Quick links: Lynsee, birth centers, home birth, birth parties in the news

This has been a busy week for news in the birth world. The big news, of course, is the live streamed birth (midwife-attended, but very medically-minded midwives, apparently) of Lynsee in Minnesota. Jill at Unnecesarean.com has two good pieces on Lynsee’s birth, and you can of course watch the footage yourself.

Then, there’s this NYTimes article about the sad closing of an in-hospital, midwife-staffed birth center at Bellevue available to patients without insurance. It’s a good article on a sad subject.

There’s also this piece from the LA Times: “The right place to deliver: home or hospital? It’s a heated argument, and neither side has conclusive evidence. So how to decide?” It starts off well enough, and it seems to give attention to midwives and recent studies and their conclusions on the safety of home birth, but then, frustratingly, the article ends this way: “At the end of the day, convincing evidence to support either the obstetricians or the midwives simply isn’t there. Doctors believe that the burden of proof rests on those advocating delivery outside of the hospital; midwives put physicians on the defensive by pointing out that childbirth is a natural process that historically hasn’t required hospitalization. Until the question of home birth safety is answered, women can’t make truly informed decisions about their childbirth experiences.”

Finally there’s this CBSTV piece on “birth parties,” apparently a cool mom trend inspired by celebrities. Because, yeah, we all had home births just to be cool and be like Cindy Crawford. Sigh. It’s not an absolutely terrible article, though, and I guess it’s the best of the bunch, this week.

–Christina