Midwives for Freedom

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Submitted by LoganFerree on Mon, 2006-04-03 16:14.

Homeschooling is one traditionally conservative issue that I believe Democrats need to do a better job of supporting and expanding. As a male, I haven't really considered the issue of midwives until now. Like homeschooling, on the surface it appears to be oriented toward the "family values" crowd on the right. But standing up against the state's attempt to create a health care monopoly is always the right thing to do.

According to Indiana law, though, the midwife who assisted Ms. Hendrix-Petry, Mary Helen Ayres, committed a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. Ms. Ayres was, according to the state, practicing medicine and midwifery without a license.

Doctors, legislators and prosecutors in Indiana and in the nine other states with laws prohibiting midwifery by people other than doctors and nurses say home births supervised by midwives present grave and unacceptable medical risks. Nurse-midwives in Indiana are permitted to deliver babies at home, but most work in hospitals.

Midwives see it differently. They say the ability of women to choose to give birth at home is under assault from a medical establishment dominated by men who, for reasons of money and status, resent a centuries-old tradition that long ago anticipated the concerns of modern feminism.

Do you think that homeschooling and midwifery are viable local and state issues to rally around or not?

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fixing home-schooling

#1583 On Tue, 2006 04 04 15:33 adam ricketson said,

I've been thinking of writing something about homeschooling -- so here's my thought. Many people view "homeschooling" as a way that parents isolate and practically enslave their children. I think this is a common experience in small towns and less affluent areas. I think many libertarian advocates for home-schooling view it in a much different light. I think we tend to get around in affluent, highly-educated circles, where alternative schooling arrangements are seen as a way to avoid the institutionalization of public schools, to place the children in a safer and more natural learning environment, and to protect the family against atomization. We learn about homeschooling organizations and networks, which inevitably value homeschooling for the same reasons that we do--the people who join these networks aren't trying to isolate their children and they do care about the actual education.

Anyway, I think that this can be a tricky issue. If we are going to push for more freedom to home-school, we need to make sure that it's the RIGHT freedom, and not the freedom to enslave one's own children. First priority is to make sure that the current home-schooling arrangement is not being abused. This should make any expansion of the system more palatable to the voting public, and also provide the advocates with more credibility.

This is similar to issues surrounding land tax. Many communities face problems with land tax, and they respond by trying to scrap it. Advocates of land tax are then stuck with trying to defend a broken system. Making sure a system works is just as important as, if not more so than, advocating for its expansion.

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