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Better births for Aboriginal women

The first event in the Future birth tour of Darwin went very well - the feedback was overwhelmingly positive for the speakers and the event as a whole. The four speakers dovetailed well, their messages reinforcing and strengthening the overall theme of “with woman, with child” and showing in practical ways how this could be achieved.

There was a lot of discussion about the plight of the Aboriginal women in the Territory (and other States) who are forced to leave their homes and travel, often huge distances, to large city hospitals to give birth. The disruption to their family lives, the dislocation of their social networks and the cultural insensitivity inherent in these policies is shameful state of affairs. The wonderful examples provided by the Innuit and Greenlandic women, beautifully described by Susanne Houd in her presentation, highlighted the appalling conditions we inflict on our indigenous people.

We know we treat our Aboriginal women badly in this regard and that reform of the health care system is desperately needed. There are those who are championing their cause at Government levels and there are resources and funding that can be made available. What is needed, as a first step, is to hear from the Aboriginal women themselves - they need to tell us what they want and to get involved in making sure that the services they want are provided. Without this input, new programs may fail, or be implemented in inappropriate ways, as has happened in the past.

We can learn a lot from the strong, resourceful Innuit women of Canada and the women of Greenland. They clearly announced what they wanted and set about finding ways it could be achieved: giving birth in their own homes and towns, no matter how remote; being cared for by their own people and training their own midwives. The results have been spectacular, and show how safe birth can be, when there are competent midwives, no doctors, no anaesthetics (epidurals), no hope of an intrapartum transfer.

It would indeed be a wonderful day when we can say the same services and outcomes exist for our own indigenous peoples. It would be one practical step in reconciliation that would would say “sorry” for the havoc our western medical practises have wreaked on women who quite capable of managing birth themselves.

Posted by andrea at March 08, 2005 10:17 AM