c-sections

Hypnosis used as anesthesia for cesarean

MZP3 Comments

 

According to Press TV, Iranian doctors just completed the first birth by cesarean section using only hypnosis as anesthesia.

Volunteering to be the first women to undergo a C-section without conventional methods of chemical anesthesia, Hassanlou had attended pain management sessions with Dr. Almasian for four months, before her due date.

The article mentions that hypnosis is a technique that can be used in natural childbirth as well–which is how I had heard of it before–hypnobirth. A quick google search pulls up a lot of sites about this technique for natural childbirth:

Birthing with Hypnosis

Hypnobabies

There’s even a patented method called the Mongan method

I have had no experience with this idea of hypnobirthing (besides the quick mention in my doula training). I would love to hear from you all about your opinions/experiences with this birthing technique.

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Woman catches baby during cesarean section

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This article from the Australian newspaper The Age, tells the story of one mom who had an “assisted cesarean section,” where the mother is conscious and even is the first to touch her child–by helping pull the baby out of the womb.

Called “assisted caesarean”, the procedure allows the mother to be the first to hold her child, with her hands guided into the womb by medical staff. In what is believed to be only the third assisted caesarean in Australia in recent years, Perth mother Naomi Chapman, 38, helped deliver her third baby, Thomas, on April 2.

It’s definitely an interesting concept, which aligns with the desire of midwives to include women in the birth process. With the help of midwives, mothers and fathers have been catching their own babies for years now. But is this just an attempt to make an entirely medicalized process seem more mother-friendly? Luckily both the mother and doctor in this situation don’t want this procedure to encourage c-sections:

But women should not consider assisted caesareans ahead of vaginal birth. “I still think a vaginal birth is the best way to birth your baby,” Ms Chapman says. “I don’t want women to choose to have a caesarean because of this,” [Dr. Gunnell] says. “We need to be very clear that this is not a good alternative to a vaginal birth; the caesarean section rate is very high.”

TV to blame for increased c-section rate?

MZP2 Comments

I just found this article, in the British newspaper The Independent, that their “Maternity Csar” is placing the blame for Britain’s increasing cesarean section rate on television coverage of birth.

The IoS reported last week that Caesarean sections had risen from 9 per cent of all deliveries in 1980, to nearly 23 per cent by 2004/05, well above the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 15 per cent. Ms Lewis’s comments come in the wake of several shows depicting Caesarean sections, including ER and Emmerdale. She said: “I blame TV programmes. Every time, you see a pregnancy on television it seems to go wrong and ends up with a Caesarean section. You never see a woman having a normal delivery.

This is a claim that I have been making for awhile now, and although I cannot really comment on British television, I think this is exceedingly true for US TV, particularly in the wake of the Psuedo-documentary Reality TV boom. There are a number of these medical documentary series, particularly on stations like The Discovery Channel and TLC.

Check out one particularly frightening example:

No wonder women are afraid to give birth. And one last thing, our c-section rate is even worse than the UK, at almost 30%. Thank you reality TV.

Plastic Surgery…for your vagina?!?!

MZP2 Comments

Check out this post at Feministing about the scary prospect of “vaginal rejuvenation” surgeries. Eww. Apparently the Washington Post considers it “Comestic Surgery’s New Frontier.” If this isn’t the final frontier…I don’t want to know what is.

I think the thing that scares me the most about this is how it points to the way our society is really becoming a plastic surgery society–we seem to be willing to go under the knife (even our genitals) at the drop of a hat. Not only are these procedures costly and dangerous…but they are definitely not solving the real problems at hand, which are our over-zealous standards of beauty and our intense focus on physicality.

And to make it even more interesting, there seems to be a relationship between rates of cosmetic surgery and cesarean section rates–best example: Brazil. There, the elective c-section rate is up to 80% (SCARY), even though the WHO recommends a c-section rate of around 10%. Many people speculate that rate has been contributed to by the intense culture of plastic surgery. Maybe that’s the direction in which we’re going…although I personally hope not.