A Breath of Fresh Air

Check out this month's editorial in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing. I just about did a handstand after reading this nurse-midwife's (who only has done hospital births and has a daughter who is an OB/GYN) defense of home births and plea to the American medical community to stop attacking midwifery. It was SO wonderful to read something from the medical community that was cooperative and open minded about midwifery. Yippee! I SO hope that there are MANY more editorials like this in major American medical journals-- then things might start changing sooner! Did you know Canada's socialized health care system just added home births as an option for birthing women--- how come the US is SO far behind?!!! Here are some of my favorite quotes-- I bolded my favorite part :)

"... in our current health care milieu for childbearing
women, the protection of normal is not valued or
supported, except in a very few locales. Those who
support normalcy are usually swimming upstream
against a system that treats every laboring woman
as a surgical case. The idea that a normal spontaneous
birth is by design the best outcome for a
healthy woman and her infant is neither believed
nor entertained as a basic concept. Most U.S.-
trained physicians and sadly most U.S.-trained
nurses have minimal experience with normal labor
and birth.Without fetal monitors, intravenous lines,
infusion pumps, epidurals, pitocin, endless charting,
and rules theses individuals are helpless and
unskilled to provide the kind of informed human
support and wise guidance that a laboring woman
needs while the normal process of labor and birth
unfolds.

... the very core of my being, my
scientifically trained brain, and four decades experience
in the business of mothers and babies tell me
it is our system that is not serving mothers and babies
well. There is not some inherent danger lurking
for healthy American women who desire to give
birth at home. The primary danger is that the ‘‘system’’
does not support this choice. To pretend that
a normal healthy woman cannot give birth safely
without the trappings of a U.S. hospital is not only
audacious but also uninformed. Perhaps it is time
for a new woman’s movement, one that embraces
the normalcy of childbirth and puts mothers and
babies back on the center stage rather than the
system’s need to defend the interventionist subculture
it has developed and that it must financially
support. This system has not improved outcomes
for mothers or babies while the cost of care has
continued to escalate keeping pace with unnecessary
intervention. The recent initiatives of our
medical colleagues, the ‘‘authorities,’’ simply highlight
the painful reality that the ‘‘Emperor has no
clothes!’’