Hi, folks, Ima Frawde, CPM here with my latest product for empowered mamas, the automated birth story generator app.
You can download it from the app store for the low, low price of 4 separate payments of $95 each. Once you download the app, you need to activate it by sending us a copy of the baby’s birth certificate signed by a CPM or a family member, with a sworn affidavit attesting to the fact that you fulfilled our requirements: a vaginal birth, no pain medication, a fecally contaminated birth pool, and eating at least one full meal during labor. Don’t worry, though, it doesn’t matter whether the baby lived or died.
Once we review your affidavit, we will instantly email you the code to unlock the app. If your birth doesn’t meet our guidelines, we won’t send you the code. Sorry, no refunds; you will still owe the 4 separate payments of the low, low price of $95 each.
The app is fantastic. Mama, now there’s no need to interrupt the tandem breastfeeding of your newborn, your toddler and your middle-schooler during your babymoon to labor over (get it? labor over?) the 15 page birth story that you can upload immediately to Mothering.com. Just fill in the blanks and we do the work for you.
Choose from several options including: the healing HBAC after 12 C-sections, the 45 week pregnancy, the homebirth of breech Siamese triplets and many other variations of normal.
Here are some excerpts of an actual birth story generated by the new app highlighting some of its most important features.
1. The opening paragraph immediately places the focus of the birth story right where you want it, on the baby yourself:
The birth story of my precious daughter Areola Anigav (that’s vagina spelled backwards) begins 3 years ago when I had a completely unnecessary C-section birth rape for my son Whatshisname. I don’t call it a birth because he was ripped from my body after 4 days of labor including 11 hours of pushing. I never gave him an actual name because if he didn’t have a real birth, he isn’t a real baby.
How did it happen that my hopes for a homebirth were torn to shreds and my spirit and body were mutilated? In a moment of weakness, I gave in to the pleas of my sniveling DH that we transfer to the hospital. Sure enough, as could have been predicted, the doctors birth rapists promptly recommended a C-section for no better reason than the fact that Whatshisname was lying sideways in my uterus, presenting shoulder first. They said he was in an undeliverable position, but having educated myself in the interim I now realize that it was the baby’s fault for not knowing how to be born.
2. A contraction by contraction description of your labor:
In contrast to my labor with Whatshisname, I had no pain at all during the birth of my precious Areola Anigav. Yes, I was screaming myself hoarse with every contraction rush, but those were blood curdling screams of joy.
3. A special section for recounting the 911 call, the NICU stay and the use of the latest technology including head cooling to reduce brain damage from lack of oxygen:
I birthed Areaola Anigav into a kiddie pool of bloody water strewn with flowers. How bloody was the water? When it was over the birth pool had a higher hematocrit than I did.
Areaola Anigav arrived earthside so peacefully. She never screamed. She never cried. She never even opened her eyes. My midwife was awesome. She didn’t panic just because Areola wasn’t breathing. She knew that if you don’t cut the cord, the baby continues to get oxygen from the placenta for up to 3 days. It was my DH who made the 911 call that filled the house with EMTs 15 minutes later. The EMTs bowled over my awesome midwife who was trying to stop them from cutting the cord. They resuscitated Areola and transferred her to the hospital.
4. A closing paragraph that allows you to summarize what your baby did for you.
I don’t consider my homebirth a failure just because Areola Anigav did not survive. Areola gave me the ultimate gift. Her birth taught me that my body is not broken and that trusting birth is all it takes to attain the highest human achievement of all, a baby passing through your vagina. My precious Areola Anigav knew how to be born. I do feel a little sad that she didn’t know how to breathe, but perhaps the next baby will be smarter. Newly empowered, I look forward to having another homebirth to provide a little brother or sister for Whatshishame, even though he doesn’t deserve any gifts from me.
The app has many more features, too numerous to list here.
The Ima Frawde, CPM Birth Story Generator is available in the app store. Download it today!
This is great.
Obstetricians love to focus on effectiveness and ignore efficiency. This is why sites like this one exist. Home birth is shunned by the medical industry because it illustrates how inefficiently the medical industry identifies between babies that need saving and babies that don’t.
Hospital birth – 99% effective. 1 out of 100 babies die. Home birth (according to the statistics portrayed on this site) 97% effective. 3 out of 100 babies die.
In order to save those extra two babies in a hospital setting there should be roughly two intervening procedures out of one hundred, right? Oh wait, I forgot about all the high risk pregnancies. We all know hospital births include high risk pregnancies which account for a whopping 6-8% of all births (I’ll give you 10%). In order to save those 12 extra babies out of 100 (2 from the difference in the homebirthers + 10 (10% of 100 births for the high risk)) our obstetricians perform approximately 33 cesareans and 67 unplanned medical interventions.
