WORLD-RENOWNED midwife Ina May Gaskin has said medical students are being filled with “horror stories” about the nature of birth.
Ms Gaskin told the Home Birth Association of Ireland’s annual conference that there was a “systematic scaring of women” when it came to birth and this was leading to too many interventions and Caesarean births.
She claimed that there were fewer interventions and less blood if midwives were thought not to be scared of birth.
About 500 people turned up at a Dublin hotel to hear Ms Gaskin, the author of best-selling books about childbirth including Spiritual Midwifery. She is an advocate of natural birth and runs a midwifery birthing centre in Tennessee called The Farm.
The situation had improved in Ireland since her first visit in the 1980s, when there was almost no home birth, but those who wanted home births would have to continue agitating, she said.
Ms Gaskin told the audience that about 3,000 babies had been born at The Farm since 1970 and there had been no maternal deaths.
The Caesarean rate was 1.7 per cent and there had been no forceps delivery since the 1970s. She was astonished to find Caesarean rates in Brazil were between 50 per cent and 95 per cent.
Ms Gaskin said The Farm had safer rates of birth with Amish women than for women in general in hospitals in the US.
She said the practice in hospitals of breaking a woman’s waters when her cervix was 1cm dilated was dangerous because the baby was not nestled down far enough into the pelvis. She believed women should be given as long as possible to give birth.
