I’m an NHS midwife, despairing over your article (Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world, 22 November). My key frustration, though, is how, as with any successful charlatanism, there is truth and real fear being exploited: medical overreach blights lives, women can and should trust their bodies, and a healthy body rarely grows a baby it can’t birth.
However, physiology is not a perfected endpoint. Evolution continues with genetic variation spreading through a population by “survival of the fittest”. In the brutal “wild”, the least “well-adapted” (whether by health or circumstance) do not survive. Human beings, however, don’t like those odds. Medical intervention, yes, but a body of life-saving social knowledge has been passed down since language began, towards facilitating successful birth.
Midwives provide the kind of respectful emotional support that in itself can act as pain relief. A good modern midwife will fiddle with the blood pressure cuff (and rightly – unchecked pre-eclampsia is a killer) but will also prioritise holding your hand and breathing with you through contractions. Mostly, though, experienced midwives enact “watchful waiting”; being discreetly right there, to intervene directly, or escalate to more medically focused colleagues when/if necessary.
The loss of access to and respect for autonomous midwifery, its descent into obstetric nursing, is a raging western misogynist tragedy, resulting in both heinous obstetric violence and the Russian roulette of free birthing. The solution to both is accessible, respectful, experienced, autonomous midwifery care.
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