Illinois Home Birth Safety Act Up for Vote This Week

Back in October, I told you about the Home Birth Safety Act before the Illinois legislature. This act, so important for the women and families of Illinois, will likely come to vote this week. If passed, women of the state will finally have access to a safe birthing experience at home, if they so choose.

Right now, Illinois women have no such access. The state currently provides absolutely no certification for midwives. So the approximately 800 to 1,000 Illinois women annually who want to have a home birth have to rely on an unlicensed, unregulated midwife without any way of being sure she is properly trained. As I explained in October, this can lead a woman in desire for a home birth to a situation without standardized care, difficulty in obtaining a birth certificate for her newborn, or, in the worst case scenario, trouble getting smoothly transferred to a hospital in the event of a medical emergency.

If the Illinois legislature passes the Home Birth Safety Act, these problems would be addressed. The act would create a Midwifery Board in Illinois that would oversee the licensing of  and certification standards for professional midwives. Midwives would be required by law to consult with medical professionals, should medical complications arise during pregnancy or birth.

Even though planned home births have the same infant and maternal mortality rates as hospital births and significantly lower rates of medical intervention — such as caesarean section, episiotomy, and vacuum extraction — there are still people who vehemently oppose the certification of midwives. Those would be, of course, the people who make money on hospital births.

Obstetricians have made wild claims about the so-called dangers of planned home births. They've said that midwives won't want to refer their patients to doctors, even when it is in the woman's best interest. And, even if she did, the executive director of the New York division of the congress of obstetricians said that she doubted that any obstetrician would be willing to interrupt his free time to help out a woman in critical condition during labor if that woman hadn't previously been his patient. Classy. When certifying midwives was an issue in Ohio, the American College of Obstetricians (ACOG) actually said they feared women were being taken in by "what’s fashionable, trendy or the latest cause célèbre."

Enough is enough. Reproductive choice means more than whether or not to have a baby, but how you choose to have that baby. Home births aren't trendy, they've been happening for thousands of years. It is not the government's role to throw obstacles in the way of a woman's birthing wishes. It is likely that the bill will come to a vote this week. It is important to tell the Illinois legislature to pass the Home Birth Safety Act. There are those out there who are fighting to defeat this bill and we've got to be louder in our support of it.

Photo credit: eyeliam

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