Save Birth Choices - Australian Families Deserve a VOICE and a CHOICE

Australian women are entitled to make an informed choice about where, how and with whom we give birth.

In most other developed countries, except USA where there is a total medical monopoly, women can choose between the midwifery model of care and the medical approach.

Getting care from midwives who are obliged to work within strict obstetric guidelines is still the medical model.

Only midwives who are independent of these fear-based, legal-butt-covering obstetric policies can truly offer women the midwifery model - which provides a woman with her the best go at a natural birth. Examples: independent home birth midwives, and midwives who work in a free-standing, independent birth centre.

These options need to be on the menu of birth choices available to Australian families.

In this chapter of my blog you can read about the Government's plans to criminalise homebirth, limit natural birth options, and hand over the birthing women of Australia to the control of the medical lobby.

The women of Australia are not going to take this lying back in stirrups. . .

This is the submission I sent to the various enquiries, and to senators and MPs:
Birth at home should be an available option

This article appeared in our local newspaper, the Upper Yarra Mail:

Yarra Valley Women Want Birth Choices

Now maybe you are like many mothers and fathers and you feel you wouldn't necessarily choose homebirth for yourself. But you'd like a fair go at a relatively natural birth in a birth centre or hospital. And you think homebirth should be AN option even if it's not necessarily YOUR option. THIS AFFECTS YOU and it will affect your daughters. We really don't want to see Australia go the way of the USA. So, please read this next post and see what you can do to protect our basic birthing rights and freedoms.

10 Things You Can Do For Birth Reform

Marsden Wagner worked with the WHO for 15 years. Here you can read the WHO's recommendations for maternity care. How they contrast with what we're really getting in Australia. In a recent email to birth activist Sarah Langford, Wagner wrote: "the people of Australia cannot be fooled all the time and value their freedom too highly... Australia does not want an international outcry against them and to be seen as unable to prevent unjustified medical dominance of normal family life.”
Read more here:

Marsden Wagner on Birth Reform in Australia

Here is a thoughtful and intelligent article published in The Age. Monica Dux asks, "If we truly live in a society where women are granted ownership of their own bodies, and if home births, properly supported, are a safe option, then why shouldn't women have the right to choose that option?"

It's a woman's right to choose how she births - by Monica Dux

On August 4th, 300 people gathered outside Nicola Roxon's office in Maribyrnong, leaving "calling card" for her - photos of homebirthing families, with names and addresses. Senator Fielding spoke as did several mothers and midwives. Next: September 7 in Canberra!



Keep writing your letters to Senators, to Ms. Roxon, to your local MPs. You are entitled to a voice and now is the time to raise it. We all know that this is about the rights of women, babies and families, to have safe alternative to the medical, corporatised monopoly over birth, an event which holds profound significance and important repercussions for each one of us.

Don't let cultural norms, the economic climate, politics, laws, increasing technologisation of family life, beliefs, misinformation, scare tactics, expectations from family, friends, society or government, lack of freedom, the failure of democracy, oppression, persecution or ANYTHING else prevent you from choosing the safest, gentlest, wisest way to give birth, for the sake or your well-being, your baby's well-being and that of you family and everyone in it.

Regardless of what the law will be from next July onwards, we need to see the bigger picture. Right around the world, natural values and feminine wisdom is being denigrated and marginalised. In every society where technology is advancing, natural living skills are being lost, sometimes irretrievably. In countries where this is not a mutually honouring balance between the wisdom of the masculine and the wisdom of the feminine, you see the feminine being dominated, and vital wisdom and skills being trodden under foot.

Every woman knows deep in her heart and soul what she is capable of and what she needs to give birth safely. You can't look at what is available, what is "allowed", what is even "legal" and then try to work within that. You need to start with your own deep wisdom, your own vision of what you know is right and safe and good for you when you are birthing. And then - choose that. And do whatever you need to achieve that.

Underground or not, we in Australia are part of a network of women and men in every country who are clinging onto the remnants of natural wisdom and knowledge, to preserve the love and gentleness and compassion needed to nuture our unborns, birth them safely, and parent them gently and kindly.

Don't give up and don't let any authority of home, church, state or peer group, dictate what is accepable for you. Access your own inner wisdom, know the heart of God for you and for all women, then reach out to support, and feel the support of, women (and caring men) all around the world who instinctively know that these things are too precious to lose and cannot be wrested from our possession so easily.

Here is some footage of the rally by Midwife Jane Palmer, for anyone who couldn't make it. Despite the rain, it was an exhilarating experience. As Justine Caines said: "Ignore us at your peril!"

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The Real Birth Wars

Another Submission to the Senate Committee - December 2009

But can I still have a homebirth? Aren't they making it illegal?