"Three men in a tub"

For a drama-filled and comical birth story, check out Summer's blog. Birth works, despite all the busy-ness we sometimes add to it, and even without the hospital! And... what blows me away (but doesn't surprise me) is how hospitals and medical professionals will still come away with thousands of dollars even when they do next to nothing!

Let's get angry and organized.

"We Americans are consumed with the need to believe that we are number one. But here's a wrenching fact: forty-one countries have better infant mortality rates than the United States does. In 2002, our infant mortality rate went up, not down, and if the United States had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year. And mothers? Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe, and the rate of women dying in childbirth in America has been going up every year for more than twenty years. . . .

"Just as those who never make mistakes can never learn from them, so too those who must always be number one can never learn from others. . . .

"[S]omething happens in the countries at the bottom of the chart. It varies from country to country, but whatever it is, when things get really bad and women's reproductive freedom is abused severely enough, some precipitating factor or series of events finally brings women's attention to the power doctors hold over their reproductive lives. This leads to women's disillusionment, anger, and resentment and a call to action. . . .

"[Midwives] join with the angry women (often forming coalitions that also include scientists, journalists, some politicians, and some doctors and nurses) to start the long, difficult process of regaining women's autonomy in childbirth and reproduction, moving the country up . . . .

"It seems there is at least one thing more powerful than the medical establishment: women, when they are angry and get organized" (Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA, p. 212, 214-215).

Hug a midwife!

This is my midwife friend and me last Saturday at a party. She's awesome! I love midwives!

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).

Sad, but true

"We do not see childbirth in many obstetric units now. What we see resembles childbirth as much as artificial insemination resembles sexual intercourse." ~Ronald Laing, psychiatrist