A Hungarian champion of home birth is facing five years in jail, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Budapest
FAR FROM her Budapest jail cell, demonstrators in Dublin recently sent out a message of support to Agnes Gereb, and a warning to the future mothers of Ireland.
They rallied outside the Hungarian embassy to show solidarity with Gereb, a doctor, midwife and champion of the natural birth movement in Hungary, who has been in police custody for 10 weeks and faces five years in jail if found guilty of endangering the lives of women and their children.
But the protesters also sounded the alarm over plans by the State to dramatically restrict the rights of Irish women to give birth outside hospital, and to punish midwives with huge fines and long prison terms if they breach the proposed legislation.
Police arrested Gereb in early October, after a baby that she helped deliver suffered breathing difficulties and was taken to hospital. Mother and child were soon fine but Gereb will now be spending Christmas in jail.
Relatives say she is kept in a small cell with three other people and regularly subjected to strip searches.
She is allowed only one visit from her family each month and at a court hearing they were shocked to see her led in wearing handcuffs and chains that had gouged a bloody wound in her leg.
Over almost two decades Gereb has helped deliver some 3,500 healthy babies at home, but Hungary is prosecuting her for negligent malpractice while assisting at five births in which the mother or child required hospital treatment. In only one case are the parents pressing charges – all the other parents involved absolve her of blame.
Gereb’s supporters say her success rate is admirable, and many of the women she has helped are her staunchest allies in a battle they say exposes the Hungarian health authorities’ determination to maintain total control of one of the country’s most lucrative branches of medicine.
Though Hungary’s constitution allows home births, successive governments have effectively criminalised the practice by failing to define what constitutes a safe environment for having a baby outside hospital and by refusing to issue licences to independent midwives.
Anyone who helps a woman give birth at home therefore runs the risk of being accused of endangering mother and child by offering unlicensed assistance in unsafe conditions; if an ambulance is called to a home birth in Hungary, the police are never far behind.
As well as the innate conservatism of Hungary’s medical establishment, financial concerns allegedly play a role in its perceived suppression of the natural-birth movement.
Almost all Hungarian parents give a substantial monetary “thank you” – often several hundred euro – to an obstetrician who, by law, must attend each hospital birth.
“Doctors would lose out if our voice was listened to and the model became less hospital-centred and changed to a midwives system,” said Mirtill Rackevei, whose three daughters were born at home with Gereb’s assistance.
“The situation with Agnes is absurd. We must get her released – it’s not her fault that the rules are not clear and she had to work without a licence – and then we should change the birth system here from a medicalised one to a more natural one.”
Thousands of Hungarians have protested to demand Gereb’s release and changes to the law, and they received a boost last week when the European Court of Human Rights found in favour of a mother who claimed that Hungary was preventing her giving birth at home because any assisting midwife could be prosecuted.
For some women, 1,000 miles away in Ireland, Gereb’s plight is also a grim vision of the way their own medical system may be going.
The new Nurses and Midwives Bill seeks to severely restrict the circumstances in which Irish women can give birth outside hospital, by withholding compulsory insurance from any midwife who attends a birth that is categorised as anything other than extremely low risk.
The new rules would bar any mother who had previously undergone a Caesarean section or experienced any delivery problems from giving birth anywhere except hospital, and would require women to be hospitalised if they are still in labour 24 hours after their waters had broken.
Any midwife attending a home birth that failed to fulfil the ultra low-risk criteria – or took longer than 24 hours – could be fined €160,000 and jailed for five years, or 10 years for a second offence.
“We did it to show solidarity with Agnes and her family,” Krysia Lynch, a campaigner for natural births, said of the Dublin protest.
“But we also wanted to show our support for home births as a valuable and safe choice for mothers and babies, and to draw attention to the parallels between the situation in Hungary and what is happening here in Ireland.”