Call me old fashioned, but when I think of a successful birth, I think of a healthy mother and a healthy baby.

Apparently that’s not the case for the folks at the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN), an organization that appears to think that the only successful birth is one that involved transit through the vagina … whether the baby was dead or alive.

Consider their post New Survey Shows High Success Rate for VBAC’s at Home. They are talking about the results of the statistics paper from the Midwives Alliance of North America:

Within this cohort were 1054 women with a history of cesarean section who were planning a vaginal birth after cesarean – VBAC – at home. (This is also referred to within the birth community as “HBAC” – home birth after cesarean). Within this subgroup, 87% had successful vaginal births, with 94% of those births occurring at home and the remaining 6% occurring after a transfer to a local hospital. This success rate is substantially higher than the 60-80% success rate reported across other large hospital-based cohorts (2) and likely reflects the high level of commitment to and support of natural birth, both from the mothers and their care providers.

If you are old fashioned like me, you might think that meant that there was a high rate of healthy babies who arrived by VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean).

You would be wrong.

For those at ICAN, who are more concerned to boast about the use of their vagina than whether their baby survives, a dead baby is a “success” so long as a C-section wasn’t involved. It’s not that ICAN is unaware of the dead babies:

In the cohort reported by MANA, the intrapartum fetal death rate was significantly higher for women with prior cesarean compared to those without a history of cesarean (2.85/1000 versus 0.66/1000). For comparison, neonatal death rates for repeat cesarean and hospital VBAC were 1.03/1000 and 0.84/1000 …

Notice that nifty sleight of hand here (committed by MANA and repeated by ICAN), comparing FETAL death rate of the MANA cohort with NEONATAL death rate of the hospital group. The overall death rate in the MANA VBAC group was 5/1000. That’s a death rate 5X higher than comparable risk women giving birth in the hospital.

We at the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) find these statistics encouraging and applaud the Midwives Alliance of North America for collecting and presenting this data.

Encouraging??!! Anyone who is considering VBAC should take note:

When ICAN tells you that you have a high chance of a successful VBAC, they do not mean that your baby will survive. If you care about whether your baby lives or dies, you should be getting your VBAC information elsewhere.

The folks at ICAN and have nothing on the geniuses at the Midwives Alliance of North America, though. ICAN merely misrepresents the data and includes dead babies among “successful” VBACs. The fools at MANA don’t even understand their own data.

Consider this bit of appalling stupidity, direct from the MANA Facebook page (deleted the following day), in response to the observation that a VBAC death rate of 1/200 is hideous:

Here’s the money quote:

…[I]t does show a combined 5 deaths of 1000 (which is not the same as 1 in 200, since 1000 subjects were necessary to find those 5 deaths).

5/1000 is not the same as 1/200??!! 5/1000 is better than 1/200 “since 1000 subjects were necessary to find those 5 deaths”??!!

Those who rely on MANA for their information on the safety of homebirth take note:

If the people at MANA cannot do basic division, you cannot trust them to analyze their own data properly, let alone report it honestly.

It’s pretty clear that you cannot trust either ICAN or MANA to care about the safety of your baby.

Of course if you care about the safety of your baby, you wouldn’t be contemplating a VBAC at home in the first place, would you?

I received the following email from Susan O’Connor, a Board Certified Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) instructor:

I see so many comments about midwives being “trained” in NRP, but people not realizing that without the equipment necessary (ETT, bag/mask, oxygen, epinephrine, umbilical lines, saline, etc) you are not performing NRP. NRP is so much more than just the rate of compressions to breaths; … taking a class in NRP [does not mean] that a midwife is actually qualified to resuscitate a baby. And performing NRP correctly can make the difference between life and death in a neonate.

I invited her to share her thoughts and experience with you in the guest post below:

Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) is a specialized type of resuscitation that was designed for neonates and their unique physiology and needs after birth. The American Academy of Pediatrics in a statement May 1, 2013 affirmed “there should be at least 1 person present at every delivery whose primary responsibility is the care of the newborn infant”. This is in addition to the midwife who is attending to the mother, in the situation that both the mother and infant need simultaneous resuscitation.

