Family Forum / Pregnancy / Pregnancy / July 2007

You have to remember that there are so many midwives at the Rosie, that
not everyone is going to know the policy for everything single thing,
there are some community midwives who have very very few clients having
a homebirth and others who have very high rates, there's one who serves
some of the southern villages who has about 12% homebirths and
breastfeeding rates at 1 month in the high 90s. As far as I know there
hasn't been a policy change one way or the other, but that's not really
an issue, when it comes to the crunch if a women demands a homebirth,
they pretty much have to provides staff for it (look at homebirth.org.uk
for more info), though they can then not provide treatment, so they
could say well, if you choose to be at home, you're also choosing not to
have antibiotics, problem is, if anything then did happen the likely
outcome in any kind of inquiry would be that they should have provided
antibiotics at home, so they will give them. Thankfully in this area
there is a bit of a precedent for this and several women have had
antibiotics at home, whereas in other areas a lot of women fighting for
that opportunity are the first one.

Cheers
Anne