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Birthing Outside the System: The Canary in the Coal Mine

Birthing Outside the System: The Canary in the Coal Mine

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This book investigates why women choose ‘birth outside the system’ and makes connections between women’s right to choose where they birth and violations of human rights within maternity care systems.

Choosing to birth at home can force women out of mainstream maternity care, despite research supporting the safety of this option for low-risk women attended by midwives. When homebirth is not supported as a birthplace option, women will defy mainstream medical advice, and if a midwife is not available, choose either an unregulated careprovider or birth without assistance. This book examines the circumstances and drivers behind why women nevertheless choose homebirth by bringing legal and ethical perspectives together with the latest research on high-risk homebirth (breech and twin births), freebirth, birth with unregulated careproviders and the oppression of midwives who support unorthodox choices. Stories from women who have pursued alternatives in Australia, Europe, Russia, the UK, the US, Canada, the Middle East and India are woven through the research.

Insight and practical strategies are shared by doctors, midwives, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists on how to manage the tension between professional obligations and women’s right to bodily autonomy. This book, the first of its kind, is an important contribution to considerations of place of birth and human rights in childbirth.

Why You'll Love It

About the author:

Hannah Dahlen is the Professor of Midwifery and Higher Degree Research Director in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University. She has been a midwife for 29 years and still practices. She is one of the first midwives in Australia to gain Eligibility and access to a Medicare provider number following government reforms in 2010. In 2017 Hannah gained one of the first clinical privileging positions to provide care in a hospital as a Visiting Midwife. Hannah works in a group practice with 5 other private midwives called Midwives at Sydney and Beyond and provides care to women at home and in hospital.

Hannah has strong national and international research partnerships, has received 20 grants since 2000, including being CI on three NHMRC grants and an ARC Linkage grant and has had over 150 publications. She has spoken at over 100 national and international conferences in the past 5 years and given invited keynote addresses at most of these.

In November 2012 Hannah was named in the Sydney Morning Herald’s list of 100 “people who change our city for the better” A panellist on the selection panel for the special feature in the (Sydney) magazine described Professor Dahlen as “probably the leading force promoting natural birth and midwife-led care in Australia.” Professor Dahlen was named as one of the leading “science and knowledge thinkers” for 2012. Hannah received an Australian Medal in the June 10th 2019 Queen’s honours list for her services to Midwifery, Nursing and Medical Education

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