name changes for negligent midwives

The skeptical OB has an article up about negligent midwives changing their names as to deceive their customers.

It happened to me, too. Ester Werbach now goes by “Nueve Lunas Maternity” on the internet. The Utah Midwive’s Association is well aware of it, and my complaints of sexual misconduct, and continue to support my abuser. They don’t care.

These types of actions also make it impossible for women to research their care provider. If you have a health care provider that has killed negligently, had their license suspended, or otherwise been reprimanded their patients have a right to know. Midwives rob women of the opportunity to know what they are getting into.

“do nothing”- the official slogan of home birth

With a few exceptions (namely placenta previa) the home birth midwife’s theory of practice is to not do anything. Their strategy of not doing anything (often euphemistically called “trusting birth”) is what patients shell out thousands of dollars for. Home birth midwives seem to believe that active management of risk factors causes deaths, when there are plenty of statistics that evidence the safety of hospital birth when compared to home births. Here are the numbers from Oregon. The midwives have a theory, that doing nothing is better than doing something nearly all of the time, but they ignore all the available data to check and see if their theory is correct. They put peoples lives on the line and do not check ahead of time to see if their idea is true.

The way that midwives come to believe such nonsense is that the majority of the time no one dies when they decide to do nothing. The issue with doing nothing isn’t usually death, its usually brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation. There is not any accountability or tracking of brain injuries in babies by home birth midwives, but a paper by perinatal specialists found an 18 x higher rate of them. Sometimes it takes years before the effects show up.

I began thinking about this matter because of an article on the Thinking Midwife’s page about how nuchal cords (cords wrapped around baby’s neck) are a “scapegoat” for interventions. Heres her advice:

• During birth DO NOTHING.
• IF the cord is preventing the baby descending once the head is born (extremely rare) use the ‘somersault technique’ (Schorn & Blanco 1991) – see below.
• Once the baby is born, unwrap the cord (the mother/family can do this).
• If the baby is compromised at birth encourage the parents to talk to their baby whilst the placental circulation re-establishes the normal blood volume and oxygen for the baby. if the baby requires further resuscitation do it with the cord intact.

She emphasizes over and over again how rare it is to have to use the somersault technique, but to me that says that american home birth midwives specifically will be unlikely to actually learn this technique during a birth. Would you want to be the first patient a midwife has used this technique on? Would she even know if she were making a mistake? States that actually regulate direct entry midwives require that they fulfill educational criteria that is woefully inadequate, You can take the NARM exam and get certified after attending only 20 births- most non OBGYNs deliver more babies in med school than that.

The thinking midwife’s theory is that compressed cords are providing compromised, but not completely absent, blood and oxygen to the baby. That may or may not be true in any specific case, but there isn’t any electronic fetal monitoring to detect distress at her home births, so midwives are forced to form an opinion based on intermittent Doppler readings.

I sometimes wish I could get midwives together with malpractice attorneys sometime to talk birth injuries. Midwives who do home births attend to far fewer births than physicians, midwives get to pick their patients with more freedom than physicians, and lay midwives are less likely to actually recognize their mistakes. Home birth midwives are less likely to see the impact of their practice choices in any representative way, which probably makes it easy for them to pass around useless advice over and over. Malpractice attorneys deal exclusively in cases where someone died or was injured because critical decisions were made (or not made). They tend to have a much more common sense explanation of the problems caused by nuchal cords because they actually have to see the parents of the injured babies, and file the documents in court, and see the costs associated with the injuries, interview medical experts who explain what went wrong, etc. Malpractice attorneys have to face what these midwives would rather forget or blame on the parents. You will notice that it says in some cases the only way to treat is emergency c-section, and the only way to make sure its not an unduly delayed c-section is to use fetal monitoring. Home births have neither of these things at their disposal, so they have to push the lie that doing nothing is better than doing something that can only be done in a hospital. Admitting that it is more dangerous would lead them to having to obtain actual informed consent, and very few people would be willing to sign on for the risks of homebirth if they were honestly represented ahead of time.

 

The reason the #notburiedtwice campaign exists

The reason the #notburiedtwice campaign exists

I came across a link for a radio show called Progressive Parenting, which decided to discuss the Vickie Sorensen manslaughter case. They had someone from the human rights in childbirth campaign and Katie McCall of Our Sisters in Chains. These women are trying to bury the memory of the baby that died a preventable death in Utah, they are trying to make sure people do nothing in response to the deaths.

The focus of the show was how prosecution of midwives for attending preventable deaths would affect the community. There are a few major claims in the show that are questionable:

Claim #1 is that Doctors are never charged with manslaughter for killing a patient.

