ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has asked for people to submit their unsuccessful homebirth stories in an effort to collect anonymous anecdotal evidence in their fight against the practice.

The homebirth community immediately responded by logging into the survey and listing positive homebirth stories. All the birth blogs have been soliciting people to log in and ruin the ACOG database.

Immediately, ACOG altered their site, limiting the access to ACOG members.

The events are illuminating.

For one, it demonstrates how partisan and detached from the data the argument has become. ACOG’s data collection is methodologically meaningless and useless. They only want a collection of horror story narratives to leverage in propaganda. And ACOG members would not have homebirth stories to begin with, as they do not practice homebirth – other than at the receiving end at emergency room where they see the self-selected worst cases.

The homebirth community is equally transparent in its political agenda.

ACOG’s insistence that homebirth is dangerous in the face of the contraindicating data highlights how disinterested it is in health outcomes, and how motivated its members are by their economic interests.

Here is the survey:

State

Choose a month (June, July or August) for your baby’s birth and 2009 for the year… Read More… Read More

Gravida (# of times you’ve been pregnant)

Para (# babies you’ve had who were born after 20 weeks)

Maternal Age

Gestational Age (number of weeks pregnant you were when your baby was born)

Problem -

Fetal Outcome:

Pre-Arrival length of labor –

Home Attendant –

Epilogue:  One doula-lawyer created a survey of her own in response to the ACOG one.  It is pretty funny.

Check it out:

http://enjoybirth.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/response-to-acog-homebirth-survey/

Also, this article by Louise Marie Roth appeared earlier this week on Huffington Post, providing further exposure to the gross political agenda behind ACOG’s survey.