Many midwives – especially lay midwives – will claim they are trained in NRP and able to provide resuscitation to a newborn. Unfortunately, taking a class in NRP does not mean anything when it comes to the actual resuscitation of the infant. NRP is a systematic method of evaluating and providing support to a struggling neonate, which includes advanced life support.

NRP is set up in 30 second intervals: you have thirty seconds to determine whether your interventions are working and if they aren’t, to escalate care.

First you provide positive pressure ventilation with a bag/mask.

If that is not working, you must intubate the child to provide a secure airway – the first thing that most midwives cannot do. Intubation is not a skill you can perform infrequently and expect to be successful, especially in a stressful situations.

Once you are providing respiratory support, if the heartrate is still low (below 60) – compressions must be started.

But giving compressions in coordination with ventilation isn’t enough. At the point where you are doing this, epinephrine should be drawn up. It can be given through the breathing tube, but the most effective way is through the umbilical vessels. This is the next step in NRP that lay midwives cannot provide. They cannot have epinephrine for the infant, and they definitely do not have the equipment and training to place an umbilical line.

In a code situation, volume expansion [fluid] is frequently needed. Normal saline should be infused through the umbilical line, in order to be able to support circulation.

Occasionally, even other interventions are necessary, such as administration of surfactant, or the child could have a pneumothorax, a leak of air from the lungs into the chest and prevents infants from being able to breath/beat their heart well. In a hospital setting, you have all those supplies and trained personnel to be able to stick a needle into the chest to release the air. Some infants develop a pneumothorax spontaneously, without any risk factors or obvious cause.

All of these things happen in 30 second intervals. That means by 2 minutes of life if the baby is depressed, you are giving epinephrine and putting in lines while giving adequate ventilation. That’s a very short time-frame. It takes confidence, repetition and study to be able to provide adequate resuscitation to a newborn. Midwives are trained in the care of the mother and basic well-baby care. In the hospital, OBs do not provide NRP; typically, it is specialized nurses, nurse practitioners and physicians who do it.

This lack of ability to provide true neonatal resuscitation accounts for some of the morbidity and mortality that is seen with home births.

Bad things can happen at home and in the hospital, but in the hospital, you have a team of highly trained individuals who are dedicated solely to saving the baby’s life. That’s a huge departure from the care provided by midwives and that alone should explain why births are safer in the hospital.

I’ve been told that she’s a disciple of killer midwife Lisa Barrett, who’s notched at least 5 neonatal deaths. But Gaye Demanuele has exceeded her mentor; she’s notched the ultimate obstetric disaster, a preventable maternal death.

Demanuele is taking a page out of the Lisa Barrett playbook. She is acting as if the Coroner investigating the death of Caroline Lovell is a fool by making extraordinarily implausible claims and hoping that he will believe her anyway.

I wrote yesterday about the homebirth horror that ended in Caroline Lovell’s demise. Lovell bled to death in front of not one, but two midwives who assured her she was fine even when she told them she was dying. Allegedly they never even took Lovell’s blood pressure or pulse. Apparently they “trusted birth” while birth was busily killing Caroline Lovell right before their eyes.

According to the Herald-Sun, Lovell’s mother, Jade Markiewicz, stated the obvious:

… [I]t was outrageous that her daughter was the first to notice her condition and that it took too long for an ambulance to be called.

She said two girls had been robbed of a mother and lessons must be learnt to preventing this from occurring again.

“Her death was preventable and it must not be in vain,” she said.

Demanuelle, in contrast, reeled off one whopper after another.

Senior registered midwife and nurse, Gaye Demanuele, told the court the haemorrhage was not in the medical records she was shown by Mrs Lovell and her patient did not tell her about it.

However, she did know about the uterine fibroid, a tear and two operations over suspected retained placenta after Lulu’s birth.

So Demanuele DID know that Lovell was at risk for hemorrhage.

The midwives said Mrs Lovell lost approximately 400ml of blood at home, which the midwives said was not excessive.