It took me one google to debunk that, there are many cases of physicians being charged with manslaughter when they have done something incredibly negligent. The reason that doctors or midwives are charged with manslaughter is that their negligence was so egregious that it could be considered criminal. I think it is safe to say home birth midwives are more likely to do something outrageously negligent because of their dogmatic belief system about the nature of birth combined with paranoia about being persecuted. The women on the show complain that physicians only have to worry about being sued, but are not in favor of mandatory insurance for midwives so that they too could “just” be sued in the case of a death. If midwives want to be sued instead of charged they should carry insurance. The ones with risky practices cannot secure insurance because insurance companies know the risk involved would make for a very high rate for services, and midwives cannot charge prices high enough to justify the insurance cost. Its common sense that if you do a risky job then you open yourself up to these problems, but midwives and natural childbirth advocates believe that they should be exempt from the rules that the rest of us have to play by. They want all the glory of being a physician without any of the responsibility, which leads me to the next claim.

Claim #2 is that home birth midwives are experts in vaginal birth and should be regarded as such by the medical community.

The women on the show praise Utah’s midwifery laws, despite the fact that you need no training or experience to become a home birth midwife in the state. They later refer to Utah as a ‘haven’ for midwives because the law is so lax. I don’t know how they can claim that our laws are great because they require nothing of people who want to practice home birth midwifery, but then demand that untrained or undertrained midwives be regarded as experts in childbirth. Physicians are sick and tired of cleaning up after the mistakes made by lay people and have a negative view of home birth midwives for a reason. I’ve noted before how a non-nurse midwife’s complete ignorance of electronic fetal monitoring makes them unable to detect distress patterns outside of brachycardia, and likely explains the wealth of intrapartum deaths that home birth midwives preside over that are completely unheard of in a hospital setting (the long labor, heart rate was fine, then suddenly the baby is dead story you’ve seen so many times before). The human rights in childbirth rep says that collegiality needs to be in place so that the midwife and hospital can trade info, but if you’ve read From Calling to Courtroom (the guide for home birth midwives to avoid liability) you know the standard advice to avoid liability is to make a chart in your own special code that only you understand.

Do not chart emergency medical procedures. Use a “made up” code that only YOU understand. Don’t ever think it can’t happen to you. I believe I was careful BEFORE I was prosecuted. I am even more careful now.

 

-Chapter 1 of From Calling to Courtroom

It is absolutely impossible to take information from someone in this profession seriously because there have been so many cases where home birth midwives lied to the hospital, EMTs, police, etc.

Claim #3 Anyone working with birth is bound to see a ‘bad outcome’.

Lets assume that by bad outcome they mean a newborn death, since that is the case being discussed on the show. Vickie Sorensen was a midwife for over 30 years, and has delivered ‘over 1000 babies” (according to her fundraiser page). Contrast that with an OBGYN, which would take about six years to get that number of births (delivering 140-180 or so babies a year). OBGYNs still manage to lose significantly fewer babies in the hospital despite taking on cases where newborn death can be expected.  It seems to me that if most OBGYNs were working at the same pace as home birth midwives, and could be as selective in choosing their patients, that they would be extremely unlikely to see an unexpected perinatal death. The culture of home birth has a creepy way of trying to normalize preventable newborn deaths as being unpreventable, but the numbers say something different. The vast majority of home birth deaths can be prevented.

Claim #4 There is an anti-home birth agenda that causes unmerited arrests of midwives and causes the media to falsely report information.

I’ve never actually seen a midwife be exonerated after being accused of manslaughter or homicide, so unless the agenda extends to juries its a bit hard to take seriously. A lot of evidence would need to be produced to support this claim, which is essentially a conspiracy theory to try and excuse the allegations against midwives. I’ve seen no evidence of it anywhere. It seems as though this would be a pretty low priority target, considering the minority of births are taking place out of hospitals. I’ve pointed out why I believe in the charges against VIckie Sorensen, and I talk specifics exactly because I know that these natural child birth advocates won’t. Its a manipulation tactic to keep things vague.

Claim # 5 The right of midwives to practice is about the right of women to choose when and how they give birth.

I find this incredibly dishonest and appropriative of legitimate feminist issues. This is and always has been about letting midwives do whatever they please without accountability. People who are actual feminists think that women deserve to have skilled birth attendants who can actually adequately explain risk vs benefit to them, not a bunch of anti-vaccine nutjobs who idealize the history of human child birth, despite its high mortality rate. Letting midwives get away with being unaccountable and untrained means that we are letting women fall into the trap of charlatans, and many of them are choosing home birth because of fear of hospitals or a lack of finances.

