By Dr. Leila El-Alti

In the UK, Jennifer Cahill and her baby, Agnes, died after a home birth. In Australia, Stacey Warnecke, a food influencer, also died giving birth at home. 

The response to both deaths on social media has been quite frankly shameful: from outright blame and vilification of both women for their choice of birth setting and their lack of compliance with medical recommendations, to statements about how women should never be allowed to give birth outside the hospital, to expressing empathy solely for the midwives involved in Jennifer’s birth, to distinguishing between safety of midwife-attended home births and lack of safety of free births like Stacey’s, to drawing hard lines between low-risk and high-risk women like Jennifer, and to scrambling in defense of the safety of natural birth at home and assuring the world that either death can be easily dismissed as an exception. 

And between natural birth advocates who are ever so quick to affirm that home births are definitely safe and the self-proclaimed voices of reason who assert that women should unconditionally comply with medical advice, women pay the price with their lives and are somehow also blamed for their own deaths. The very same mothers who are deemed ignorant by healthcare systems or entire societies for refusing to submit to medical authority in its current problematic structure, are simultaneously discarded as a rare exception to a norm by natural birth advocates who fear the attention given to these stories would render their worldview void. Because no matter what choices mothers make, they will inevitably be placed on a rack and pulled in opposite directions by the false dichotomies pervading birth discourse. 

“Did you have a normal birth or a c-section?”

“Are you a low-risk or a high-risk pregnancy?” 

“Did you have a natural birth or take an epidural?” 

“Are you planning a home birth or a hospital birth?”

“Did labor start spontaneously or were you induced?” 

“Do you breastfeed or formula feed?” 

Let’s be clear on one thing: Women do not form views and make decisions about birth in isolation from a larger context. 

If women have been alienated by coerced medical interventions and paternalistic standardized practices within hospital settings, natural birth ideals and the promise of birth entirely under their own control at home is bound to sound like liberation. These women are not uneducated or stupid. They are not prioritizing comfort over safety. Most people who parrot these claims obviously do not understand or appreciate what trauma is and how it can consume every aspect of a person’s life. Current research literature hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface on the links between traumatic births, postpartum depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and incidence of postpartum suicide. Blaming women for choosing home births but absolving healthcare systems of the responsibility for institutionalized violence against women, is misogyny.

Similarly, if women are alienated by the deeply traditional and patriarchal ideology of natural birth, witnessed others being harmed by, say, sustaining life-altering injuries due to vaginal births, or have themselves been traumatized by the experience or outcomes of labor and vaginal birth, then desiring more medicalized control over the uncertainty of pain, trauma, or injuries is highly reasonable. Most people who insist that natural birth is safe commit at least two errors, first by defining safety based on what risks they deem acceptable by their own standards, and second, through intentionally dismissing the disempowerment and devastating injuries many women experience because of natural birth. Blaming women for choosing pain relief, elective inductions, or c-sections but absolving natural birth advocacy of the responsibility for accepting major risks on behalf of women, normalizing women’s pain, and conflating sacrifice with empowerment, is also misogyny. 

And so, the more divisive the discourse on birth becomes, the more women and their families will suffer as a result. It is not sufficient to make meaningless statements such as “we need to listen to women”. In the absence of serious effort to identify and address obstetric violence as a distinct branch of institutionalized violence against women, to do away with ideology-driven maternity care, and to support a rigorous person-centered decision-making process for pregnancy and birth, no commentary will truly be meaningful or result in any substantial change. 

When both biomedical dominance and natural birth ideology are willing to effect women’s compliance with their respective worldviews on pregnancy, motherhood, and birth through shame, coercion, manipulation, and withholding information about risks; women’s birth choices remain illusory and any decisions they make in relation to birth remain constrained by an ever-present threat of violence and fear of failure as mothers. 

Two women whose lives were lost while bringing life into this world were not even graced by acknowledgment or appreciation for their motherhood. The silence and ingratitude surrounding their sacrifices were deafening, revealing the lies we keep telling ourselves about women and mothers. The widespread romanticization of the maternal sacrifice is truly nothing but a sordid myth, weaponized to conceal deeply ingrained hatred and cruelty towards women by placating them into accepting sacrifice without objection. When mothers do become martyrs, in the literal sense, they are shrouded in shame, the pretense of valorization of maternal martyrdom finally laid bare. 

May Jennifer and Stacey, and all the mothers who sacrificed their lives for their children, rest in peace. Even in death, the world continues to fail you.

Note: The featured image in this post is AI-generated.