For those who care about midwifery and home birth, the Netherlands has stood as a beacon of sanity, a light in the darkness, a ray of hope. When all over the world midwives lost the power of an independent profession and became some kind of nurse or physician-extender, Dutch midwives remained Midwives. When all over the world, women moved into hospitals for birth, Dutch women stayed home. The story is more complicated (all stories always are) but over and over again, those of us arguing for home birth and for midwives turned to the Netherlands. And we still do, but.... it's getting a bit precarious over there. The home birth rate is down and dropping, the midwives are finding the appeal of shift work and turning over all the complicated cases to the doctors, the doctors are pushing for more control, the women are watching the same television as everyone else and expecting to be in agony and rescued by epidurals. As midwives around the world face various forms of state-control, dramatically shown in the recent case of Agnes Gereb who was arrested for doing home births in Hungary, we turn, yet again to the Dutch, and hope they rise to the occasion.
To learn about the conference, click here.
To read my contribution to the conference, click here.