Lovely freebirth story

There's a rather wonderful series on British TV this advent called Our Yorkshire Farm (four episodes I believe, one for each season) following the year in the life of a family who live in Upper Swaledale in Yorkshire.  In yesterday's 2nd episode (Spring), Amanda Owen tells her story of giving birth to her eighth child (the Owens have nine children) in front of the fire in the middle of the night with one of the dogs and a cup of tea for company.  She explains her how she came to her decision and evokes a sense of place, time, calm and peace.  A lovely, lovely narration and well worth a viewing (UM is fast becoming a Yorkshire Shepherdess addict):

https://netpro.website/series/356069/1/2

Amanda has her own website: https://www.yorkshireshepherdess.com/

Birth centre and home are safe for low-risk women: new systematic review.

Maternal and perinatal outcomes by planned place of birth among women with low-risk pregnancies in high-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0266613818300974

This is a paper by Vanessa Scarfe and colleagues [Australia] looking at the combined outcomes of 28 studies involving more than half a million women across a number of countries.  It demonstrates that the evidence for the safety of home or birth centre for birth for low risk women is broad, substantial and clear.  Not that this hasn't been known and shown before, but it is good to remind the world of this at regular intervals, given the continued commitment of the anti-homebirth, anti-normal birth, anti-midwife lobby to their Project Fear agenda (for example but by no means the only example, Amy Tuteur's regular pseudo-skeptical pronouncements e.g.http://www.skepticalob.com/2014/04/just-how-dangerous-is-childbirth.html
and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnYRie_neROaEuTQslggVvg )