I Ungern är det i praktiken olagligt att föda hemma och den barnmorska som bistår vid en hemfödsel bryter mot lagen. Läs den här artikeln från 2010  i The Guardian.

Fem av landets 15 hembarnmorskor har fått fängelsestraff. Ágnes Geréb är en av dem – en erfaren och internationellt känd gynekolog/förlossningsläkare och barnmorska som har bistått vid 3500 hemfödslar. Såhär uttalar sig Mirtill Rackeveie i artikeln, en kvinna som Ágnes hjälpt att föda hemma:

”I decided to have home births because I had seen my sister have a child in hospital and it was awful,” she said. ”My sister was reluctant to have any more children because of her traumatic experience but my home births were so lovely that she decided to try it,” she added. ”The difference for her was so great that she went on to have third and fourth children, also at home. So now she has three children in the world who would not exist were it not for Agi. Agi is a wonderful woman.”

Ágnes Geréb har länge arbetat för en mänskligare och mer kvinnocentrerad förlossningsvård  i Ungern, hon var först med att låta pappor följa med in i förlossninsgrummet.

Såhär skriver Hermine Hayes- Klein, en amerikansk advokat – och jag ryser när jag läser:

Travesty of Justice Alert! Hungarian ob-gyn turned home birth midwife Ágnes Geréb is being sent to prison– again. This gentlest and wisest of women has endured decades of suffering at the hands of the Hungarian legal system, for daring to support women in childbirth on their terms. She has been imprisoned, dragged through a million hearings, placed on house arrest in her apartment for over three years, and forbidden to even talk to a pregnant woman– but they’re not done torturing her.

Why do I use my law degree to defend midwives? Because they are probably the most abused profession in the history of the world, next to sex workers. For centuries, the legal system has been used to destroy midwives and midwifery– sometimes with torture and murder, other times (like now) with prison, impoverishment, home raids, and hurting their families. Anybody who works in maternity care will eventually be involved in cases where baby, or mother, do not survive. Ob-gyns complain vociferously that they are the most sued of medical specialties. But when a doctor is the caregiver in a stillbirth, their biggest risk is a lawsuit. For a midwife, the risk is total annihilation.

***

For offering women a choice, for embarrassing the doctors who cut the babies out of most of the women who walk through the door, and for holding the secret of how the female body works and what childbirth really is, midwives are an endangered species. At my first Human Rights in Childbirth conference in 2012, a Hungarian ob-gyn reported how, when Ágnes opened her birth center, the doctors said, ”But Agnes, you don’t want to take money out of the pockets of doctors, do you?” She wanted to offer women a choice, she wanted to offer babies a gentle birth, and she did. For that, they won’t stop punishing her.

Om du vill skriva under ett upprop för Ágnes Geréb, klicka på den här länken!