You summed up several of the points I've been trying to make.
For me, this debate really has not been about home v.s hospital birth. It has been about understanding when medical interventions are truly necessary, when they are overkill (no pun intended), and when they are done simply because medical staff "know how to do them."
No one here is arguing that there aren't those rare occurences when moms and babies benefit from the life-saving hands of medical staff, technologies, medicines and techniques. That is indisputable. Thank God we've made those advances. But study after study has shown exactly what Sasha pointed out: in OUR COUNTRY, it tends to only be 10% of the time.
I can't tell you how many times I have had one of my students describe to me their experience of an emergent assisted delivery, or "emergency c-section" within an hour of having an epidural placed in her back. Even though there is a known potential side effect of drop in fetal heart rate and drop in mom's blood pressure (thus the constant FHM and BP measurment) during and after epidural administration. Nonetheless, these women are made to believe the hospital staff "saved" their baby from some ambiguous cause of distress--when it was the epidural administration that caused the distress in the first place.
The above scenario is just one of many that contribute to the gap between the WHOs recommended 10% reasonable c-section rate, and our present 30+% c-section rate.
Am I 100% against epidurals, c-sections, pitocin, etc.? No. Am I against the overuse of these technologies? Yes.
Birth IS inherently a normal process that OCCASIONALLY becomes dangerous.
To suggest childbirth is potentially dangerous for all women and all babies all of the time is a severe and frightenly extreme statement.
Afterall, women have been doing this for thousands of years. There must be SOMETHING normal about it.
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Sasha,
You summed up several of the points I've been trying to make.
For me, this debate really has not been about home v.s hospital birth. It has been about understanding when medical interventions are truly necessary, when they are overkill (no pun intended), and when they are done simply because medical staff "know how to do them."
No one here is arguing that there aren't those rare occurences when moms and babies benefit from the life-saving hands of medical staff, technologies, medicines and techniques. That is indisputable. Thank God we've made those advances. But study after study has shown exactly what Sasha pointed out: in OUR COUNTRY, it tends to only be 10% of the time.
I can't tell you how many times I have had one of my students describe to me their experience of an emergent assisted delivery, or "emergency c-section" within an hour of having an epidural placed in her back. Even though there is a known potential side effect of drop in fetal heart rate and drop in mom's blood pressure (thus the constant FHM and BP measurment) during and after epidural administration. Nonetheless, these women are made to believe the hospital staff "saved" their baby from some ambiguous cause of distress--when it was the epidural administration that caused the distress in the first place.
The above scenario is just one of many that contribute to the gap between the WHOs recommended 10% reasonable c-section rate, and our present 30+% c-section rate.
Am I 100% against epidurals, c-sections, pitocin, etc.? No. Am I against the overuse of these technologies? Yes.
Birth IS inherently a normal process that OCCASIONALLY becomes dangerous.
To suggest childbirth is potentially dangerous for all women and all babies all of the time is a severe and frightenly extreme statement.
Afterall, women have been doing this for thousands of years. There must be SOMETHING normal about it.
July 18, 2008 - 9:20pmThis Comment
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