Sunday, May 20, 2007

Hmmm... Interesting...

"After working as a practicing physician for several years, I became a perinatologist and perinatal scientist, as well as a full-time faculty member at the Schools of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA. Then I became a director of maternal and child health for the California State Health Department. In that capacity, I learned that in the rural town of Madera, California, doctors had decided that they no longer wanted to attend births at the Madera County hospital. They complained that it took too much of their time and didn't pay enough. So in 1968, two out-of-state midwives were recruited by the county to fill the gap. After two years of midwifery practice at the hospital, the rate of babies dying around the time of birth in the Madera County hospital was cut in half. Alarmed that their style of maternity care was being made to look bad, the doctors in the town agreed that they would once again attend births in the hospital if the two midwives were fired. The hospital fired the midwives, the doctors returned, and soon the rate of babies dying around birth rose to its earlier levels" (Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA, p.99, emphasis added).

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