But they simply made up that number. Lovell was sitting in a pool of water and there is no way to accurately assess blood loss into a pool of water.

How much blood do you have to lose before succumbing to hemorrhagic shock? According to Clinical review: Hemorrhagic shock, an otherwise healthy person can lose more than 40% of blood volume before lapsing into unconsciousness. Since the average person has approximately 5000 cc of blood volume, it means that Caroline Lovell probably lost more than 2000 cc. That’s more than 2 quarts of blood.

But the biggest whopper of all is this:

[Mrs Demanuele] … denied the homebirth was a political statement in light of this situation.

That is a bizarre claim considering the paper trail left by Lovell and by Demanuele herself.

Caroline Lovell was a prominent homebirth activist who wrote a letter to the government threatening to give birth unassisted if midwives were regulated.

Within months of Lovell’s death, and facing disciplinary action, Demanuele made this flamboyant political statement:

… I choose to no longer call myself a registered midwife (which would attract a $30K fine if I did).

I choose to not collude with a maternity care system that does not respect the rights of birthing women and their midwives.

A maternity care system:
• That restricts women’s birthing choices; that coerces some women into medical treatment that places them at a 1 in 3 risk of surgical birth with it’s associated complications. (Less than 10% of women actually require obstetric services.)
• That restricts the ability of midwives to care for women in a woman centred and holistic, primary health model…

Earlier this year, Demanuele published this manifesto, Why Birth is a Feminist Issue:

… Obstetric practice is based on risk aversion, dictated by insurance underwriters—not on good evidence of where true need exists. More women are facing legal action, accused of acting against the “rights” of their foetus. Midwives and doctors who support women’s autonomy are similarly persecuted. By putting its trust in technocracy instead of the birthing woman, the maternity care system is failing women.

Why is the culture of childbirth saturated in fear? Why not trust women to make their own informed choices about their bodies and their babies?

The answer lies in the rise of private property and the division of society into classes many millennia ago. The ruling class needed to exterminate what remained of matrilineal kinship society and subjugate its respected leaders: women. So it invented patriarchy…

And we’re supposed to believe that neither Lovell nor Demanuele viewed homebirth as a political statement?

Poor Gaye Demauele implies that she is being persecuted by the patriarchy just because the mother of two small children is dead and would be alive had Demanuele provided even the most rudimentary care. She must view the Coroner and the rest of us as gullible fools.

Demanuele is just another in a depressingly long parade of self-pitying homebirth midwifery sociopaths who leave a path of death and destruction in their wake and refuse to accept any responsibility for their own actions.

It wasn’t the patriarchy who ignored Lovell’s obstetric history; it was Gaye Demanuele.
It wasn’t the patriarchy who refused to accurately assess Lovell’s blood loss; it was Gaye Demanuele.
It wasn’t the patriarchy who couldn’t be bothered to check Lovell’s blood pressure when she complained of feeling faint; it was Gaye Demanuele.
It wasn’t the patriarchy who failed to call for an ambulance when Lovell said she was dying; it was Gaye Demanuele who assured her she was fine as her life ebbed away.
It wasn’t the patriarchy who let Caroline Lovell die an easily preventable death, leaving two small children motherless; it was Gaye Demanuele …

And for that she should be punished to the fullest extent the law allows.

The story was horrifying even before we knew the details.

Maternal deaths in the hospital are unusual; perinatal deaths are 100 times more common. There are so few maternal deaths in the developed world that they are measured per 100,000 and most of the women who die have serious medical complications like cardiac disease or pre-existing medical conditions. Death from a routine childbirth complication like bleeding is almost unheard of in an age of blood transfusions and surgical repair … but not in an age of homebirth.

Caroline Lovell was an Australian homebirth activist.

She wrote the following in response to midwifery legislation under consideration:

On a personal note, I am quite shocked and ashamed that homebirth will no longer be a woman’s free choice in low-risk pregnancies… I feel the decision to outlaw homebirth’s is contrary to women’s rights … Please find a solution for women and babies who homebirth after this date as their lives will be in threat without proper midwifery assisstance. And as a homebirthing mother I will have no choice but to have an unassisted birth at home as this is the place I want to birth my children.

