March 7, 2008
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.
The rest of the birth story after the jump
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by radicaldoula
February 12, 2008
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.
No Comments » | birth | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
February 6, 2008
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.
Wanna move to the UK anyone?
2 Comments | birth, midwives | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
February 3, 2008
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.
Great interview with a midwife from the campaign website.
2 Comments | birth, midwives | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 24, 2008
I’ve been feeling very bogged down lately by intense and somewhat depressing news and blog posts. Maybe it was the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade…who knows. So today something a little fluffier to write about.
I’m not generally a huge celebrity stalker, but lately it seems like there is a lot of news about famous people giving birth.
Nicole Richie, the pseudo-actress best known for her stint on The Simple Life with Paris Hilton, gave birth on January 11th.
‘The Simple Life’ star, who delivered Harlow Winter Kate Madden naturally two weeks ago, was keen to get a clear view of the moment her little girl entered the world at Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Following the birth, Nicole - who had had an epidural injection to help her with the immense pain - then sent a note to Christina Aguilera, who was in a nearby ward awaiting the arrival of her son.
Since when did epidural births become natural births? Okay, so I said this would be a lighter post–but are c-sections becoming so common that going natural just means not delivering your baby surgically?!?! Come on! The article ends by recounting Christina Aguilera’s birth by c-section the next day.
4 Comments | birth | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 23, 2008
The New York Times had an article yesterday about a recently released study that claims that caffeine can double the risk of miscarriage. This is just another study to throw on the pile of “you’re going to harm your baby if” studies.
Research on pregnant women is a difficult issue. As it stands, due to ethics guidelines and a strict Institutional Review Board policy it’s very difficult to get permission to do studies on pregnant women. They are placed into the same special category as minors and incarcerated people–they are considered unable to give consent.
Now there are a few reasons why this might be. Minors are not considered capable of giving consent because of their age–it’s difficult to involve them in medical studies, particularly things like clinical trials, and their parents usually have to consent for them. People in prison are not allowed to give consent because of the history of abuses they have faced at the hands of medical research–it is also likely that they might feel coerced because of their incarceration. I think the most likely reason pregnant women aren’t considered able to give consent really lies in the ideas of fetal personhood–the unborn child she is carrying can’t give consent, therefore she can’t. That takes us down a slippery slope that most reproductive rights advocates are afraid of because it gives the fetus rights.
But what does this all mean for pregnant women and birthing mothers? What it means is that the research on pregnancy and obstretrical practices is not all that scientific. The studies can’t be set up in the rigorous ways they traditionally are. There can’t be control groups, you simply can’t test things out the way you normally do. Which means that studies like this one rely on data from women who are making their own decisions about how much caffeine to intake, so there are a lot of variable that are hard to factor out.
But most importantly what it means is that obstetrical technologies are used anecdotally. No one can run a study on the effects of pitocin in labor, except to look back at cases that already happened and try to compare. Same thing with epidurals, with fetal monitors, with cytotec. So instead doctors learn the hard way, and the SLOW way, by trial and error. But at whose expense? Just looking at the short obstetric history we see a lot of these mistakes:
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T
wilight sleep: a drug used in the 1950s which erased all memory of childbirth but resulted in women being restrained and having rages and fits, in addition to affects on the baby
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Episiotomies: It was once believed that cutting the perineum (skin and tissue between the vagina and anus) was preferrable to natural tearing. After a lot of years of routine episiotomies, they figured out that women were more likely to have really serious tears (and all sorts of other nasty problems) as a result of the episiotomy, and that natural tearing (with its jagged edges) healed faster.
Feel free to add your own to the list in the comments!
5 Comments | birth, pregnancy | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 18, 2008
Via Feministing.
The New Hampshire house just voted to make insurance companies who cover in-hospital births also cover home births for women who want them. The primary argument is financial, as a home birth costs usually less than a third of what a hospital birth costs. Definitely good news!
