Maternity care is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States,” said Steff Hedenkamp, Communications Coordinator for The Big Push for Midwives. “So it’s no surprise to see the AMA join the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in its ongoing fight to corner the market and ensure that the only midwives able to practice legally are hospital-based midwives forced to practice under physician control. I will say, though, that I’m shocked to learn that the AMA is taking this turf battle to the next level by setting the stage for outlawing home birth itself—a direct attack on those families who choose home birth, who could be subject to criminal prosecution if the AMA has its way.
The Big Push for Midwives has released this story (the above text is from their press release). What people tend to forget is that the American Medical Association is a professional association, not a scientific or medical (and therefore unbiased) organization.
It’s hard to see this as anything other a business ploy to further dominate (and secure) their place in the market. With how expensive childbirth is, it’s a lucrative market. This mode of business-oriented thinking has dominated the attempt to push out midwives since the beginning of obstetrics. What’s missing here? Perhaps what is best for the mother? Just a thought.
Hi everyone! I’m on a two week vacation (from my day job at least), in Seattle and San Fransisco. Hopefully it will give me some time to catch up on blogging, and make some much needed changes here at Radical Doula! Stay tuned for an overhaul of my blog roll, as well as my Radical Doula?!?! page revisited.
I’ve had this article in my drafts for a while, and while it’s a piece from last year that ran at Alternet.org I wanted to highlight it anyway.
Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The hardest part of the infection-control team’s job, Yokoe says, is not coping with the variety of contagions they encounter or the panic that sometimes occurs among patients and staff. Instead, their greatest difficulty is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.
Those of you who know anything about the history of obstetrics in the United States are probably familiar with puerperal fever, which was a major cause of death of pregnant women when birth was first brought into the hospital. (Side note: this is a great thing to bring up as a counter to the “but so many women used to die in childbirth before hospitals argument”) Basically, doctors at the time didn’t understand bacteria and how disease was spread. They also believed that hand washing wasn’t necessary for gentlemen. This meant that doctors went from birthing mother to birthing mother without washing their hands or using gloves, and passed infections between them.
So many horror stories circulate about birth that it can be difficult to believe that labor and birth can be a beneficial experience. One great way to counter the effects of frightening stories is to hear and read empowering ones. These stories may change you because they might tell you something you didn’t know before or they might help you look at things from a different perspective than you ever had before. (Passage adapted from the introduction to the birth stories in Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin.)
GUEST SPEAKERS: Four new mothers who will talk about their individual choices and experience with regards to their birth, Kristen M. Leonard, Midwife, Mary Esther Malloy-Hopwood, Childbirth Educator, Doula and Lactation Counselor.
We hope to see you there, and welcome you to invite your friends, family or other expectant families who might be interested.
Ok, so if you ignore the cheesy uplifting pop music (so you wanna change the world…), in addition to the not-so-great graphics (the entering text made my head hurt after a while) the video has a great point. Multiple births (twins, triplets, etc) shouldn’t have to be c-sections. Women can and do birth multiples naturally (even at home! unassisted! in water!) and this video just reiterates that.
What also struck me about the film is the great providers who must have been behind many of those births. Some people might accuse me of being a doctor-basher generally, but from what i know of hospitals and insurance policies, any doctor who is willing to fight for a woman’s right to deliver twins naturally rocks. Same for the midwives too.
As a queer person, I can’t pass this one up. Ani DiFranco (can’t you just hear the angsty lesbian music cue in the background) has an interview out about her home birth. Aww.