Claim# 6- if midwives have restrictions placed on them, women will have to choose between c-sections and unassisted birth.

Of course this is a false dichotomy, there is a lot of space between those two things. Many hospitals have tried to incorporate as many features of home birth as they can into birth centers attached to hospitals. You could have a vaginal unmedicated birth in a hospital.  Illegal home births attended by midwives happen all the time.

The claim here supposes that going unassisted is much worse than having a midwife, a claim that is false in many cases. Midwives have a mantra of ‘trust birth’, and it means that they are more likely to say that everything is fine when there is a real risk or a real problem happening. There have been many times where home birth midwives prevented transport or insisted it wasn’t needed while the patient knew that they needed urgent help. Midwives have a history of making things much worse than they needed to be.

Not Buried Twice Video- please share!

Doula Dani has made an amazing video about home birth loss mothers and the #notburiedtwice campaign. Please view and share.

if your baby dies, will the NCB community be there for you?

I read a lot of home birth loss stories before I chose a home birth. Most of them were explained away by saying that the baby would have died if born in the hospital. Sometimes though, its obvious that the baby never would have died in the hospital.

The recent death caused by Christy Collins (a las vegas, nevada CPM) is a good example of this. Her patient was weeks past her due date and had ZERO amniotic fluid. Christy posted on facebook to get advice on how to deal with that, and other midwives said to wait it out or try worthless remedies like stevia. This was an entirely preventable tragedy and should have never happened. How does the natural child birth community react when this happens?

This babycenter thread is a good example of what loss moms are up against when they lose the baby at the hands of a midwife outside of a hospital. 

Most NCBers tried to say this was a bad midwife instead of proof that lay midwives are NOT adequately trained to care for pregnant women. People who said this ignored the crowd-sourcing portion of the tragedy, because industry leaders and other long-time midwives advised waiting despite the obvious danger.

Those who realized that the majority of other lay midwives said to wait decided to blame the mother instead. Here are some choice quotes:

“Did the mother thoroughly check out this midwife? The other midwifes on that facebook page? Obviously that midwife lacked experience and the ladies on the page giving terrible advice did as well. That absolutely does not speak for the majority of midwives who strive for complete care centered around mother and baby trying to obtain the best and healthiest birth possible

…

This would have never happened to me because I would have been pro active.”

another person said:

“IMO, once you become pregnant you owe it to yourself and your child to *educate* yourself. It doesn’t matter what type of birth you want to have, learn about *all* of them. Unplanned home births happen. Emergency C sections happen. You need to be *educated* so you don’t fall prey to shitty health care “professionals”.“

You get the sense they are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else. They are desperate to make up reasons that this could not have happened to them, but it could have. It could happen to anyone who uses a provider willing to do out of hospital births- specifically non-nurse midwives. They have nothing to lose if your baby dies, and they genuinely believe that there is not any elevated risk for out of hospital births.

Even if you manage to find the strength to fight a negligent midwife and tell everyone what happened after she causes your baby to die, she can just move and set up shop again. She can make up a story about what ‘really’ happened and other midwives can corroborate her story. None of these women on babycenter understand that this easily could have been them. It could have been me. I find myself being grateful every day that everyone was physically okay at the end of my horrible experience. I feel like I dodged a bullet, like I came out of a car accident without a scrape- in short, I feel that I was very lucky. It is baffling to me that these other women feel that they were somehow earned a safe birth for their baby.

Imagine having trusted your midwife and paid the price for it- you have to bury your child. Imagine having to see these comments about you. Strangers saying that you just must have been stupid or uneducated or not researched enough about that midwife. Why are these women focusing on the victim? What about the next woman who is duped by a dangerous midwife? Is it okay for that baby to die, as long as its not yours? Why should these women even have ACCESS to patients after demonstrating that they don’t know what the hell they are doing? 

 

If moms are to blame for not doing enough research (although there might not be information available on the midwife), or for not being ‘educated’ enough, then why the hell do they hire a midwife in the first place? Natural Child Birth advocates change their tune completely when an event does not fit the ideology of the group. You get this kind of blame even if your child is okay, but you’ve decided a lot of the things you were told about birth by the NCB movement was rubbish. That’s certainly been my experience.

 

NCB is there for you as long as you agree with it all the time. If your baby dies and you don’t blame the midwife (even if she was clearly at fault), if you still want your next birth at home, then they will be there for you. If you lose your uterus to a VBAC rupture and do not blame the people who convinced you it was safe to VBAC at home, only THEN will NCB be there for you. They will only be there for you if you don’t try to hold anyone in the movement accountable for their words or actions.

