I am still here - work started this week and I’m loving my new job at a hardware store (yes, really!) but it’s long wearing days. Good training for being a midwife probably.

This article caught my eye:

Tragedy waiting to happen

(yes, the title is written like that, just to get the point across)

by Tanya Giles and Peter Mickelburough

DOCTORS say it is only a matter of time before mothers and babies die by the roadside because of a critical lack of specialist obstetrics care in rural Victoria.

Only 37 specialist obstetricians and gynaecologists practise outside Melbourne.

Obstetrics services have disappeared from 34 towns since 1997.

Wodonga senior obstetrician Pieter Mourik said the lack of maternity centres and specialist obstetricians in rural Victoria would inevitably lead to roadside deaths.

"It is not a case of if a woman and a baby is going to die, it is a case of when. It will happen," he said.

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Yeah, so besides the hyperbole and button pushing, is this really the case? If more midwives were available (as in, made available to women not so much have more of them, and available in terms of medicare) and the majority of women were cared for under a midwife-led model, and only the high risk women were referred to the high-risk pregnancy specialists, would the "crisis" stop?

Would women stop travelling if they could have their baby at home or the local hospital/medical centre? Women in rural, regional and remote places are perhaps more aware of the cycle of life and death, and births wouldn’t be as foreign to people outside of the city, so perhaps this is the place to start for converting birth back to a perception of a natural, easy and unmedicalised process.