Yours sincerely,
Caroline Flammea, Nick Lovell and daughter Lulu Lovell.

She never acted on her dare, but perhaps she would be alive if she did. According to a tribute published at the time:

Caroline Emily (Flammea) Lovell

LOVELL (nee Flammea). – Caroline Emily 15.07.1975 – 24.01.2012 Passed away suddenly after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl. Beloved daughter of Jadzia (Jade), loving wife of Nick and exceptional mother of Lulu and Zahra. You taught us how to love Always in our hearts

Instead, Lovell told her midwives that she was dying, and they, with stupidity that borders on the criminal, never even examined her.

“A mother told her midwives she was dying and needed to go to hospital in the moments after she gave birth to her second daughter in her Melbourne home, the Victorian Coroners Court was told on Tuesday…

But just over an hour after the “overjoyed” couple greeted their daughter in their Watsonia home, the court heard Ms Lovell told her midwives she needed to go to hospital. Ms Lovell, 36, died later that night in the Austin Hospital.

And so Caroline Lovell bled to death … slowly, preventably … because the midwives she depended on were too ignorant, or too ideologically brainwashed, to perform even the most basic midwifery tasks. Instead, as reported by midwife Melody Bourne:

Just over an hour after Zahra was born in a birth pool, Ms Bourne said Ms Lovell was light-headed and hyperventilating, telling her midwives she was dying and needed to go to hospital.

“Gaye [Demanuele, the second midwife] then questioned Caroline as to what she was feeling, in this conversation Caroline did not identify any physical symptoms,” Ms Bourne said.

“Gaye and I also made efforts to calm and reassure Caroline.”

Five minutes later, Ms Lovell became pale, cold and unresponsive and an ambulance was called. Examination by hospital clinicians revealed Ms Lovell had suffered two tears and a blood clot.

Any real healthcare provider will tell you that the most chilling words you can hear from a patient are: “I think I’m dying.” That’s because they probably are dying and it is up to you as the provider to undertake whatever examinations and tests are necessary to prove that they are not.

It would have been laughably simple for the midwives to have assessed Lovell BEFORE they reassured her. Her life threatening blood loss would have been easily diagnosed by taking her blood pressure or checking her pulse. Nothing sophisticated was required, merely the most basic of clinical skills.

Instead:

Under questioning by Tania Cristiano, the counsel assisting coroner Peter White, Ms Bourne said this could have been identified if the midwives had examined Ms Lovell.

“There were more pressing events and there didn’t appear to be any excessive blood loss,” Ms Bourne said,

More pressing events? What could me more pressing than checking blood pressure and pulse to see if their patient was dying?

And that wasn’t the only basic task the midwives ignored. They never checked her past obstetrical history to learn that Lovell was at increased risk of bleeding to death:

Ms Bourne, who said she has since “distanced” herself from midwifery, said she was not aware of Ms Lovell suffering a postpartum haemorrhage in the hospital birth of her first daughter, Lulu.

Ms. Lovell had been warned:

Ms Lovell saw three general practitioners from the same clinic during her pregnancy, where she was warned about the risks of home births on four occasions and underwent blood tests, which revealed she was anaemic.

Dr Daniel Bevz had told the court earlier Ms Lovell was steadfast in her decision to have a “natural” birth.

“She indicated she had discussed that with previous doctors at length and did not want to enter into further discussions,” Dr Bevz said.

Had Ms. Lovell given birth unassisted, she might be alive today. When she told her husband she was dying, he may have called an ambulance to summon real medical professionals.

Instead, Ms. Lovell trusted homebirth midwives and they “reassured” her she was fine even as her life ebbed away.

Ms. Lovell trusted birth and birth killed her.

A fitting memorial to Ms. Lovell would be very strict regulation of Australian homebirth midwifery, so that no other woman or baby dies while ignorant, brain washed, negligent midwives stand by and watch.