Check out the comment thread on Vanessa’s feministing post about this. Very interesting.
No Comments » | birth, midwives | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 16, 2008
Next week is the Anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision which upheld a woman’s right to an abortion. In preparation I’m going to blog about some more reproductive rights centered topics leading up to next week.
First off is a shout-out for the just released NARAL Pro-Choice America report Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States. The report gives a state-by-state breakdown of the laws affecting women’s ability to choose abortion, access emergency contraception, get insurance coverage for reproductive health services, among other things. They give each state a grade that corresponds to these issues.
For example, my lovely home state of North Carolina receives a D+ from NARAL for a variety of reasons including that 83% of counties in NC have no abortion provider (which is consistent across the country, by the way). You can see what grade your state gets here.
They also have some awesome maps that give an overview of certain restrictions across the country, like this scary one about states with almost total abortion bans (even though they are unconstitutional) on the books.
What would be really awesome is if next year, NARAL could add some information about birth–which states allow midwives to practice and which allow home birth. I know a lot of you would agree that how you birth is a fundamental reproductive right as well.
1 Comment | abortion, birth, family creation, pregnancy | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 12, 2008
I finally got to see the movie that has been garnering a lot of attention in these past few months tonight.
I’ve seen my fair share of birth movies, but The Business of Being Born is definitely worth the hype. I highly recommend it. It does an incredible job of summing up a lot of what is wrong with birth today, particularly in regards to hospital-based maternity care. There is also footage from a couple of really beautiful home births (no matter how many births I see, whether in person or on tape, I still tear up every time).
I have to say that even after all this time in the birth activism world, it still gets me so fired up to hear about just how absurd it has all gotten. 70% of births in Europe and Japan are attended by midwives, compared to less than 3% here. Maternal and infant mortality rates are not good compared to other developing countries. Interventionist hospital practices create a domino effect that ends in an “emergency” c-section that is actually a result of the interventions in the first place–for one in three births. I could go on and on. Ricki’s movie does, and everyone should see it.
While it doesn’t say anything new, or anything that hasn’t been said by midwives, doulas or activists in the past, she does have the possibility of reaching a new and broader audience thanks to money and fame. Hopefully more women, men, doctors and medical students will start to see the light on this epidemic.
I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the movie, from Marsden Wagner, the author of Born in the USA:
The best thing to do if you want a humanized birth is get the hell out of the hospital.
Amen.
No Comments » | birth, doulas, midwives | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
January 11, 2008
Thank you Ricki Lake for bringing so much attention and media to the homebirth issue. I haven’t yet seen The Business of Being Born (I’m seeing it tomorrow so I will report back) but it certainly has gotten some significant attention in the press.
On Good Morning America they had a segment yesterday on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) births, or unattended homebirths. You can watch here. It’s a really good segment, until the a-hole doctor goes off an a fetal personhood tirade.
“What women need to appreciate is that the few hours of labor are the most dangerous time during the entire lifetime of the soon-to-be-born child,” said Dr. Frank Chervenak, Chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. “Because of this, I would argue … all soon-to-be born children have a right to access immediate Caesarean delivery, and women who are denying this right are irresponsible.”
This kind of thing is EXACTLY why birthing rights activists NEED to work with reproductive rights and abortion rights people. These kinds of arguments, which basically imply that the unborn fetus has rights that trump the needs, desires and even health of the mother. Also framing childbirth as the most dangerous hours of an unborn childs life is problematic to say the least. And this guy isn’t even a pediatrician! He’s an OB-GYN. Oh sorry, I thought their concern was supposed to be the MOTHER. Nevermind how much people think medical interventions are hurting fetuses and mothers.
There was also a review in the NYTimes of the movie, which is super positive and supportive of home birth! That’s exciting. Also here you can see the trailer of another forthcoming film about homebirth in NYC.
2 Comments | birth, news | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula
