Home births back on agenda for Labor
CANBERRA is reconsidering its controversial exclusion of home births from a new midwifery indemnity scheme, before a Senate challenge to the draft legislation.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon revealed yesterday she was looking at whether the government could accommodate home births in the $25 million indemnity scheme.
“I recognise that a very small proportion of women would like to have home births and (I) am currently investigating if there is some way that we can provide this as an option without making the proposed midwife indemnity insurance unaffordable,” she said.
The scheme was welcomed by midwives, when announced in the May budget, as a precursor to next year’s expansion of their powers to prescribe subsidised medicines, order publicly funded tests and claim Medicare rebates.
Private midwives had gone without insurance cover since the indemnity crisis at the start of the decade, putting their ability to practise at risk under a new national registration scheme for health professionals that also takes effect next year.
But support for the budget decision fractured when the draft bills revealed home births would not be covered under the new indemnity arrangements.
Not only would home birth midwives continue to lack cover, they would also for the first time be stripped of their professional registration from next July for failure to secure adequate insurance. Unregistered midwives who continue to practice beyond that date could face a $30,000 fine.
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AMA head Dr Andrew Pesce in IVF row
THE new head of the Australian Medical Association has said single women and gay couples should not have access to IVF.
Dr Andrew Pesce, elected AMA federal president in May, told the Sunday Herald Sun that IVF should not be a “lifestyle choice” and use of the treatment by same sex couples went against the “natural order”.
“Fertility treatment is there to treat diseases that cause infertility, it shouldn’t be there as a lifestyle choice,” Dr Pesce said.
“For example, single women (who choose IVF) don’t have a disease, they just don’t have a partner. Same-sex couples, they don’t have disease but they are using an option that gets around the natural order of things.”
Dr Pesce later contacted this newspaper and said his comments were “clumsy” and a mistake.
He said single women and same sex couples should have access to IVF, but could not give a reason for his earlier remarks.
Categories: gender & feminism, media, medicine, Politics
Hoyden About Town 
but could not give a reason for his earlier remarks.
Very little infuriates me like someone saying bigoted crap, backpedalling when there’s negative fallout, and refusing to acknowledge that they said bigoted crap because they’re a bigot.
That wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, there was a fully-fledged line of reasoning behind his statement, and I can only presume Dr Pesce was so high on his own privilege it took him a while to figure out people weren’t going to take his utterances as Wisdom From On High.
Perhaps he realised he’d said something factually highly incorrect? To whit:
Um, what? really? Single women and gay couples who could conceive using non-IVF methods of non-intercourse conception are choosing the extra expense, effort, complications and potential side-effects of IVF instead? For giggles, maybe, and just to annoy Dr Pesce?
Of course they are not doing any such thing. People who can successfully conceive using a simpler form of artificial conception do not just rock up to an IVF clinic. The single women and gay couples accessing IVF are doing it because they DO have fertility problems, just the same as the partnered het couples using IVF.
I recognise that a very small proportion of women would like to have home births
O RLY? Figgers plz.
Dontchoo know that women in Australia are just naturally completely different from women in countries where attended homebirth is supported and affordable?
Roxon is clueless about birth and feminism both, and is taking most of her cues from AMA/RANZCOG shills.
Regarding what’s happening (not what women would like, but what they currently do), homebirth numbers in Australia are around one in 100, or a bit less. In the Netherlands, it’s around one in three. My understanding is that the vast majority of women in Australia have no access to funded home midwifery; pregnancy care, homebirth, and aftercare with a private midwife costs somewhere around $3000-$5000.
Well, it’s true, only a very small proportion would like to have home births. Mostly because home births are presented as a fringe choice chosen by dirty hippies who don’t care if their babies live or die.
I’m not sure how I feel about the claim that fertility treatment is there to treat diseases and that dual-sex couples who can’t conceive are diseased. I mean, even putting aside the horrific bigotry vis-a-vis single women and single sex couples. Infertility as a disease? Really?
This seems to be something of a trend in healthcare politics, doesn’t it? The populations of each country are considered to be entirely different beasts and thus the practice of antenatal and birthing care in New Zealand, let alone that of the Netherlands, isn’t admissible to the Australian debate. Which shows how little actual evidence is valued.