But I predict that Australian midwives will fight that tooth and nail. Indeed, I can’t wait to see how midwifery spokesperson Hannah Dahlen tries to spin a mother’s easily preventable death at the hands of homebirth midwives who couldn’t even be bothered to check a pulse.

The death rate of homebirth with American homebirth midwives is appalling. Indeed, it is so appalling that the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), the organization that represents homebirth midwives, hid their death rates for 5 years. When they finally released those death rates, they refused to compare them to the death rates for comparable risk women giving birth in the hospital, because that would have shown that homebirth midwives have a death rate 450% higher.

This is part of the homebirth campaign to bury babies twice, first in tiny coffins in the ground, and then again by erasing their existence from websites, blogs and message boards and by refusing to accept responsibility for those deaths.

Enough is enough! Several months ago, Jan Tritten, the editor of Midwifery Today crowd sourced a life and death situation among her Facebook friends while the baby was dying; then she deleted the thread and any mention of what she had done. The #notburiedtwice campaign was started in response. There’s a Facebook page, numerous tweets, and now, courtesy of doula Danielle Repp, there is a YouTube video. The video includes mothers of babies who have died at homebirth and other women who care passionately about babies who didn’t have to die.

Watch the video. When you do, you will never feel the same way about homebirth again.

Please join our campaign to make sure that the babies who die at homebirth are #notburiedtwice.

Yesterday I mentioned the racists tropes that are at the heart of natural childbirth (and therefore homebirth and UC) advocacy. To paraphrase:

Just like blackface performers often portrayed people of color as happy to be slaves, natural childbirth advocates (generally well off white women) like to portray women of color (albeit without the blackface) as without fear and happy to give birth “in nature.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s not a surprise that this racist trope is at the heart of natural childbirth advocacy. It harks back to the racism of Grantly Dick-Read, the “father” of natural childbirth. Dick-Read viewed natural childbirth as a way for white women of the “better” classes to avoid “race suicide.” Ornella Moscucci explains the thinking of Dick-Read and his eugenicist peers:

… Dick-Read … claimed that primitives experienced easy, painless labours. This was because in primitive societies the survival value of childbirth was fully appreciated and labour was regarded as nothing more than “hard work” in the struggle for existence. In civilised societies on the other hand a number of cultural factors conspired to distort woman’s natural capacity for painless birth, producing in woman a fear of childbirth that hindered normal parturition …

In other words, “natural” childbirth is based on the racist assumption that “primitive women” (read “women of color”) are fundamentally different from white women, simultaneously simple (longing only to reproduce) and unafraid of dying in childbirth, rendering them immune to the pain and dangers of birth.

That racist trope is alive and well among contemporary natural childbirth advocates who pretend to themselves that they are re-enacting childbirth among indigenous peoples. Their little fantasy bears as much resemblance to childbirth in nature as a 3rd grade Thanksgiving play bears to the real relationship between the Pilgrims and the “uncivilized” Native Americans they came to displace.

But the racism extends even further. Natural childbirth advocates are positively eager to use the misfortunes of women of color to advance their own privileged agenda. They delight in pointing to relatively high rates of perinatal and maternal mortality in the US (as compared to other, “whiter” countries), yet ignore that they are the result of appalling death rates among African American women and their babies.Natural childbirth advocates and organizations have the unmitigated gall to imply that these women are dying of “too much” medical intervention when the reality is that they are dying of too little intervention for the serious complications they face.

Ina May Gaskin, a privileged white woman, has led the way in this exploitation. Gaskin never misses an opportunity to highlight mortality rates and even created a “Safe Motherhood” quilt project to draw attention to the problem. Gaskin represents herself as shocked at the current rate of maternal mortality. Yet as far as far as I can tell, homebirth midwives in general and Gaskin in particular have done NOTHING (no research, no education, no fund raising) to reduce the incidence of maternal mortality.

Anyone who visits the quilt website will notice something rather curious. There is NO information about the causes, treatments and research into maternal mortality. There are no scientific papers about maternal mortality. There is nothing about the epidemiology of maternal mortality.

