Dear Ms Roxon

RE: PROPOSED LEGISLATION AFFECTING HOMEBIRTH AND INDEPENDENT MIDWIFERY IN AUSTRALIA FROM JULY 2010

I'm writing this to you as one woman-mother to another. It hardly matters whether I'm a homebirther or not, because the core issue at hand transcends birth location. It's about a woman's right to choose what's best for her and her baby, and I think it's fair to say every woman-mother cares about that.

I see you have one child yourself and no doubt your child is the most important person in your life. So I know this same issue affects you personally, because I'm sure that as you carried that baby in your womb you thought constantly about where and how they would be born, what choices you had at your disposal, and what would be safest and best for you and for them.

I also know you're an intelligent woman who can appreciate that one person's choices are not the same as another's. And when it comes to birth choices, what makes one woman feel safe is likely to make another want to run for the hills.

Ms Roxon, please think back to the choices you made for the birth of your own child. You did what you believed was best for you and them, didn't you? It was none of anyone else's business, was it? It was your body, your baby, and no-one had the right to decide for you what you would do, correct?

Now imagine how you would have felt if some total strangers had come along and said "We don't think the care provider you've chosen for your pregnancy and birth should be allowed to provide your care any more. We are going to remove them their practice. You will be forced to make a different choice, and we don't care if the choices you are left with make you want to run for the hills. We know better than you what is best for you and your baby." I don't imagine, being the strong woman you obviously are, that you would take such an irrational, overbearing and unfair restriction lying down.

And yet Ms Roxon, you are doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING to hundreds of your fellow women-mothers. Do you realise that? Removing legal access to homebirth with independent midwives is a travesty of a woman-mother's right to autonomy over one of the most significant and personal events of her life. It perhaps would be understandable if the choice was a demonstrably unsafe one. However, by now enough people will have written to you with evidence-based research that you well know the opposite is true -- that homebirth is safe, that independent midwives have transfer rates of less than 10% (compare this to Australian birth centre transfer rates of 42%, or the deplorable overall c-section rate of 31%), and that safe, empowering births have an enormous beneficial flow-on effect to society's health in general (less incidence of post-natal depression, greater breastfeeding success rates, fewer health complications caused by surgery, etc).

Ms Roxon, please also consider the irony that YOU, a woman in a position of influence thanks to the political activism of her foremothers, may be responsible for the removal of not only a basic human right for your countrywomen, but also the availability of the safest birth choice for women in Australia.

Please use your position of influence to reverse the direction these proposed laws are taking us in.

Yours straight from the heart,
Nat

P.S. I am attaching a copy of my daughter's birth story as a classic example of what a "normal" (or worse, "natural") birth in hospital looks like.