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What is 'freebirth'? Stillborn baby prompts online debate

With additional reporting by Beth Greenfield.

The idea behind “freebirthing,” a fringe movement of women who opt to give birth at home or in natural settings with no professional assistance, is a subject that tends to elicit reactions from intrigue to horror — on YouTube, for example, with the hugely popular “Birth in Nature” video (viewed over 76 million times since 2013), and also the short-lived Lifetime series Born in the Wild, which the video reportedly inspired.

But this week, vitriol seems to have taken over. It follows news of a freebirth that ended in tragedy when a baby named Journey Moon was stillborn, with online critics attacking the grieving mother as a “baby killer.”

That American mum, who goes by the pseudonym “Lisa” in a Daily Beast article, reportedly chose to labor for several days at her remote desert home in California, with only her husband present; she leaned on the Free Birth Society, a supportive viral community of thousands, and went to the hospital when her situation felt dire. She then posted a final update to the group’s Facebook page: “Journey Moon was born a sleeping angel on Oct. 7 at 8 lbs 13 oz. She passed due to a massive urinary tract infection I had… I’m laying in the hospital writing this and get to go home tomorrow. We will be having Journey cremated.”

Who has the ultimate say in choices surrounding childbirth? The freebirth movement has had many people rethinking their answer. (Photo: Getty Images)
Who has the ultimate say in choices surrounding childbirth? The freebirth movement has had many people rethinking their answer. (Photo: Getty Images)

The mum was immediately attacked online, telling the Daily Beast, “What should have been a time of grieving and mourning alone with my family was now a time of defending myself from evil people and their horrible words.”

Other critics have focused their ire on the influence of the Free Birth Society — with ob-gyn and author Amy Tuteur going so far as to say that founder Emilee Saldaya “is as ethically responsible for Journey Moon’s death as if she had taken out a gun and shot her.” As a result of the criticisms, Saldaya shut down the group’s private Facebook page and is now speaking out about what she sees as an unjust reaction.

“This is a fight about choice, a woman’s autonomy, and reproductive freedom,” Saldaya tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “You are either pro-choice and support both the legal and human rights of adult bodily autonomy, or you don’t. For anyone to suggest that a woman makes any of these decisions lightly, or is selfish or irresponsible when intentionally choosing what she feels is safest for her and her child, is a blatant misogynist.”

The baby’s death, then, and resulting fiery discourse, has for many been a line in the sand — with those on one side seeing freebirthing as a reckless choice that selfishly flouts the standards of modern medicine, and those on the other seeing it as the powerful epitome of a woman’s right to choose. The argument is strikingly similar in tone to that of the abortion debate, with one question at the center of it all: How freely should a woman be to choose her childbirth experience?

Some doctors shared their concerns about freebirthing on Twitter this week.

Instagram glorifies home unassisted deliveries and this leads women to make dangerous choices,” began a long and impassioned Twitter thread about the situation on Monday from Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco-based gynecologist known for frequently taking folks to task for what she says are “snake oil” claims (especially when they are peddled by Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand GOOP).

Gunter, who stopped her obstetrics practice after one of her own triplets was stillborn years ago, shared her feelings about being part of a medical system that is often shunned by home birthers but then hastily called in for help at the last minute, only to be blamed for problems in the end.

“No one ever talks about how traumatic it is for the OB team to receive these patients [from home births]. We often have minutes to intervene, and so the rush to prevent catastrophe is interpreted as ‘you only want to cut me open,’” she shared, adding:

Gunter noted, “Imagine doing your best to salvage a baby from a home delivery gone wrong. And failing. And being told you ruined the birth experience.”

That thread led some to call out the difference between midwife-assisted and unassisted home births, with some saying they supported a woman’s right to choose her childbirth experience, as long as she wasn’t going it totally alone.

Still others, such as psychologist and grief counselor Joanne Cacciatore, have expressed simple compassion for Journey Moon’s 29-year-old mother.

Women’s reasons for wanting a freebirth vary wildly — from aiming to prevent unwanted medical interventions, to avoiding (or healing from) incidents of obstetric violence, or simply living in an area where no home-birth midwives practice.

According to a 2015 study published in the International Journal of Women’s Health, Australia has the third lowest rate of planned home births among a group of developed nations at 0.4 per cent.

The difference between freebirths and midwife-assisted home births is that the latter occur in the presence of highly trained midwives, typically certified professional midwives (CPMs) or certified nurse midwives (CNMs), who follow different paths to accreditation. Both operate according to the Midwifery Model of Care, which looks at birth as a normal physiological event rather than a medical one.

While there have been no known studies on freebirth outcomes, there have been many that compare the outcomes of hospital and planned home births, including a landmark 2014 look at 17,000 home births — the largest ever — which found that among low-risk women, planned home births resulted in low rates of interventions and extremely healthy outcomes, including excellent birth weights, a low 5.2 percent C-section rate, high rates of breastfeeding, and a 10.9 percent rate of hospital transfer for babies, mainly for nonemergency reasons.

Another such study, of 80,000 births, found that for planned out-of-hospital births, 3.9 out of 1,000 cases resulted in a baby’s death during the birth process or within four weeks afterward; that’s compared with 1.8 deaths out of 1,000 in planned hospital births. On the other hand, out-of-hospital births were far less likely to involve C-sections — 5.3 percent compared with 24.7 percent in a hospital — which are high-risk surgeries.

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