That’s because Gaskin and other natural childbirth advocates care about the deaths of women and babies of color only to the extent that they can exploit them for their own ends, not because they care that they are dead and not because they have any intention of lobbying for an increase in high risk obstetricians to treat the problem.

The exploitation of women of color extends to the many ham handed attempts to increase breastfeeding rates. For example, ending gifts of free formula samples does NOTHING to increase the rate of breastfeeding. It’s only real impact is to deprive poor women (among which women of color are overrepresented) of a desperately needed resource for infant formula.

None of this is surprising. The natural childbirth movement is by, about and for privileged white women.

Political scientist Candace Johnson explores the role of “natural” childbirth as a philosophy of privilege in contemporary society in The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth. Johnson asks:

[W]hy do some women (mostly privileged and in developed countries) demand less medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, while others (mostly vulnerable women in both developed and developing countries) demand more …? Why do the former, privileged women, tend to express their resistance to medical intervention in the language of “nature,” “tradition,” and “normalcy”?

And answers:

It is a rejection of privilege that simultaneously confirms it. Therefore, the problem of medicalization seems to apply disproportionately to privileged women. In fact, some of the most serious pronouncements of medical interference in pregnancy and childbirth as a “natural, normal, woman-centered event” come from women of considerable privilege and authority…

The fantasy of Third World women’s natural experiences of childbirth has become iconic among first world women, even if these experiences are more imagined than real. This creates multiple opportunities for exploitation, as the experiences of Third World women are used as a means for first world women to acquire knowledge, experience and perspective on ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ birthing practices, while denying the importance of medical services that privileged women take for granted.

Natural childbirth rests to a large extent on misrepresenting women of color, while simultaneously exploiting the poor outcomes of those very same women in a thoroughly disingenuous critique of modern obstetrics.

It may be unconscious racism, but it is racism nonetheless.

Stuntbirth, known to devotees as unassisted childbirth (UC) or “freebirth” is about to get a reality TV show. It’s a marriage made in heaven!

Stuntbirthers are narcissists in the extreme and reality TV is made for narcissists who are so desperate for attention that they are willing to be ridiculed and/or humiliated for the TV.

The only surprise is that it took this long.

Stuntbirthers like to pretend to themselves and others that this is how birth happens in nature (no, across all times, places and culture, birth is assisted), that birth is so deeply personal and “sexual” that a couple must experience it alone (really, then why are you posting a video of it on YouTube for all the world to see?) and that it is safe. The entire practice would be nothing more than a punch line were it not for the fact that it kills babies, in fact a startlingly high proportion of the babies whose mothers were ignorant enough to embrace this stunt.

Perhaps more compelling than the statistics is the fun fact that both the leading American and Australian advocates of UC have ended up with dead babies as a result. Laura Shanley, the American, likes to boast that she had 4 wonderful unassisted births, but she has actually had 5. She deliberately and knowingly gave birth to a premature baby alone at home and, over the next several hours, watched him die without ever summoning help.

In April of 2009, Janet Fraser, Australia’s leading advocate of UC, experienced the death of her baby during labor. Fraser had proudly boasted to an Australian paper that she had no prenatal care of any kind, and planned to have no medical assistance at the birth. Her baby paid the ultimate price for her idiocy.

Unassisted childbirth is also, in its own self-absorbed, narcissistic way, startlingly racist. Stuntbirth advocates (like many homebirth advocates) like to imagine that women in nature, particularly women of color, did not fear childbirth, simply squatted down by the Congo River to give birth, and immediately returned to their fabulously healthy paleo lifestyle.

Instead those women in nature, often women of color, feared childbirth because they died in agony and in droves. Indeed, even today many women, particularly women of color, continue to die in agony and in droves. According to the World Bank, the life time risk of maternal death is the probability that a 15-year-old female will die eventually from a pregnancy related cause. In the US where modern obstetrics is available the risk of death due to pregnancy and childbirth over a lifetime is 1 in 1800; in countries that are predominantly white and ethnically homogeneous, the lifetime risk is 1 in 13,000. In contrast, a teenager in Cameroon has a 1 in 34 chance of dying of a pregnancy related cause over her lifetime and women in Chad have a 1 in 15 chance of dying.

