They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth!

Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death, are our owners! Our owners! They have us! They control us! They are our masters!

Wake up! They’re all about you! All around you!

So this morning I’m reading Roderick Long talking about whether or not Étienne de la Boétie actually wrote the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. A mention of Isabel Paterson takes me over to Wikipedia on biographical curiosity. A reference citation to her place of burial takes me over to the Find a Grave website. Putting in my own surname, what do I find?

I find that one Stefan Gogulski was killed in 1940 at the Katyń massacre.

Who was Stefan? I have no idea. My father’s grandparents left Poland around 1905. “Gogulski” is not a common surname. According to some information I found a few years ago but have since mislaid, a census in the late 1990s showed about 650 “Gogulskis” living in Poland, most of them concentrated around the Poznań area.

Stefan was almost certainly a relative of mine, though the blood connection likely would need to be traced back to the mid-1800s to find the common ancestory.

So Stalin killed one of my relatives, then. Lovely.

And, oh look here… plugging in my paternal grandmother’s name at Find a Grave, I see that one Edward Korecki also was killed at Katyń.

So, two more rather personal reasons for me to hate the state, I guess. I’ll add these two to one I discovered a few years back…

Suitcase of Anna Kraus at Auschwitz

My mother’s birth name is Kraus. A few years ago when I visited Auschwitz, I took this photo above. There is a room there which displays gigantic piles of luggage which belonged to those killed there in the gas chambers and before the firing squads. And right there, front and center by the window, a connection to one of my family names. Mind you, “Kraus” is far more common than “Gogulski” or “Korecki”, but this was the top chiller on a brutally chilling meander through the detritus of the final solution.

I’ve gotta give my ancestors credit for getting the hell out of Germany and Poland when they did, even before World War I. Thanks, y’all.

In the spirit of doing only the best things possible for mothers and babies, ACOG and the AMA are now pushing to eliminate a terrible danger to babies and mothers alike: home birth.

Eamon greets the world, at home. Image from chrisandjenni @ flickr.com

Now, babies have been born at home, or in fields or forests or any number of other places for millions of years. I even had the pleasure recently of meeting a young woman who was born on a train in Russia. The distinction between “hospital, medical” birth and anything else is a rather modern invention. Just a hundred years ago in the West, and even today across huge portions of the planet, children were always born at home. Birthing carries risks for both mother and child, and sometimes medical intervention is needed to save lives. In many parts of the world, the expertise and facilities aren’t always there.

From ABC News:

Are Home Births Dangerous?

AMA Says Women Should Use a Hospital — Some Doctors Disagree

The American Medical Association has agreed to support proposed legislation that, some physicians say, could make make having a planned birth in one’s home difficult, to virtually impossible.

As of now, no actual legislation has been drawn up, but the AMA has agreed to back a measure called “Resolution 205,” a request to support the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) position that home births are not safe.

“We are against home births, period,” said Gregory Phillips, an ACOG spokesman.

What does Resolution 205 say?

RESOLVED, That our AMA develop model legislation in support of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex, that meets standards jointly outlined by the AAP and ACOG, or in a freestanding birthing center that meets the standards of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, The Joint Commission, or the American Association of Birth Centers.” (Directive to Take Action)

Jennifer Block, writing for the LA Times, rightly questions what’s going on here:

The AMA’s statement calls for legislation that could be used against women who choose home birth, possibly resulting in criminal child-abuse or neglect charges. The group says this is about safety, but with no credible research to back up its claim, this argument falls flat. Women are simply caught in a turf war over the maternity market, and it would appear that the physicians’ groups are perfectly willing to trample the modern medical ethic of patient autonomy — grounded in our legal rights to self-determination, to liberty and to privacy — in their grab for control.

Block’s op-ed makes a lot of good points, and asks a very cogent question: “Why do U.S. doctors strong-arm women into our standard maternity care system?”

ACOG, the AMA and other organizations like them are, effectively guilds in the medieval sense. Guild membership or approval is required to practice the guildsmen’s trade, manifest in all sort of licensing and education requirements that these groups have managed to write into law with the “objective” criteria for inclusion or exclusion of any given would-be practitioner being left up to those who have already passed whatever arbitrary bar for inclusion they have set, and backed up by the unlimited violence that is the state. That organizations such as these serve to limit the supply of medical services and thereby increase costs to patients while enriching their members has been analyzed in great detail elsewhere.

Born free, born at home. Everett with mom. lobo235 @ flickr.com

Quibbling a bit about how the mechanics of guild exclusionism get written into US law, I doubt that mothers would be penalized for choosing to give birth at home. No, what AMA and ACOG are really after here is the criminalization of midwives, and especially those who aren’t members of the various AMA-approved midwifery guilds or who haven’t passed stringent certification requirements. The guilds don’t give a damn about unlicensed midwives’ patients. What they care about is limiting the supply of childbirth-assistance services, to the benefit of their members’ profits.

ABC’s headline, “Are Home Births Dangerous?”, really might be better written as “What Penalty Should Home-Birthing Mothers and Midwives Face?” AMA/ACOG are calling for legislation. There will be fines and disincentives, penalties and prison terms, police raids and prosecutions, all against midwives practicing a skilled trade that has existed for thousands of years.

But the penalty for violating statist law is always death. Deconstructed, what we see is the physicians’ and obstetricians’ guilds calling for non-guild midwives to be killed for practicing their trade.

Now how is that good for mothers or babies?