I feel uncomfortable talking about home births. Not because I find the subject disgusting- shoving a baby out of your reproductive parts is just part of being a placental mammal- but because sometimes I worry that I’m going to be dragged into a debate that has not much to do with home birthing and more to do with abandoning “western medicine” for alternative medicine. So let’s unpack that.
I trust science to give me a way to find correct information on medical topics.
Thus, I trust medical professionals, who have more knowledge in their field than I do, to help me make good decisions about my health.
But I know that there are serious problems with the American medical system.
More after the jump.
And I know from experience that any discussions about problems with the American medical system tend to attract a large number of people who are, for lack of better words, against science based medicine. A discussion about how to decrees the over prescription of antibiotics is derailed into an argument of the effectiveness of Homeopathy, and any discussion of neurological conditions seems to become an argument about vaccines, and we go no where.
So I feel uncomfortable talking about home births because I feel that I need to set up boundaries the discussion should cross. We can talk about the risk of MRSA but we can’t talk about avoiding evil vaccines. We can talk about the over reliance on drugs during delivery but we can’t talk about magic that we should be using instead. We can talk about how modern hospitals are designed to get patients in and out as quickly as possible, but we can’t talk about relying on the church and vitamins instead.
We do use to many drugs. It’s easier (and more profitable) to tell people to take a pill every day to lower their high blood pressure than it is to tell them to change their diets and exercise. So now we have pills for everything. Take antidepressants when you could use counseling instead! Amphetamines to make your kids behave! You need our magic pills to make mini-you stand up strait again!
And hospitals are dehumanizing. We don’t have enough doctors to be with every patient all the time, and there is too much of a power difference in the doctor patient relationship for most people to feel comfortable with discussing their health with their doctors. And most people in the united states don’t know enough about their own bodies to make good decisions on their own. So we end up with situations where doctors are doing things because it’s more convenient for them and no one is asking questions anyway.
Which leads us to the other problem. When people decide to research other ways of dealing with their medical conditions- or just the daily aspects of leading a healthy life as a human- there is to much Cow Poo to wade through. It’s why we have outbreaks of whooping cough for the first time in 50 years, people going online to look for information on their child’s autism and being frightened away from vaccines forever. So we need to get people informed about their health, but at the same time we need to teach them how to spot quacks.
I would trust a Nurse Midwife, because they have had the training to recognize when something goes wrong. But as I’m watching The Business of Being Born, I notice that while all of the midwives they interview are all Nurse Midwives, they haven’t once yet cautioned people to make certain that their midwife is a Nurse Midwife, and not a Practicing Midwife.
A Nurse Midwife will know when something is going wrong and be able to take a correct course of action, even if it means allowing a Cesarian section to happen. I’ve only heard good things about Nurse Midwives, and I consider them to be medical professionals that we need a lot more of. There are also just not enough gynecologists in the united states, and I think planned parenthood would benefit greatly from having Nurse Midwives around.
But all of the horror stories involving modern midwives have involved Practicing Midwives, who are not required to have medical training and only need to attend a handful of births to be licensed. Now, the real problem is that a large percentage of Practicing Midwives are into alternative medicine, which means even if they see something is going wrong they will not take medically sound action for it.
In short, my main worry is that people are going to get hurt because the problems in the American medical system lead them to seek help elsewhere, and because most of elsewhere likes to do everything as differently as possible from the American medical system, and going back to pre-germ theory techniques in the process.
To my knowledge most Nurse Midwives will not do home births for insurance reasons. After watching the business of being born I suppose I would feel comfortable doing a home birth if I had a Nurse Midwife with me and I know that I had extremely low risk of complications, although I’m not certain about this waterbirth thing. My main reason for not really wanting a home birth is that my brother was a low-risk pregnancy, and he ended up literally exploding out of my mother, and they both needed a week long stay in the hospital. Basically, my mom was in labor for less than four hours and her water didn’t break until he came out head and shoulder first.
I also don’t feel comfortable with hospitals. Hospitals are where sick people go, like small children with whooping cough. Whooping cough kills babies. There’s also MRSA and a host of other horrible antibiotic resistant diseases that live in hospitals. Actually, now that I think about it the whooping cough outbreak is probably going to get a lot worse in the next decade. And the antibiotic resistance.
I think having a midwife attended birth a birthing center near a hospital would be best, but unlikely. So yes, I would do a home birth as long as I was low risk, could get a Nurse mid could get my spawn vaccinated ASAP.
-Andrea
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