You can bet that they aren’t crowing about the virtues of stuntbirth. They have the assistance of traditional birth attendants in labor; they may walk miles to deliver in a clinic, and they certainly don’t give birth outside by the river bank.

In a sense, stuntbirth is the childbirth equivalent of blackface, complete with racist stereotypes minimizing the childbirth horrors that women of color endured and still endure (look up obstetric fistula). Just like blackface performers often portrayed people of color as happy to be slaves, stuntbirthers (invariably well off white women) like to portray women of color (albeit without the blackface) as happy to give birth “in nature.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Tragically, unassisted childbirth has no benefit for the baby and poses very serious risks or injury and death. It is a form of medical neglect based on appalling ignorance, extraordinary selfishness and clueless racism. In short, it is nothing more than an ugly and dangerous stunt.

Perfect for reality TV!

Awww, Katie Jenkins McCall (remember Sisters in Chains) is feeling angry.

Why? Because her buddy, self-proclaimed “midwife” Vicki Dawn Sorensen, was arrested just because she allegedly presided over the death of a very premature baby after insisting that homebirth would be fine, interfered with an ambulance crew trying to rescue a hemorrhaging mother, lied on medical records, and may have multiple dead babies buried on her property.

Well, you know what, Katie? I’m feeling angry, too.

I’m feeling angry because ignorant, arrogant, irresponsible clowns like you support homebirth with ignorant, arrogant, irresponsible self-proclaimed midwives who fail to meet the basic qualifications for midwives in ALL other industrialized countries.

I’m angry because it doesn’t matter a damn to you that babies die at the hands of these ignorant, arrogant, clowns like yourself. All that appears to matter to you and your buddies, is your pocketbook.

I’m angry because you confuse your ability to fleece unsuspecting pregnant women with “birth freedom.” The only freedom you and your buddies appear to be interested in is the freedom from safety standards, taking responsibility and being held accountable.

I’m angry because it in your privileged white, middle class woman way you think YOU are persecuted just because a bunch of babies are dying preventable deaths at the hands of your buddies. You have no idea what persecution is.

You have no idea what ethics is, either. Ethics involves caring about the LIVES of the babies in your care. It involves caring about the LIVES of the pregnant women in your care. It does not involve your ability to profit despite your substandard education, substandard training, and overweening arrogance in thinking that you are capable of caring for human beings.

Donating to a legal fund for any midwife who is accused of hideously negligent substandard care because you like homebirth is like donating to the Aaron Hernandez defense fund because you like football. It betrays a fundamental contempt for the lives of the people you are supposed to serve.

Does Sorensen deserves a lawyer. Of course she does, and the State of Utah is obligated to provide her with a public defender, not a “lay” lawyer, not a self-proclaimed “lawyer,” not an self taught “lawyer.” Although homebirth “midwives” think that “lay,” “self-proclaimed” and “self-taught” are okay when it comes to medical care for women and babies, they are concerned enough about their own hides that they don’t want to settle for a public defender, but want to hire a professional who requires a $50,000 retainer. It would be the height of irony if it weren’t so tragic.

Katie, I have some unsolicited advice for you and your buddies:

Stop pretending that you are midwives; you are poorly educated, poorly trained lay people.

Stop attending homebirths. Too many babies have died because of clowns like you.

Stop prattling about “birth freedom.” This has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with responsibility.

Stop giving new meaning to the term “blood money” by donating to support women who should not be allowed to care for anyone, let alone vulnerable women and babies.

And please, please, please stop feeling sorry for yourselves! You are not oppressed. You are not persecuted. You are just ignorant, arrogant and terribly dangerous.

A midwife in Utah allegedly presided over the death of a very premature baby after insisting that homebirth would be fine, interfered with an ambulance crew trying to rescue a hemorrhaging mother, lied on medical records, may have multiple dead babies buried on her property, and, nonetheless, homebirth advocates are supporting her; they’re raising money for her legal defense and even holding a benefit concert.

