Read this testimony by Ilene Jaroslaw about why the Federal Abortion Ban would have prevented her from expanding her family, as well as putting her health at serious risk, in addition to possibly forcing her to carry a not-viable fetus to term.
news
Midwifery/doula news round-up
Some great math to explain why homebirth midwives are more economically viable.
A synopsis of some of the changes in childbirth and parenting over the last few decades.
Limited birth options in San Francisco, where one woman’s insurance forces her to have a c-section.
Citypaper article about the potential crisis for maternity care in Philadelphia.
Video about doulas in Texas.
Cost of birth control skyrockets on college campuses due to a change in Medicaid law.
An exerpt on Huffington Post from Jessica Valenti’s (Feministing.com) new book, Full Frontal Feminism, where she talks about definitions of motherhood, including how women are being limited by increasing numbers of c-sections.
The #1 cause of death among pregnant women? MURDER
An article in the newest issue of Mother Jones makes a great point:
And if the Supreme Court and abortion opponents really want to protect the lives of fetuses, they might consider this: Murder is the number one cause of death of pregnant women in the United States.
But of course we don’t really care about the women carrying the fetus, just the fetus itself. It’s frightening to think about the incidence of intimate partner violence and women as victims, the article also points out that one million women are stalked in the US every year. ONE MILLION women.
Another related crisis is the mass murder of women and girls in Guatemala. This is a human rights disaster, and its not being talked about. Women are being murdered simply because they are women.
Since 2001, more that 2,600 Guatemalan women and girls have been killed and the numbers seem to be accelerating – 110 were murdered in January and February this year alone. Only a negligible number of their killers has ever been convicted.
The scary thing about these murders? They are usually unprovoked. Similar issues have been documented on the US-Mexico border, as well as war-torn countries where rape is used as a weapon.
This weekend I finally saw the new Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and what struck me about their Global Feminisms exhibit is how violence is such a pervasive theme. Many of the pieces used shocking imagery to represent the effect of war and national struggles on women’s bodies, including a video which showed a woman hula hooping with barbed wire. It was painful, disturbing and moving all at the same time.
It’s horrible that we have to waste our energy on five anti-choice men on the Supreme Court, when we have such big issues at hand. BTW, it’s National Call-In Day. Call your Congress people and tell them to support the Freedom of Choice Act.
More news about the ban
Check out some of these articles/posts about the outrageous ban.
Als0, if you happen to be in Washington, DC, there is a rally at 3pm in front of the Supreme Court. Come. This is important.
Bush starts to work his magic…
The Supreme Court just released it’s decision to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban of 2003–the first major abortion restriction since Roe vs. Wade. This is a HUGE deal and reflects how Bush’s conservative SC appointments are going to have an effect on women’s rights in the long term.
The ban includes NO exception for the life and health of the mother. And for those of you who are conspiracy theorists–the news of the tragedy at VA Tech will ensure that this news makes little noise.
More at SCOTUSblog
More midwifery/doula news
Illinois Senate approves licensing of home-birth midwives.
Another article about the closing of two DC area birthing centers.
Pennsylvania Governor Rendell proposes expanding the rights of non-physician medical providers, including nurse-midwives, to do things like write perscriptions, in an attempt to bring down healthcare costs.
A Toronto group provides doulas for new parents with infant sleep problems.
Just a nice article about midwives.
Gay and lesbian families suffer from laws that don’t protect their parenting rights in North Carolina.
Midwifery/Doula News Round-up
Here is a quick summary of recent news about midwives and doulas in the US:
Story about an infant fatality at a homebirth in Massachusetts and the politics surrounding the home vs. hospital debate.
Births with midwives increasing!
Colorado midwifery group going strong with 9000th birth.
Advocates are trying to pass a bill to legalize homebirth in Alabama.
Two midwifery centers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area closing because of financial problems due to the high cost of insurance. Sad.
Spotlight on cool doulas in Albuquerque, NM. This one has a ridiculous intro:
When Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, God told Eve that she and all women to come would bear their children in pain. It’s too bad Eve didn’t have a doula to help her in labor.
Comments welcome!
Science meets pregnancy, guilt and abortion
The first thing I want to say about this story in the NY Times, is why the hell was it put in the Fashion and Style section?!?! I hate the way women’s issues get shelved into these sexist categories, especially when they have NOTHING to do with these categories. This article is more about science than anything else. But moving on, it brings up a lot of interesting points about science, pregnancy, motherhood, infertility and abortion.
The article, entitled My Triplets were Inseparable, Whatever the Risks, tells the story of a mother who discovered she was pregnant with triplets after tens of thousands of dollars worth of infertility treatments and years of attempting to get pregnant. They don’t react well to the news, and the doctor recommends they consider “reducing” to one or two fetuses since triplets have such a high risk of complications.
In the end they decide not to reduce, and the pregnancy is as complicated as the doctors had predicted, ending early with the birth of three premature children. Suzanne clearly states her feelings as the two pound babies are born: “I had not kept my babies safe. I had failed as a mother.” She continues, “I was afraid to be involved, to fall in love with my babies. In my mind, science had taken over, and like a mother bird that loses a chick from her nest, my instinct was to stay away, to keep my distance.”
This story mostly draws questions to my mind:
Plastic Surgery…for your vagina?!?!
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.
“Drugs, Knives and Midwives”
Check out this great article by Elizabeth Larson, just published in Utne. It does a good job of giving an overview of the politics of birth in the US today and identifying many of the problems that exist with our current overly medicalized system. She talks about Marsden Wagner’s new book Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006), which I haven’t read, although I did hear him speak at NAPW’s summit. It also happens to share a title with the documentary that brought me into the birth activist world–I highly recommend it. I dare say it changed my life.
The good thing she does in her article is point out the problems that exist with the polarization of the two birth camps–the highly medicalized OB-GYNs and the anti-medicine midwives. I agree that we need to work on creating birthing options that support women and give them the ability to make informed and supported decisions about their births, regardless of what those decisions might be.
Radical Doula 