On the Subject of Freebirthing or Unassisted Birthing

There was an article about freebirthing posted in the UK (here) and this comment was one of the ones I found in response to it:



I can tell you what might have gone wrong.

I had a trouble free pregnancy, expecting a second baby with no health problems or suspected complications. As it happened, I went into labour twelve weeks early and my son's lungs had not fully formed. Immediately after birth, he went into respiratory distress and would have died if I had been 'freebirthing'.



Comments like this always make me want to pull my hair out and scream in frustration. How does an anecdote like that even make any sense? What woman in her right mind would purposefully try to birth a baby at home twelve weeks early, midwife or not? Comments like this I think are meant to show the base ignorance of freebirthers but all they really do is demonstrate the amazing inability for the commenter to think rationally. It disturbs me how the vast majority of people that hear about freebirth think that we are all idiots. Women do not choose freebirth because they want an adrenaline rush or because they desire to push the envelope. Women and their families who choose freebirth do so because they believe it is the safest option for them. They don't just wake up one morning and say "Ah, I think I'll play Russian Roullette with this one!". I have met only a very few ill-prepared freebirthers. I've probably spoken with thousands of "mainstream" birthers that are ill-prepared about birth/pregnancy and wholly ignorant of the process. Most of the women I know who choose to freebirth do so after hours upon hours of research and experience. We don't come this decision lightly and most of us have a much better than average understanding of how birth works. I have known freebirthers with more birth-knowledge than their midwives! I certainly had far more knowledge about normal birth than the first ob I ever had. I'm not suggesting I could perform surgery, of course, he was obviously far more qualified than I will ever be for such a task. But natural pregnancy/labor, normal variations and, I was appalled to discover, *female anatomy* were something he was grossly lacking an education in. (He actually tried to tell me that the excruciating, debilitating pain in my *symphesis* was "just pressure on my cervix". That really frightened me, considering they weren't even in the same location!) I certainly had an extreme experience with that idiot but my point still stands. Those of us that choose to "risk" birthing at home without a paid attendant aren't generally stupid, ill-informed or foolish. I don't know *anyone* that would stay home with a 12week early baby. That kind of assumptions being made about the freebirth movement makes me want to ask people if vapidity was a class they took in high school. That wouldn't be very nice, though.