#notburiedtwice

I used to be an advocate for out of hospital birth. Before I was even pregnant, I read Ina May Gaskin, Henci Goer, watched The Business of Being Born...you name it, I read it. I believed the fear-mongering about hospital birth, and decided that whenever I did have a baby, I would go to a birthing center (it would be cheaper too!), but I was open to a hospital birth should I somehow feel it was necessary.

The day I took a pregnancy test and saw those two lines saying that I was going to have a baby, I had a powerful, unmistakable feeling that this baby needed to be born in the hospital. My husband felt the exact same way, though he was always hesitant about my previous desires for an out-of-hospital birth. I was already getting my well-woman care through a group of Certified Nurse Midwives, so I continued going to them for my prenatal care.

As you all know, I developed ICP and had to be delivered early. Can you imagine what could have happened had I decided to give birth outside the hospital? Kate could very well have died. While yes, she was born healthy and screaming and never needed NICU time, it was all because I received proper care for the ICP and was induced early.

In fact, around the time I received my ICP diagnosis, I watched a home birth video on YouTube where the mother was diagnosed with ICP, but her midwives did not transfer her care but rather, put her on a "special liver diet" (there is no evidence of this helping significantly, by the way) and she went to 39 weeks. Her baby lived, but she was really lucky that nothing bad happened. I was angry.

I am not against home birth, but I am against how home birth is handled here in the United States. Sure, everyone talks about how it's so safe in European countries, but people, in those countries, those midwives are the equivalent of CNMs, have hospital privileges, AND have OB backup! We don't have that here, and regulation just sucks.

In fact, in my state of Utah, midwifery licensure is optional. There are midwives who have gone through the training, but choose not to be licensed so they can attend high risk deliveries, such as breech and twins. There is a big problem with this law: there are midwives who have been prosecuted in other states for baby deaths who come to Utah and ride off this optional licensing. One prime example is Valerie El-Halta. She had had her license stripped from her (which rarely happens, by the way) because she had had babies die under her, and she came here and killed another in a home birth after THREE c-sections. And yet, the community of home birth midwives defended her, rather than discipline her. That is just sick.

The video I posted is in response to a tragedy that happened a few months ago on the Midwifery Today Facebook page.

The page owner, Jan Tritten, posted on behalf of another midwife (Christy Collins), asking about a client who was more than 42 weeks pregnant. The mother had no amniotic fluid left, and the midwife was asking what she should do about it.

First off, what medical professional would outsource a life and death situation like that?!

There were people who told her, "Get that mother to the hospital NOW!" but many others told her that there was nothing wrong with going past 42 weeks, giving her crazy remedies, etc.

The baby, Gavin Michael, was stillborn. And he did not need to die. As it turns out, Christy Collins has other dead babies under her belt and moves around to avoid prosecution.

As for the thread? It got deleted (screenshots still exist). Any mention of Gavin Michael on the page get deleted too.

In a sense, they are trying to bury him twice. But we won't let them.

Hence, #notburiedtwice.