 

If you believe in Natural Child Birth and you disagree with my view, please prove me wrong. Advocate for mandatory licensing and midwives who are Certified Nurse Midwives instead of lay midwives. I would be delighted to be wrong about my view of the movement.

Calling out a negligent Midwife

Here is a revealing exchange between a midwife (Brenda Ann Scarpino Newport) who is responsible for a preventable death and the grieving mother. It seems to me like the midwife is trying to convince herself as much as the mom that nothing could have been done to save the baby, despite what the medical examiners said. The gaslighting and guilt tripping placed on the mom is familiar to me because of my experience in reporting abuse by a midwife to a birth center. It seems like this is standard operating procedure for midwives who screw up. I would be amazed if I saw one who took responsibility, apologized, and stopped practicing. The mother is a brave woman who fights on behalf of her daughter to make sure she did not die in vain. Please follow and support her blog if you want insights from a loss mother about NCB and out of hospital births.

Momofmanyfeet

What can you do when your child dies due to a midwife’s negligence?

Let’s see, we attempted to consult a lawyer only to have nobody want to help because midwives don’t carry insurance.
The police wanted to charge her with Negligent Homicide, but the detective refused to go on a “witch hunt”.
The midwife review board did nothing but give us shit. Funny enough, they also have sat idly by while multiple babies die under her care.
A reporter was going to help us but after an interview, we never heard from him again.

After much thought I am going to publicly share the emails and as much info as I can dig up.

Email 1

There is alot of mis-truths on this. A Baby born at 37 weeks is not pre-mature by anyones standards, not even the medical community. Respitory distress is a common label for any reason the…

View original post 2,101 more words

Justice for Vylette

Justice for Vylette

These stories are everywhere- it seems like the only recourse american women have after suffering from midwifery related negligence is to tell their story online to prevent other people from being hurt by specific midwives. It is damage control, not prevention. I am planning on pulling together a state-by-state resource list for concerned citizens to try and organize around the cause of holding midwives accountable to the public. Here is the beginning of Vylette’s birth story, available on the facebook page:

my absolutely perfect baby from my perfect pregnancy was murdered by the negligence of my midwives ASYA PORTNAYA & YULIYA MILSHTEYN of The Brooklyn Birthing Center ( http://www.brooklynbirthingcenter.com/ ). also doula London King ( http://www.pushlove.com/ ). they delayed me for hours so much so that my baby was trapped in my birth canal and suffered lack of oxygen to her brain. they did not believe me when i told them my contractions were 2 min apart for HOURS.

I took a look at the brooklyn birth centers webpage, and they still recommend the doula involved in this preventable perinatal death. I sent them an email asking why, considering the information available online about what happened there. You can email them too at info@brooklynbirthingcenter.com. My heart aches for this family.

The midwives in this story were a lot like the one I dealt with- it seems like when midwives just don’t want to deal with a patient they say whatever they can to get out of being responsible for the births they agreed to attend. The mother of Vylette believes that since it was thanksgiving weekend she was blown off by people who agreed to care for her during her labor. It is shameful. Do you think the midwives were even sorry? Of course not. They just moved on like nothing happened and had nothing to say to the woman who had to bury her daughter:

 her name is Vylette Moon and though she was here for such a short time she was very loved by all who saw her. except the midwives.. they never spoke to me again. stopped all contact and ran me in circles when i tried to obtain my medical records they are evil.i was supposed to birth at the Brooklyn birthing centerthe midwives were ASYA PORTNAYA and YULIYA MILSHTEYN. i believe they are currently still delivering babies. it makes me so sick.

The organizer of Justice for Vylette (Vylette’s mom) encourages people to share this story with anyone who is interested. I looked up her midwives on healthgrades, and neither Yuliua Milshteyn or Asya Portnaya have any record of a sanction or malpractice suit available online. Vylette’s mother did a very good job of publicizing these events so that anyone researching these midwives will find the story of what happened, but again that isn’t what I would call “justice”. I admire her strength in telling her story despite the pain of the loss of her daughter.

I am not sure if Vylette’s mother tried to report these women to the licensing board or not (both are CNMs) but I am going to contact her to see if I can help get anything done for her case. Please share or like her facebook page to show support.

UPDATE 1-16-14

I contacted Vylette’s mother through facebook and gave her the contact information for the complaints department of the new york licensing board. It was weirdly hard to find. Hopefully she will be able to put a mark on these women’s records (or perhaps cause them to lose their RN licenses).