The Value of Anecdotal Evidence
By Emily Jones
February 24, 2008
By Emily Jones
In all the reading and researching I’ve been doing in preparation for my own home birth, I particularly enjoy reading uplifting, positive stories of other women’s home birth experiences. In the recent ACOG statement, a mention was made of “the rosy picture painted by home birth advocates.” I think stories like these are what the ACOG was referring to. What the ACOG neglects to mention is that home birth advocates don’t just tell one side of the story. Midwives, doulas, and all other home birth advocates are very quick to point out that yes, there are risks in home birth. There isn’t any midwife in the world that will tell a prospective mother that home birth is going to be some mystical experience, full of light and laughter, free from pain and oppression, and colored in 1970s sepia-tones, resulting in perfect mothers and perfect babies. There also aren’t any people ANYWHERE that will try to claim that home birth is without risks. But for some reason, those who advocate the safety of hospital births over home births are continually disdainful of the positive stories of home birth, and outright disbelieving of those negative stories of hospital births. These people refuse to listen to our stories, calling them “anecdotal evidence,” and dismissing them as not valid, simply because it can’t be proven that the experience actually occurred, in the case of negative hospital stories, or because it seems unlikely to them, in the case of home births. To hospital birth advocates, home birth is one big accident waiting to happen, and they have loads of examples for us of home births that went wrong.
Wait, did I say they have loads of examples? But isn’t that also “anecdotal evidence?” As a matter of fact, it is. It is one of the many double-standards imposed on the media, on the general public, and on the home birth community for the purpose of discrediting the very idea of home birth. Strangely enough, no one seems to notice or question this pattern. Home birth advocates bring up study after study, done in the
Wrong. When hospital birth advocates go to argue their side of the story, do they have studies to show us that hospital birth is equal to or safer than home births? No, they just spend their time arguing that the studies that support home birth are flawed. And while hospital birth advocates rail against the use of anecdotal evidence, they are wicked in their use of “home birth horror stories” to “prove” how dangerous home birth “really” is, perhaps because they haven’t got any real evidence. But we must be fair: if we expect them to take our stories seriously, we should at least take their stories seriously too, right? Unfortunately, they don’t even fight fair in that department either. While home birth advocates relate stories of their own experiences, hospital birth advocates relate stories that are second- or third-hand, theoretical, or generalized. Can they really get away with that? They can, and they are. Doctors, NICU nurses, and EMTs are happy to share their stories of how many transfers they saw from home births. No names, no cases, no specific situations, no dates. Doctors, and especially PR reps from the various medical organizations love to be quoted in the media telling about “some woman” who died, or “some baby” who died of “some complication” which they are SURE was a direct result of the home birth itself. And they all love to caricature women who birth at home, describing them as some cultish group of throwback hippies who eat their placentas and have naked group orgies. Okay, maybe I went a little far with the “naked group orgies” part. But sometimes, the way they describe us makes us wonder.
So why do the stories told by women who advocate for home birth have value at all? Should they be considered as supporting their claims? The answer is unequivocally YES, and this is why: these are stories told by the women who experienced them. They are not conjecture, rumor, or hearsay. They are not supposition or generalization. These are real stories that really happened to real women. Bad things happen in the hospital. We know this because we were in the hospital and bad things happened to us. Hospital birth advocates describe us as shallow women who are like “brides who are unhappy that their wedding didn’t go as perfectly as planned.” They cannot believe that giving birth in the hospital can be all that bad. But MILLIONS of women can’t be wrong. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Is the hospital birth establishment prepared to say that each and every one of the MILLIONS of women over the last CENTURY who have related bad hospital experiences are shallow? That they are somehow mistaken? Or even partly or wholly responsible for what happened to them? And the same can be said for positive home birth stories. Can the MILLIONS of women who have had positive home birth experiences be an anomaly? An exception to the rule? Just because the hospital birth advocates can’t, or won’t, believe these stories, does that make them any less true for the women who experienced them?
The stories of women who experienced the tragedy and pain of a negative hospital birth, or the success and healing power of a home birth, are more than “anecdotal evidence.” They should be considered in weighing the choice of where to birth one’s baby, because success in giving birth is determined by more than just where it happens. Success in giving birth is also about how it happens.
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