Well Clarabelle, Hi. You seem to be rather typical of one of Tom's groupies - any criticism of Tom results in a rabid irrational rant. Well, good for you. Tom acutally seems perfectly capable of rational discussion and I think he accepts that his orgininal blog was a bit OTT. He does not really want parents who smoke to die prematurely so that the children can be adopted. You clearly don't see that. But then you are a rather bossy sounding midwife. My main problem with "nurse-specialists" (and you may not even be a nurse of couse these days) is that becuase of their lack of breadth of training they don't know what they don't know and tend to assume that they know everything. I don't care what stage of labour the dear lady was in, Tom's remarks were inappropriate and offensive. If you don't understand that, you are either a fool, or have no understanding of female emotions during labour. Of course, seeing the patronising way that so many arrogant midwives treat pregant women, I would not expect that most of them would realise how inappropriate his behviour was. I am so glad you think you are an expert. Keep up the good work. I don't know where we would all be without you. I advise all women not to have a home birth (however big their feet), becuase this country is not geared to home births and they are not safe. You wont understand that because of your obession with "touchey-feely" nonesense. One of the main reasons they are not safe is because midwives do not have the expertese to resuscite flat babies, and even if they did, they do not have the equipment. To make matters worse, non medically trained workers such as you encourage women to embark on this dangerous practice. Well, it's looney tunes. We can all jump into the birthing pool with the madwive, the vicar, the social worker and the husband and sing ten green bottles together prior to eating the placenta.....but this is the way that babies die. They don't have midwives in the USA by and large becuase no one will take the medico-legal responsbility for their actions. I think British midwives do pretty well considering their superficial knowledge and lack of medical training, and given that there is a lack of doctors we have make do - but in reality it is just another example of the health service dumbing down.