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These articles are Caroline's bid to convey to unbelievers the reasons why homebirth is such a worthwhile cause. The arguments put forward relate to cost, safety, client preference, intervention rates, midwifery autonomy, rest and sleep, family cohesion, convenience, privacy, social cohesion, tradition, job satisfaction, continuity of care, comfort and better mothering! These arguments, in various configurations, appeared in a range of publications -the National Childbirth Trust's `New Generation', Primary Health Care, Nursing Times, Socialism and Health, Nursing and the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The articles therefore represent a remarkable attempt to expose a considerable number of people to pro-homebirth propaganda and to sow seeds of doubt about the supremacy of hospital birth. As such it is reasonable to conclude that they have played a part in halting the decline of homebirth. No opportunity to acquaint readers with Caroline's favourite articles and reports is lost. The work of Damstra-Wijmenga, Klein, Campbell and MacFarlane, Caldeyro-Barcia, Tew and Dunn are presented in numerous articles in this as in preceding sections. Their findings and conclusions, challenging as they do the dominant medical culture of childbirth, are not allowed to pass unheeded or sink without at least making impact on Caroline's readers. Similarly the Royal College of Midwives' report `Towards a Healthy Nation' is promoted in a number of these articles, despite the fact that its failure to adopt continuity of care as a central theme for the development of the maternity services must have been a frustration and disappointment for Caroline, who was a RCM Council member at the time. This rather bland report was published a year after the Association of Radical Midwives brought out its more foresighted `Vision' for the future of the maternity services. However Caroline dwells on the aspect of `Towards a Healthy Nation' that she found most positive, namely its endorsement of homebirth. `A very special birth day' and `No place like home for labour' both contain case studies of childbirth as it should be in Caroline's view: woman-centred, quiet and private and against a background of family and community life. The former article is also a quick guide on how to attend a birth as an independent midwife whilst working for the NHS. Caroline was not quite the innocent she makes out in this article or in `Home service'. She is publicly retracing the origins of her own thinking and practice as a midwife for those coming after her. The three years break in attending any homebirths that she mentions in `A very special birthday' was a purgatorial blip in a career which has centred on attending women giving birth in their own homes. Caroline subscribes to the widely, but no means universally, shared view that the culture of birth underpins the ethos of society and that our experience of our own birth echoes throughout our lives. In `Retracing our cultural roots', the far-reaching and cross-generational implications of our management of childbirth are outlined. The idea that the mode of giving birth can be imprinted on coming generations means that the way we approach birth has long lasting effects. The possibility that this is indeed likely is attested to by the theory of morphic resonance proposed in `New Science' (Sheldrake, 1990). Caroline constantly asks her readers to consider what sort of society they want, what sort of people do we want to be and with what kinds of memories? Do we want to subject ourselves and our babies to technocratic management and thereby change something of who and what we are? In `Labour - the importance for a woman to be in control of her own childbearing' Caroline argues that control, choice and being enabled to take responsibility for oneself and one's loved ones are an essential part of being human and therefore a necessary foundation for maternity care. The rightness of homebirth for women, babies and families, as illustrated in `A very special birthday', therefore prefigures the statistical support for its safeness. For proponents of homebirth like Caroline, the findings of Tew, and Campbell and MacFarlane were no more surprising than spring being followed by summer. The fact nonetheless remains that, for many midwives, doctors and women, the exhortation to homebirth is more akin to being invited on a round-the -world cruise in medieval times, when it was well known that the Earth was flat. In 1990, Caroline and Valerie Taylor set up their `Special Delivery Midwifery Practice' as outlined in the article of that title. They made a deliberate and conscious decision to attract influential people as their clients in the belief that such clients, traditionally the private patients of obstetricians, could really help to bring about a change in the public's perception of homebirth and midwifery. As a result they have to brook a lot of criticism from other midwives that what they are doing somehow isn't really proper midwifery, an accusation they strongly refute. Meanwhile the practice has thrived and, in 1994, they opened their Birth Centre, the first free-standing independent birth centre in the UK, in Tooting, South London. ReferenceSheldrake, R. (1990). The Rebirth of Nature: New Science and the Revival of Animism. London: Rider Books. |
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