Your music is the soundtrack of my life — I’ve been listening to you since I was 16, and I just turned 30. What is the soundtrack of your life? And, can you tell us why you chose to have a home birth? Would you do it again? — Mindy Kufahl of Topeka, Kansas
I would definitely choose a homebirth again despite the fear mongering of this patriarchal society, which convinces women that they are incapable of having babies without the intervention of men and their machines. I look at societies where women are marginalized and oppressed their whole lives (even covered head to toe in tarps!) but are still in control of birthing practice, in a whole new way now. I mean, who is really more advanced? To take birthing out of women’s hands and deny us the continuum of eons of wisdom and experience is to eject us from the very seat of our power. I believe that women in hospitals are prevented from being able to have normal, healthy birthing experiences because of the intimidation of being on the clock, being pressured to take drugs to make it quicker, being inhibited in their movement and activities, and alienated by a sterile, fluorescent lit, feet-in-the-air type environment. You know the classic “performance anxiety” of not being able to pee or poo because somebody’s watching you? Multiply that by a million! A cervix is a sphincter after all! Then to add tragic insult to injury women are numbed through their great moment of revelation. I believe the act of giving birth to be the single most miraculous thing a human being can do and it is surely the moment when a lot of women finally understand the depth of their power and connection to all of nature. You think it can’t possibly be done, you think you can’t possibly take the pain, and then you do — and afterward you look at yourself in a whole new way. If you can do that, you can do anything. Check out the books on this subject by Ina May Gaskin. She’s one of my great heroes. P.S. I was in labor for 43 hours. Pushed for five hours. It was brutal and scary and prolonged, and if I was in a hospital, they would have definitely cut the baby out of me. I thank the goddesses that I was at home with patient midwives who knew how to go the distance. The memory of pain always recedes. The memory of triumph does not.
From Debra Pascali-Bonaro, my doula trainer(!) and the director of the upcoming film, Orgasmic Birth.
See my previous posts about this film here and here.
Dear Doulas and friends,
I have some very exciting news and need your help. We are finished with our documentary Orgasmic Birth and will be releasing it in May and hosting screenings around the world.
We have recently been contacted by ABC 20/20 and they will be airing a segment about Orgasmic Birth on May 16th for their special Mother’s Day show. They are planning to use some clips from the film, interview some of the women/couples in the film, Dr. Christiane Northrup and Ina May Gaskin two of our “experts” in the documentary and they also interested in talking with a few women who have had “orgasmic” births.
If you or anyone you know has had an orgasmic birth, is willing to be interviewed by 20/20 and lives in the metro NY/NJ /CT area please have them contact me ASAP with their contact info? debra@orgasmicbirth.com
If you know people who have had orgasmic births any where in the world…Or powerful, positive, blissful, ecstatic births…Please ask them to submit their birth story to our web site. www.orgasmicbirth.com
Some of you may remember a while back when I posted a call for radical doulas. A woman (who I will call J) had reached out to me because she was having real difficulty finding a doula for three reasons: 1) She was serving as a surrogate for a gay male couple 2) She had had a “selective reduction” of the resulting twin pregnancies to just have one child 3) She wasn’t sure if she would forgo an epidural.
This is quite amazing timing considering the doula article from Sunday’s NYTimes. It shows that yes, there are some doulas out there who allow their personal beliefs about lifestyle as well as birth choices to direct who they work with. But the overwhelming response to my call for radical doulas also shows that there are just as many (if not more) doulas who are willing to support all sorts of women with all sorts of birth preferences.
J was awesome enough to share her birth story with me and you all will be happy to know that she eventually found a great doula who supported her through her birth. Her story made me tear up, and reminded me why I do this work (and why I bother fighting anti-doula ignorance in the blog world too).
Happy Friday everyone.
From J’s email:
Hello!
I don’t know if you remember me but a while back I wrote to you to ask for help in finding a doula for when I gave birth to my surrogate child. After I found a doula I told you I would update you after I gave birth.
Well, my surro-child is here! He was born on Feb 12, two weeks before his due date. My doctor felt that it would be best to induce labor since my blood pressure had been creeping up slowly over last month of my pregnancy. He wanted to err on the side of caution and I was ok with that because I knew the baby’s dads were starting to get nervous.
Thank goodness for my doula! I was started on pitocin around 8 AM and she got there at 10 AM just as I was starting to feel contractions. For the next 8 hours she would only leave my side once and that was just to go to the bathroom. She helped me through every single point of what ended up being a hard, painful and occasionaly scary labor. At one point in my labor the baby’s heartbeat started to drop and my doula was the one who got me to move into different positions just in case the baby’s cord was getting pinched. Turns out she was right! After I moved around a few times the baby’s heartbeat was just fine. I wonder what would have happened if she had not been there to suggest something as simple as changing positions!
