This is about the brouhaha following BOBB and the AMA rattling sabres to 'outlaw' homebirth in USA. Jennifer Block from
Pushed Birth has teamed up with Abby and Ricki to give a response.
This is a pivotal time to speak up. Australia is so close behind, the precedent set there will affect us here.
You can click on the "
buzz up" icon to express popularity for the news article, even if you don't want to sign up and comment.
Time for women to roar!
From a midwife in USA:
"PLEASE, please click through to this piece written by Ricki Lake, Jennifer Block, and Abby Epstein.
This piece actually IS MORE IMPORTANT from a "needs-comments-point-of-view" than the other Huffington Post article from earlier today. Again, please use the Buzz Up feature associated with the Column to get it more attention.
Just got a call that if we get a TON of comments to this piece written by Ricki, Jennifer and Abby, that the piece can be moved up to the Huffington Post's "Favorites" column and thus could stay on their home page for days. PLEASE, please comment on their piece and forward on to your lists ? all of them.
Also received word that Ricki should be on Good Morning America this Saturday ? also Hollywood Access and People magazine lining up too ? the ripple effects continue and WE NEED YOUR COMMENTS on this column to help elevate the national dialogue. The media will be starting to tune more into the blogs and the comments associated with articles and columns, and we need all our good messaging out there ?
Fine to criticize AMA in your comments ? ACOG too ? but also remember to praise those family practice docs and obs who "get it" and understand the multiple-benefits that come when we provide safe and legal access to midwives and the midwives model of care across the entire the U.S. maternity care system ? talk about the vision for a New Model of care. The old guard must stand aside, and new dialogue about how we ensure women and families access to physiological birth must prevail and thrive in our society.
Click here to read the article,
'buzz up' the article to support it, and to log in and comment if you wish:
Ricki Lake, Jennifer Block, and Abby Epstein: Docs to Women: Pay No Attention to Ricki Lake's Home Birth - Living on The Huffington Post
Docs to Women: Pay No Attention to Ricki Lake's Home Birth
Posted June 18, 2008 | 02:26 PM (EST)
Ladies, the physicians of America have issued their decree: they don't
want you having your babies at home with midwives.
We can't imagine why not. Study upon study have shown that planning a
home birth with a trained midwife is a great choice if you want to
avoid unnecessary medical intervention. Midwives are experts in
supporting the physiological birth process: monitoring you and your
baby during labor, helping you into positions that help labor
progress, protecting your pelvic parts from damage while you push, and
"catching" the baby from the position that's most effective and
comfortable for you -- hands and knees, squatting, even standing --
not the position most comfortable for her.
When healthy women are supported this way, 95% give birth vaginally,
with hardly any intervention.
And yet, the American Medical Association doesn't see the point.
Yesterday at its annual meeting it adopted a policy written by the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists against "home
deliveries" and in support of legislation "that helps ensure safe
deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting
for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the
hospital" or accredited birth center.
"There ought to be a law!" cry the doctors.
The trouble is, they have no evidence to back up their safety claims.
In fact, the largest and most rigorous study of home birth
internationally to date found that among 5,000 healthy, "low-risk"
women, babies were born just as safely at home under a midwife's care
as in the hospital. And not only that, the study, like many before it,
found that the women actually fared better at home, with far fewer
interventions like labor induction, cesarean section, and episiotomy
(taking scissors to the vagina, a practice that according to the
research should be obsolete but is still performed on one-third of
women who give birth vaginally).
Which is why the American Public Health Association and the American
College of Nurse Midwives support women choosing home birth. The
British OB/GYNs have read the research, too, and have this to say:
"There is no reason why home birth should not be offered to women at
low risk of complications... it may confer considerable benefits for
them and their families. There is ample evidence showing that
labouring at home increases a woman's likelihood of a birth that is
both satisfying and safe..."
The other trouble with the American MDs is that they seem to have lost
all respect for women's civil rights, indeed for the U.S. Constitution
-- the right to privacy, to bodily integrity, and the right of every
adult to determine her own health care. The "father knows best"
legislation they are promoting could indeed be used to criminally
prosecute women who choose home birth, say, by equating it with child
abuse.
Research evidence be damned, the doctors want to mandate you to go to
the hospital. They don't want you to have a choice.
We think they're spooked. The cesarean rate is rising, celebrities are
publicizing their home births (the initial wording of the AMA
resolution actually took aim at Ricki for publicizing her home birth
on the Today Show!), people are readingPushed and watching The
Business of Being Born, and there's a nationwide legislative "push" to
license certified professional midwives in all states (The AMA is
against that, too, by the way).
The docs are on the defensive.
After all, birth is big business -- it's in fact the most common
reason for a woman to be admitted to the hospital. And if more women
start giving birth outside of it, who will get paid? Not doctors and
not hospitals.
"The AMA supports a woman's right to make an informed decision
regarding her delivery and to choose her health care provider," the
group said in a statement. But if it really supported women's choices
it wouldn't adopt a policy condemning home birth and midwives.
Because if U.S. women are to have real birth choices, everybody needs
to be working together to provide them, not waging turf wars at their
expense.
Should Homebirth be outlawed by the powerful AMA? No time to be silent ...
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