the current stories coming out of California, I think we can safely say the educrats have collectively lost their minds.
(California recently passed legislation that would mandate the teaching of homosexuality and communism in the schools, and this past week effectively outlawed homeschooling.)
The education establishment is playing out a socialist agenda in varying degrees and levels in all of the states of America. With humanism, collectivism, and the brain numbing promotion of marxism actively being promoted in every state, I think we can safely say that those pioneering homeschoolers of the 70’s who were the canaries in the coal mine warning parents about the direction our schools were heading and who carried the bulk of societal scorn and rejection around home school issues were spot on in saying parents could do just as good of a job and in many instances far better of a job than the most credentialed of educrats.
Birth activists and homebirth promoters are those same sorts of people. Birth Junkies and home birthing mothers are generally those people who have stepped away from the group think of the doctors and are taking a long hard look at what exactly is going on with american birth.
And when talking about smoky back rooms, agendas, and conspiracies, for some reason the ACOG doctors and their multitudes of lawyers, staff, paid lobbyists, PR, and promotion efforts unwittingly come to my mind.
See, I don’t reject any person in my life based on life choices. I honestly do not care how other people bring their own children into the world. I am friends with hospital birthers, home birthers and all sorts of people with different views and daily practices than my own.
But doctors sure do have a one size fits all protocol for the practice of obstetrics. Our Birth, Our Licensing, Our Midwives. And plenty of professionals have been harrassed and heckled for not practicing the way that ACOG demands. Birth centers have been shut down, millions of dollars of personal investment lost and lives and careers ruined all because individuals have not contorted themselves to fit into the rules and regs of a profession gone mad.
Dr. Amy thinks all homebirth promoters think alike, behave alike, and promote alike, but this is the pot calling the kettle black. It is the doctors and the medwives who have banded together collectively to shut out all other forms of birth, who have shut down, bullied, forced, and manipulated the whole system into a collective that is hurting women and costing the taxpayers a boatload of cash.
And now the democrats want to socialize the whole mess and take it one step further by rationing and looting the current system so that everyone can partake of the abomination that is Allopathic Birth.
Know what? Even if it is free, some of us don’t want to submit to the rules and regs of “cover your legal butt” obstetrics.
As a homebirth promoter I challenge every mother to seek out the care that fits into her life and her pocketbook. I trust that she has the wisdom and the intellect to choose whatever type of care will serve her family best and I challenge the movers and shakers in our government to work towards easing up the laws around birth away from groupthink into the wonderful world of freedom, where every family will be empowered to make the health care decisions that fit for them without any fear of being prosecuted for so called Medical Neglect.
Jenny Hatch