Natural Birth as a Commons

Interesting to know your experience and agree on the interesting innovation of empowering a commons-oriented process in this field. I have never written an entry in P2PF Wiki and I would like to know how to do it. I would appreciate if you can give me a hint and later our team would complete the rest of scientific and technical stuff.

Xavier there is quite a bit of this going on in New Zealand, especially via the Home Birth Association: https://homebirth.org.nz/ Perhaps try nextworking via them?

Thanks very much Briar for the contact. We will contact them and study their practices. We believe that Natural Birth is part of the Health and Care processes which we think should be produced and managed directly by the local communities of women without the interference from biochemical TNCs and the present male preponderant medical institutions.

I am not entirely sure about the definition of commons here.

We have had a thread about Roma dance festival, solidarity to refugees and now natural birth as commons. Not saying these things aren't interesting or important, but I joined under an impression that commons would refer to stuff like taking care of shared water resources and embracing open source tech.

I would personally like a more strict definition and more narrow scope of goals.

Hi Leo @leosammallahti -- the Commons writers I have read all seem content with an intellectual or information commons, as well as physical resource commons. So how would you scope the definition more strictly?

Nice that you give the example of embracing open source tech -- very much an intellectual commons. To me, natural childbirth -- the knowledge, skills, practices and community around it -- are more like open source tech than a rather vague concept like "solidarity to refugees".

Let me have a go at spelling out a little better what I was trying to say above. The common resource that I see here is the totality of the knowledge, skills, and competences involved with natural childbirth. The community involves people who could be called midwives, long-term, and mothers as users but also as contributors to the knowledge commons. And anyone else involved in natural childbirth, as I was.

There is a clear need for something like accreditation, regulation, or other reputation system so that mothers and others concerned can have confidence in the skills of a midwife. Clearly that can be done (as it is at present) in a hierarchical, top-down way; but equally it could be done in a peer-to-peer way, by constituting the users and practitioners as members of the community that self-regulates. The establishment would be quick to point out the dangers of having births unattended by suitably knowledgeable and experienced helpers. And they have a good point. But surely we should be able, as a community, to have a training, assessment and reputation system just as effective, if not more so, than the current official one?

Not sure if this was exactly what Xavier @xavy had in mind, but worth saying maybe?

Thanks for your reply, it's well thought, I hope I didn't come across as dismissive of the importance of these things.

Point taken, I now understand the relevance to commons!

If you are not aware of them, for a community developed approach to childbirth its got to be worth checking out http://thefarmmidwives.org/

There is a fascinating story behind them going back decades.

Thanks very much, Darren. We will contact. That´s our objective: to develop the networking and cooperation in this field. Anyone having engaged contacts, please send.

Yes of course I had read about them and forgotten. Very good, as I recall

For anybody interested in this field, a debate has been organized on May 26th in Barcelona by the women´s organization "Dona Llum" and the support of the city council, in the scope of the activities planned for the "Week of Respected Birth", under the topic "LESS INTERVENTIONS, MORE CARE", with speaches by several experts of our team, among which Beatrijs Smulders, who has already published several books defending the freedom of women to choose a natural birth and the need of a commons infrastructure adapted to this choice.