Remember when MANA refused to change their practice guidelines in light of their own research that showed home birth to be incredibly dangerous for high risk pregnancies? It turns out MANA will change their guidelines, just not in a way that has anything to do with the safety of mothers or babies. They have recently made the change of removing the word “woman” and replacing it with “pregnant individual”. If you had assumed they were too lazy to change their documents you were wrong, they simply don’t care if you or your child dies in a home birth. Anything for “the cause” of birth at home, I suppose.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Home Birth fatalities- a growing trend in Hawaii
Is Home Birth Safe? is a new blog about home birth safety, and they found an article about the trend of home births (and subsequent, preventable fatalities) in Hawaii:
“One obstetrician said that Wednesday’s death had taken a toll on hospital staff, especially because of the fact that it was another in a disturbing trend.”
“’This is an ongoing problem here. … Within the last five years, I’ve seen at least three dead babies from home births, and just a week ago I took care of a patient who nearly bled to death after a home birth,’ the doctor said. ‘All of the obstetricians here have had similar experiences. And in all of these situations, the standard of care of obstetric practice was not followed by the practitioners. I believe that all of these bad outcomes could have been avoided if good practice patterns were actually followed.’”
sexual perversion and midwifery
I was sexually assaulted at Better Birth during my labor. Later on another woman sent me a report of being sexually assaulted during her labor at Better Birth of Utah, indicating that she experienced the exact same thing that I had. I also got reports from my wordpress statistics website that indicated that midwives and doulas have touched clients inappropriately, and women searching for answers about their own birth experiences landed here as a result. All of us had the same story, all of us had our clitoris rubbed in a sexually purposeful manner by a supposed birth “professional”.
It would be easy to believe that this is just an isolated incident, a pocket of perverse behavior on the part of midwives, but it is hard for me to accept that in light of the information I have at my disposal. Midwifery pioneers like Ina May Gaskin have suggested…
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Woman Already Off To Bad Start As Mother After Requesting Epidural
thanks for the laugh, The Onion
No Prenatal Care and No Empathy
I wish that it was always ignorance, but it isn’t. There is a movement out there right now called “freebirth”, and its full of women that exhaustively looked into child birth options and chose an unassisted pregnancy and birth. Home birth midwives (who are not nurses) teach classes to women wishing to freebirth in order to rake in a few thousand dollars off of this horrendously dangerous practice.
As an OB nurse, one of the most unfortunate and all too often scenarios we encounter is having to take care of women who have had little or no prenatal care. When they present to our unit, for a moment we hold our breath. Will this be the patient that escaped any pregnancy-related complications? Will she deliver a healthy baby, screaming and pink…or will this be the patient that walks in and makes us all scramble? We have all seen horrible outcomes from these scenarios. It’s easy to lose empathy for people who do not get adequate prenatal care.
Growing up, my mother made sure that I never missed a routine doctor’s appointment and she made me get a dental checkup every 6 months. When I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I was all of two weeks pregnant, and living in England. I was not a citizen, and I wasn’t sure when I was coming back to the United…
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Hospitals and Home Births, According to a Labor and Delivery Nurse
Home birth midwives deliver (comparatively) few babies, and few people see more births than an L&D nurse. Listen to the wisdom in this post- things happen, no matter how healthy you are or what measures you take, and being in a hospital is the best way to deal with the aftermath of a complication.
Home births are more common and popular in different areas of the United States. Honestly, my knowledge of home births is very limited. I am only witness to the ones that don’t go as planned, the ones who show up to the hospital when someone is in distress and action has to be taken quickly to prevent additional harm to mother or baby. As a labor and delivery nurse, it is these situations that send a shiver down my back and makes an uneasy feeling settle in the pit of my stomach. I know that there are many home birth stories out there that have a happy ending. The majority of them probably do. What I do know, having been the nurse who had to act quickly to save a mother or a baby who showed up to the hospital when things at home unexpectedly went south, is that no…
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Home birth gurus on facebook part 1
We start today with the home birth guru Ina May Gaskin and her advice about the vaccine, Gardisil.
Ina may says “Here’s a vaccine that should have never made it onto the market. I’ve read too many of these reports.”
Too bad she hasn’t bothered to fact check the reports she has read, as the source material says that the girl’s autopsy was inconclusive. There is no evidence that the shot killed her. No one knows what did. All we have is one data point of correlation. Oops! I just hope no one ends up with cancer because they listened to her quackery.
Secondly, we have Gloria Lemay:
“One of the big problems that we have in sorting out cesarean birth stories is that doctors lie to the family/midwife about the “justification” for the c/section in order to avoid criticism and/or lawsuits. The stories always have to be highly dramatic.”
It isn’t as though Lemay is talking about sorting out the data from the doctors or reports, she is talking about sorting out the details based on what the family says. She figures if there is a lot of dramatic explanation the family must have been lied to by doctors.
This is an occam’s razor situation- the likely explanation is that if they are talking to Gloria Lemay and said they had a c-section, she is going to criticize them for their medical decision and therefore the details might get fudged a bit just to get her to shut up about it. I know I would be tempted. Its really none of her business, until she gets an adequate education and presents some type of actual need to dissect if a c/section was “really” needed or not.
The homebirth controversy: Informed consent and a child’s right
A must-read for families considering home birth
Here are some choice quotes that families may want to see before choosing these lay people to attend their birth:
I am certainly guilty of allowing my memory to lead me down a primrose path. My memory lingers over moments when I was heroic, times when I saved the day, and events that make me seem, in my own mind, like a smart and responsible caregiver. I have to force myself to see things differently, and it is uncomfortable. That time when I expertly resuscitated that breathless baby? I didn’t know he was in distress until he was born; I had missed any warning signs of that. The time I successfully helped a mom avoid the hospital when her blood pressure was…
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Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
There is no way for natural child birth advocates to accept criticism. There are two main ways that NCB advocates dodge criticism, and it is by formulating lazy ad hominems based on the critic’s history with NCB.
When a critic was hurt by NCB
Wow, I read your story and I am *so sorry* that you had such a *terrible, horrible* experience. I hope some day you can heal from what happened and move on with your life. I sense that your anger and trauma has made you lash out against midwives and home birth, but that isn’t fair to those of us who experienced them as a sacred, positive experience. I am praying for you to find peace.
When a critic was NOT hurt by NCB
I don’t know why you are so angry, these women and their choices have literally NOTHING to do with you and I wonder what kind of mental health problems you must have to obsess about what other people choose to do during their births. I could listen to you if you had actually attended home births or had one yourself, but you just really don’t know what you are talking about!
There is no way to win. Its the mark of a group of people who are uninterested in actually learning anything, only reinforcing what they already believe.
Ex Natural Childbirth Advocates 
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