ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that giving birth at home is always safer for women, and that giving birth in hospital may be safer for firstborn children, but that it is no safer for subsequent births. In some countries episiotomy rates are as high as 92 per cent, meaning that almost all women are expected to submit to often unnecessary actual bodily harm with distressing long-term consequences. Even though falling perinatal and maternal mortality rates may owe more to general improvements in women’s standard of living than to increased technological intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, it is widely assumed that there is a simple causal relationship between the routine clinical management of childbirth and better health outcomes. For some women childbirth is so traumatic that it triggers post-traumatic stress disorder. Labouring women are not the only people who may encounter condescending attitudes from healthcare professionals, or whose dignity may be insufficiently safeguarded.