Why should we care?

We should care because it demonstrates that there is no will among homebirth midwives or homebirth advocates to institute ANY safety standards of any kind.

We should care because it demonstrates that homebirth midwives will NEVER hold each other accountable for even outrageous behavior, let alone simple negligence and malpractice.

We should care because #yesallbabies are treated as nothing more than props in the mothers’ and midwives’ view of homebirth.

We should care because #yesallbabies who die at homebirth are treated as unimportant collateral damage in the quest for “birth freedom.”

We should care because #yesallbabies are put at risk of death by the blind eye that homebirth advocates and homebirth midwives turn to the growing pile of tiny dead bodies.

We should care because American homebirth advocates and homebirth midwives are fundamentally unethical, promoting ignorance, arrogance and negligence.

But most importantly, we should care because anyone who has a heart cares about #yesallbabies who didn’t have to die.

Please speak out wherever you can and make sure that the babies who die at homebirth are #notburiedtwice.

People accuse me of being insensitive for writing about homebirth deaths, but I can’t hold a candle to homebirth advocates. They are giving new meaning to the term “blood money.”

We already know that they don’t give a damn about the growing pile of tiny dead bodies. Their credentialing organizations have no safety standards; they crowd source life and death decisions among their Facebook friends, and there isn’t a death that they can’t justify (to themselves). But do they have to grind their hideous lack of sympathy right into the weeping faces of the parents of those dead babies?

Apparently they do.

If there ever were a case where the homebirth midwife deserved to be disavowed by her colleagues, the latest homebirth death to hit the news in Utah would seem to be it.

Police say a lay midwife in Cedar City refused to take a laboring mother of premature twins to a hospital, falsified emergency medical information, and tried to stop the hemorrhaging mother from leaving the midwife’s in-home birth center in an ambulance as her infant son died.

But police documents connected with the investigation go farther, indicating that other babies died under the care of Vicki Dawn Sorensen and her daughter, Camille Wilcox, and reporting allegations that the midwives were burying infants’ remains in clandestine graves…

The mother began laboring in December 2012, at 32 to 33 weeks of pregnancy. The mother and the twins’ father “became greatly concerned” that the twins would be born premature outside of a hospital — Sorensen allegedly told them she would not try to deliver the babies before 36 weeks — but Sorensen allegedly told the parents not to worry because they could go to a hospital if problems were to arise, police wrote.

I hadn’t written about this yet because the existing details make the midwife sound mentally deranged and I wasn’t sure whether this was an example of the pitiful education and training of self-proclaimed “midwives” or an example of psychiatric illness. Homebirth advocates apparently don’t care what the proximate cause is, whether it is the ignorance of homebirth midwives or deranged behavior. If she calls herself a midwife, they are on her side.

Check this out:

Yes, you read that right. Families for Birth Freedom would like to start a fundraising campaign for Vicki Sorenson. So let me see if I get this straight: Sorensen has allegedly presided over the death of a very premature baby after insisting that homebirth would be fine, interfered with an ambulance crew trying to rescue a hemorrhaging mother, lied on medical records, and MAY HAVE MULTIPLE DEAD BABIES BURIED ON HER PROPERTY, and homebirth advocates want to send her money? Really?

What would it take for homebirth advocates to disavow a midwife. Would she have to shoot the baby in cold blood?

How about the grieving parents. Surely homebirth advocates are raising money for them, right? Not so far as I can tell.

So there you have it folks, the homebirth midwifery trifecta: ignorant, negligent AND heartless.

Don’t let them get away with it this time.

Please share this post on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you can think of, and include the hashtag #notburiedtwice.

Women need to know that when they choose homebirth, they are choosing practitioners who not merely abandon them after presiding over their babies’ deaths, but will actually give money to the midwives responsible.

And for any woman thinking about homebirth, you ought to think again:

This could be you, left with empty arms, a broken heart and midwives raising blood money to protect one of their own. Apparently homebirth midwives are more interested in their “birth freedom” than whether your baby, ANY baby, or MANY babies live or die.