Thank you for providing enough information that I didn’t feel compelled to google despite (because of?) the warning. You are a master of communication. 

dude. Your neighbor sounds like a batshit crazy asshole. Also-I can’t believe after that experience she went on to have more kids

You’re painting with a pretty broad brush there. Qualifications for midwives are all over the place in the US, but in a lot of Western countries midwives have hospital privileges and can either support a birth there or a well-suited and pre-planned home birth can move to the hospital if needed. Most homebirths…

The US experience with midwives is different than others though - in Canada all midwives are the equivalent of US nurse midwives - they're university educated and provincially regulated (I think only one province is lagging), and they have hospital admission privileges. And the stats here show that home births are a…

This is fair. And if we’re all being 100%, women die in hospitals because medical professionals refuse to listen to them when they are telling the doctors and nurses that something is wrong. Someone up above said that the answer is for the medical community to treat pregnant women as humans. Otherwise, some could…

I think this is a little unfair. I think a lot of women go the home route for fear that the hospital will take away their autonomy - which is true in a lot of cases. It isn’t a fluke that America just happens to have such high c-section rates. Doctors want to go home and not be stuck at a delivery. Once you have that…

Right?! When my mother was pregnant with me, she was low risk by every definition. Back then, they didn’t do ultrasounds unless they suspected something was wrong (especially when you’re a farmer with bare minimum insurance), but everything was progressing well and she considered using a midwife. The night before my…

yeah, you’ve got to call out the husband on this.  he was with her & let this go on as long as it did?  something wrong there.

Yeah it’s not the “home” part of this that is horrifying. It’s the “alone” bit and the prohibiting of any other options or interventions. 

The thing is? Bodies don’t really know shit. We die from literally countless things and in the main it’s because the body cannot recover from whatever it was that damaged it. 

You know what else is natural? DEATH. God, this kind of shit is infuriating. It’s one thing to have a home birth, it’s quite another to just decide after reading a Facebook page that going through giving birth with absolutely no medical backup while your ‘friends’ intimidate you out of going to the hospital is another.

I get wanting natural experiences but I do not believe one’s “body knows what to do”. I also understand that hospitals are a scary place for women and there is a valid fear that medical professionals impose too much on a laboring mother. However, I would far rather have intervention that I might not want if it means…

Six days. Six. I’m a gay dude and even I know that’s not a good sign.

I feel awful about the baby dying and that Lisa and her husband have lost a child. I understand the desire to have a baby at home with as little intervention as possible, but at some point you have to be able to recognize that something is wrong and seek out professional help. Complications happen, and in those…

Totally agree, and I’ll just add that I’m glad I’m someone who never wants to give birth, so I will never have to deal with any of this stuff.

I get mistrust of the US health care system. I really do. But it wasn’t THAT long ago that childbirth was a leading cause of death for women. Forgive the expression, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I wish that my three children didn’t require surgical intervention to enter the world. The havoc those C sections have wreaked on my back and abs can’t be overstated.

WTF is the point of living in modern times if a person doesn’t avail herself of some of its luxuries, like a freaking pre-natal appointment to a midwife or something? Yet she will chatter on FB about the “primal instinct” that takes over. Guess what? Birthing can be pretty deadly, just look at history. But no, the…

big-city rapper...  That is the laziest dog whistle ever.  

I feel the same way. More than the Dems’ victories yesterday, I think the real winner was racism. The southern strategy is still working. Too many white people are either racist or apathetic toward racism, especially poor whites. All of the racist attacks that were made, all of the ads that were ran, and the fact that…