Missourians finally free to give birth at home

Finally, women in Missouri have the right to a midwife-attended home birth. By a 5-2 decision, the state supreme court rejected an effort by doctors to abolish a recent law legalizing the practice.

Until recently, Missouri was the only state where having a home birth attended by a certified midwife was actually a felony. A group of doctors sought to return women in Missouri to that benighted situation, claiming they had standing to sue by virtue of speaking for their patients. That is, seeking to speak on behalf of women who might foolishly try to have home births if they weren’t prevented, and therefore can't be trusted to speak for themselves. As Susan Jenkins, legal counsel for the National Birth Policy Coalition and a consultant to the Missouri midwives, stated:

“This case confirms the message that’s been reverberating loud and clear in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere ever since the American Medical Association launched its attacks against midwives and home birth last week—physicians do not have the right to speak for patients when it comes to deciding who delivers their babies.”

Our Bodies Ourselves notes how weirdly the concept of choice is being used by the medical establishment when it comes to reproduction and childbirth. At the same time that the AMA and American College of Obstetricians pushes the acceptability of “elective” C-sections, it is making VBACS harder and harder to have and opposes the expansion of women's choices in caregivers and birthing places.