At another point my doula rubbed my back for two hours straight. She always seemed to know just where I needed to be touched. If I was tensing up in my back or shoulders she would gently rub them to remind me to relax my body. She also seemed to know when not to touch me. If I was tensing up my face she would remind me to feel the contraction in my belly, not in my face. Sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but just having her say those things helped me make it through.
This birth story was sent to a doula listserve I am on, and its a definite must-read. In it a woman shares her battle to have the childbirth she wanted even after premature rupture of membranes, 4 weeks of bed rest in a hospital and countless attempts at intervention.
I have to admit I got a little teary-eyed toward the end.
She is my lesson in surrender. She is an exercise in determination and grace. She showed Mark and I how to work together again in ways that were instinctually natural. To come together in ways that we have not been, in entirely too long. A friend said it was magick the way that by surrendering some things, standing firm on others and in facing one of my absolute worst fears and turning myself over to it, we were given the gift of a perfect birth.
From the BBC, information about a hospital unit run by midwives that promotes “natural birth.”
It is run by midwives with doctors, allowed in only by invitation, and if a problem occurs mothers are moved. The ethos on the ward is that the birth process must be allowed to take its natural course, although pain relief drugs are given. Midwife Doreen Brunton, who is part of the team which runs the unit, told the BBC Scotland news website: “If you intervene too soon, labours get augmented, they end up with problems with the babies, sections or forceps.
What I like best about it is the emphasis on non-intervention, which is so important as a reaction to the highly interventionist obstretrical environment. We need something like this in the US. The other piece of good news is that the number of women using this unit has doubled in the last year. I wonder if they have doulas in this unit? But once again, we see natural birth being equated with epidural usage. Sigh. I’m not against epidurals, but they definitely have affects on the labor that need to be taken into consideration.
Also, the Royal College of Midwives (also in the UK) has a great campaign called the Campaign for Normal Birth.
Together, we can change the way childbirth happens. The Campaign aims to inspire and support normal birth practice. It’s a reminder that good birth experiences can happen despite the challenges. Intervention and caesarean shouldn’t be the first choice - they should be the last.
On January 24, 2008–”Push day” a new campaign to promote midwives, The Big Push for Midwives, was launched. It’s a campaign coordinated by a group of Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) to promote the midwifery model of care.
Our goals are to fully integrate the Midwives Model of Care into the health care systems of our states, to highlight the importance of family healthcare choices and to defend the ability of CPMs to provide legal and safe prenatal, birth and postpartum care to families in every state.
Sounds good to me. There is a great map which explains what states allow the licensing of CPMs and which do not. I also appreciate coordinated advocacy campaigns, where different groups can learn from each others mistakes and accomplishments. It’s also really good timing–The Business of Being Born is getting a lot of attention and bringing new people to this issue and the crisis in maternity care continues to escalate.
CPMs differ from CNMs (certified nurse midwives) in that they aren’t registered nurses and don’t go through the same type of schooling and training. The laws and types of certification vary, but we’re not talking about little old ladies with no training at all. CPMs learn midwifery techniques through apprenticeship, coursework and lots of experience. They are also frequently required to pass certification exams.
I think this type of midwifery is important because I have fundamental problems with the modern medical education, particularly when it comes to birth. Even CNMs have to start their education as nurses, who learn the scientific model of birth that has created the maternity crisis we’re in today. They practice in hospitals and are forced to follow hospital regulations which are bad for birth,. Some of the reasons I have yet to become a midwife stem from this–I’m afraid to begin my education with the modern medical logic. But being a CPM, or a lay midwife, is difficult because of varying state regulations that determine where and how you can practice. That’s what this campaign is trying to change.
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About Me
Miriam Pérez is a writer, blogger and Senior Advocacy Associate at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. She has been a doula since 2004.
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