Reply to Evelyn Muhlhan - another homebirth midwife bites the dust?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]12:26, you don't seem irrational, I didn't mean to suggest that. But can I ask, what rights do you think a full term baby has, if any, and who has the power to enforce those rights, if anyone, other than the mother?[/quote]

It's an interesting and valuable question, which I have definitely spent some time pondering but have difficulty coming to an absolute answer on.  I do believe that unborn babies have the right to life, but unfortunately we have a problem in that doctors cannot guarantee a perfect outcome.  In fact, they have similar outcomes in terms of maternal/infant morbidity and mortality as homebirth midwives do - there is not a huge difference; for some things homebirth is better, and in other things the hospital is best - but overall the stats are similar, and for the foreseeable future will always include a small number of bad outcomes.  So while we might say that full-term babies have a "right to life", there isn't any way to absolutely protect that right.

So, given that, the reasonable thing is that as long as a mother is healthy (meaning, not drugged out or mentally incompetent), and her intent is to have a healthy baby, I believe we have to entrust her to make the best decisions possible for herself and her unborn baby.   Given these circumstances, I think it would be a horrendous invasion of personal privacy for the government - or worse, a doctor - to step in and force a woman to birth in a particular way.  Except in extremely rare cases, no one cares more about her baby than the mother who is about to give birth to it.[/quote]

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