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Would you choose surgery over the pain of childbirth?
Dr. Lisa Umholtz, OB/GYN, has no problem when a woman requests to have an elective cesarean section performed in order to avoid the pain of childbirth. With tocophobia (the fear of childbirth) on the rise, some doctors simply do not mind the surgical procedure if it means that women can have healthy babies.
“Just in the last 10 years, we’ve been giving people that option; if they want to go straight to the c-section they can,” Dr. Umholtz said.
But there are risks involved with surgery of any kind and although increasingly common, cesarean sections still pose significant risks to mom and baby.
Risks for mom include infection, heavy blood loss, blood clots, nausea, vomiting, and severe headache after the delivery (related to anesthesia and the abdominal procedure), bowel problems, such as constipation or when the intestines stop moving waste material normally, and maternal death which is admittedly very rare. The risk of death for women who have a planned cesarean delivery is very low (about 6 in 100,000). Continue reading »
Is Home Birth Safe?
The medical community considers home birth dangerous, the equivalent of playing with fire. Until now, research didn’t support that position: outcomes for healthy moms with uncomplicated pregnancies were consistently on par whether babes were born at home or in the hospital.
Meet the Wax Paper. A metaanalysis of data on home births published last month the Journal of American Obstetrics and Gynecology, this paper claims that infants born at home are 3 times more likely to die than those born in hospitals.
Oh really?
No, say home birth activists and many academics. They say the paper’s methodology was flawed and the results are based on bad data.
What can Twitter teach us about birth?
Until you’ve been through childbirth, you don’t really know what you’ll feel and what to expect. For those who have only heard horror stories or seen them played out on TV, the whole process really is something of a mystery. The unknown part of giving birth is what, for many women, makes it scary.
Which is what Fi Stone-Star (great name, by the way) had in mind when she decided to send tweets during her most recent birth, which was at home and without much in the way of pain relief.
From the moment of the first contraction at 2:30 in the morning, until she held her newborn son, she typed in her thoughts and feelings in 140 characters or less. Including calls for, ahem, pain relief: Continue reading »
Should women care what the nurses think of them?
Over at the Stir, Annie Krasnow posts the confessions of a labor and delivery nurse — a proud [my emphasis] L&D nurse — living somewhere along the East Coast. Despite her pride, Krasnow’s friend wants her list of confessions printed under the pseudonym, Laborie Delivia.
After reading the list, I can understand why she doesn’t want her real name attached. And I feel sorry for L&D nurses everywhere. Though some no doubt share Delivia’s childbirth edicts, I hope for the sake of birthing women everywhere, they are few and far between. Continue reading »
The resulting baby, with her babies. She had very positive baby-acquiring experiences.
I hear a lot of women complaining about the way doctors and hospitals treat them during labor. Pushing epidurals, requiring pitocin, being generally unsympathetic to requests to limit intervention. Taffy Brodesser-Akner has written about her birth for both Self and Salon, and it’s a true horror story–a doctor who broke her water against her wishes and circumstances that only went downhill from there. Brodesser-Akner didn’t necessarily want an all-natural birth. She just wanted to be listened to and treated with respect. She wasn’t.
Writing for Babble’s Being Pregnant blog, Ceridwen Morris points out that any birth can be a positive experience. It’s less about the details than about being treated with kindness and respect at a vulnerable time. I see her point–and I would have to say that I was treated with kindness and respect for all three of my births. But ironically, my most positive childbirth experience was the one where no one listened to me at all.
Obstetricians don’t like competition. This week in New York, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out swinging against a bill that would have made it easier for women to choose home birth.
Having a home birth isn’t illegal in New York, but the legal hoops the state requires midwives to jump through make it all but unavailable to many Big Apple mamas.
Rather than regulate midwifery directly, the state requires midwives to have written “practice agreements” with obstetricians at nearby hospitals. The obstetrician has to agree to take over care of the midwives patients should an emergency occur.
The state legislature moved to do away with the “written agreement” rule this week, and was met with strong opposition from OBs.
One of the 10 shortlisted films in Canada’s National Film Board competition is this little six-minute snippet of life as a U.K. midwife. The film, “Mother of Many,” was created by Emma Lazenby, once a designer for the children’s series “Charlie and Lola.”
The cartoon follows a day in the life of a hospital midwife, showing her as a calming presence during “the most dangerous journey.” It’s not super graphic, but also NSFW.
[Video after the jump] Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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