It’s September 16th, 2007, 4:20 pm. My wife, Lyss, has been screaming at the top of her lungs at intervals of an hour when a wave of murky yellow fluid sprays out from her in an arc across our bedroom. The midwife nudges me and motions discretely at Lyss’ groin. She seems about to turn inside out. It looks more like a writhing mass of eels than a baby coming.

In about two seconds, a tiny head pops out looking down and then turns as his body turns in my wife’s pelvis, the head turning to look directly at me, and for an instant I think that he looks dead. But I say “That’s a beautiful baby,” and then the rest of him comes out in my hands and he breathes, and as I hand him to his mother his eyes open and I know he’s healthy. The midwives work to stop the bleeding and Lyss pushes out the placenta. In a few minutes I let go of the baby in Lyss’ arms and cut the umbilical chord, like cutting rope. Births are amazing, home births especially so, and it’s hard to imagine that only ten years ago home births were performed outside the law.

Canada was the last “developed” nation to recognize midwifery, with the Atlantic Provinces and Saskatchewan still refusing to regulate it today. On November 1st to 3rd, the Midwives Association of BC is celebrating ten years of regulated midwifery practice at its annual general meeting. There’s a huge party planned for November 2nd at East Vancouver’s Heritage Hall on Main Street with all sorts of family entertainment. Tickets to the party are $35 and the hope is to raise money for medical supplies for the UBC midwifery program in Zambia and Uganda. According to the April 25th Courier, several of the midwifery students raised the money to go themselves, as well as $4,500 for medical supplies. The students assist in hundreds of births, as opposed to dozens in BC, and they tell of watching Africans birthing with the bare minimum of supplies, as well as having nursed mothers sickened by illegal abortions. It sounds barbaric from a Canadian perspective, but it wasn’t so long ago that equally barbaric practices were practiced in BC.

As celebrated birth attendant and educator Gloria Lemay says on the web page of the Home Birth Association of BC, “It’s not so very long ago that women struggled to get the right to vote, women were not permitted to have information and access to birth control, women could not be openly homosexual, women could not breast feed in public, women could not be physicians, women could not choose abortion with a medical practitioner, women would have to go before medical panels to explain that they would go crazy if they didn’t get an abortion, women could not get a midwife that was not an outlaw, women could be forced against their will to have a cesarean, women could not refuse vaccines for their children, women could not choose to home school their children.” Gloria Lemay has assisted over 2,000 births over nearly 30 years and is one of the most sought-after birth attendants in the province, but she declined to be regulated because she was “fearful that regulation would change the public service and alternative nature of true midwifery and make it more like the allophatic model.” As a result of declining to be regulated in 1998, Lemay was pursued in court by the College of Midwives and faced jail time for having assisted births.

Several barbarisms still continue in Canada, and their number has even increased. The number of cesareans continues to increase year after year despite mounting evidence of the dangers involved to both mother and child. Even the BC College of Midwives practices inducing birth after a certain length of pregnancy, administering unnecessary medications, and recommending that women that have had a history of cesareans give birth in a hospital. Many midwives won’t perform home births. In some communities there are no registered practitioners to do home births, and unregistered birth attendants are not covered under medicare. Vaccinations, although controversial, are still often pushed on mothers as absolutely necessary. Sometimes it seems as though we are not as advanced a nation as we think we are.

During our pregnancy, Lyss and I did a lot of research. We met women who had been forced from their homes into hospitals by social workers giving orders to the midwives. We met women who told us stories of hospital births in which they were subjected to all manner of rules, regulations, and nurses interrupting their sleep. One mother was told by hospitals that home birthing is illegal. Another mother was told that healthy maternity is impossible without the use of cow’s milk. We also met with four physicians, all of whom refused to recommend anything but a hospital birth. (Finding a doctor that recommends home birth is about as likely as finding one that does house calls.)

What the doctors did recommend were a number of ultrasounds; we had four in total. Lyss and I went to radiology at two different hospitals and waited with seriously sick people in little waiting rooms where you can almost taste the electromagnetic radiation. Most of the hospitals would not let me in with Lyss for most of the procedure for fear that I might “interfere with the measurements.” There is a huge machine that beams some kind of ultrasonic radiation into the womb, bouncing it off the baby, showing an x-ray-like image of the baby on a little monitor. At one point, one of the attendants actually used the probe to push the baby’s head off Lyss’ pelvis. Lyss was often sore after these ultrasounds that were, with the benefit of hindsight, totally unnecessary.

You’d think that doctors would know better, considering their intensive education, but they continue to fall prey to such blatant propaganda. In the 1980s, when moves to legally recognize midwives were made in BC, associations of physicians, such as the Canadian Medical Association, campaigned hard to keep midwifery outlawed. The reasoning was based, in part, on an assumed danger of any out-of-hospital birth, despite studies from countries where home birthing has been a common practice for decades that show home birth is no more dangerous than hospital birth. One obstetrician told us of three babies lost in one year, but failed to tell us that this was in a trial group of several thousand and that the doctors delivering in hospitals also lost a baby during the trial. Not long ago, bumper stickers that said “Home Delivery is for Pizza” were given out at obstetrician and gynecologist conventions.

Our midwives came many times to our home and talked with us over raspberry, oatstraw, and camomile teas, listening to our concerns and preparing us for the birth. I’ll never forget examining the placenta with these ladies, the “tree of life” they called it. They brought over models and bounties of information and located research that our physicians didn’t think existed. On the day of the birth, both midwives stayed for over six hours and returned every day for a week and then sporadically after that. Lyss was able to eat her own food, sleep in her own bed, and use her own washroom. We didn’t take our son out of our room for two days. He barely cried for the first three days. At four days we took him outside in the sun for a moment. The midwives gave us a feeling of our being in control, a feeling that wouldn’t have been possible with a doctor in a hospital handling pregnancies like they were illnesses.

There is a maternity care crisis in BC. Many hospitals have had to struggle through shifts without a single doctor present. Recently, pregnant women were actually shipped out of province to receive attention. I sat in the BC legislature and watched the Director of the MCFD say again and again that there is no crisis for BC families, lying again and again, shifting blame and responsibility to Ottawa. It was like watching some monstrous queen of the zombie bureaucrats. It is an outrage and I’ve not heard anyone say it better than Gloria Lemay:

“It’s time to stand up in the courts right across the continent and say ‘. . . this is not appropriate for women. . . and I’m going to oppose it just as other women opposed all those other silly restrictions on their mothering and reproduction processes. If you need to jail me, go for it. The silliness stops here.’. . . The government does not love the baby more than the mother. The mother may not be perfect but she’s the best bet we have for the welfare of the baby and if she wants to give birth in a shack with a chimpanzee helping her, I’ll go to prison, if necessary, to stand for her right to choose.”