Ignore the medical interventions and just look at the cesareans. You’ll see that obstetricians are only correct about half of the time (33 procedures for 12 babies saved). These procedures effect a woman’s ability to have future children (studies suggest 10 times the likelihood of complications in substantial pregnancies after cesarean) How many obstetricians do you know that would recommend a VBAC?
From a business perspective the hospital birth is sheer genius. For 33% of the clientele return business is clenched (assuming they want more kids). 67% of your clientele is your best advertisement. These people are the same people who believe they bought the winning lottery ticket (until the numbers are drawn). These people tell everyone their birth horror stories and praise the obstetricians for their wonderful work. “My baby would have died if it wasn’t for Dr. Smith” Actually, statistically speaking, it probably wouldn’t have died. It probably would have been just fine.
I do think obstetricians can do some pretty amazing things and I will give them credit where it’s due but they are just not very efficient at their jobs.
It is this inefficiency that makes me leery and I do not suffer from iatrophobia.
Homebirth advocates love to focus on process and ignore dead babies. I don’t know about you, but I prefer doctors who worry about saving my life and the lives of loved ones as opposed to efficiency. But there are lots of people who share your philosophy; they call themselves insurance executives. Perhaps you should join them.
Yes, and obstetricians like to perpetuate the idea that if hospital births are 99% effective then they must be correct 99% of the time. How many of your patients did you honestly tell, “If you end up having medical intervention it is MORE likely that is wasn’t necessary.”?
Do you oppose unnecessary mammograms, cholesterol testing and prostate exams, too?
I don’t consider cesareans an early detection procedure. I believe that’s been my point all along; obstetricians are terrible at detecting problems that actually need intervention.
Do I oppose the early detection procedures you’ve noted? No, not really. I do, however, prefer actual preventative measures over early detection.
Want to prevent breast cancer? Refuse any and all hormonal birth control, eat healthy, exercise, choose cannabis over alcohol.
Want to prevent high cholesterol? Stop eating meat and dairy for every meal and incorporate some veggies, fruit, nuts and seeds into your diet. (hemp seed has the optimal ratio of omegas), exercise, choose cannabis over alcohol
Want to prevent colin/prostate cancer? Stop eating meat and dairy for every meal, exercise, choose cannabis over alcohol
Want to prevent unnecessary medical intervention during childbirth? Have a home-birth, choose cannabis over pharmaceuticals/over the counter drugs.
We aren’t talking about early detection procedures. We’re talking about efficiency. Now we have established that your claim that you oppose modern obstetrical practice on the basis of inefficiency isn’t true since you support other equally inefficient medical practices.
never said I support them. Only said I don’t really oppose them. They are not for me or my family. Like I said, I prefer preventative measures.
Is there anything cannabis can’t fix?
Brain fog and binge eating disorder?
Ha!
Oh and low sperm count!
Spreading misconceptions about cannabis is the epitome of ignorance. Especially when you’re doing so on a site related to the medical field.
not much. if it’s too good to be true it’s probably cannabis. you should look into it for yourself.
I don’t ignore dead babies and I surely would never exploit them for personal prestige.
You don’t ignore dead babies? Really? What have you done to prevent those deaths or alert others to their existence? Nothing, right? So you do ignore them and therefore, are hardly in a position to act morally superior to me as I do everything possible to prevent them.
I ignore dead babies and you ignore women whos subsequent pregnancies are compromised because of unnecessary medical intervention.
Where’s your evidence for that claim?
My only evidence is your unwillingness to answer the question I previously asked: How many of your patients did you honestly tell, “If you end up having medical intervention it is MORE likely that is wasn’t necessary.”? This was not a rhetorical question. Although, I believe I know the answer.
Don’t you find it hypocritical that you degrade midwives for withholding (or being ignorant about) infant mortality rates but you withhold (or ignore) the inefficiencies of a hospital birth. Hospitals do tell patients about the risks associated with c-sections: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/c-section/MY00214/DSECTION=risks (they have to to avoid future litigation) but why is efficiency never discussed?
Wouldn;t it be fair for a pregnant, liberated woman to get all the facts? No withheld infant mortality rates and no dancing around (or outright ignoring) inefficiency by boasting effectiveness. Especially when that inefficiency is very relevant because it may influence the health of the woman and/or her baby. (unlike the other unnecessary medical procedures you tried to make a comparison to) It’s just too bad that the losers of this battle are the pregnant woman with no place to turn for non-biased information. They certainly won’t find it here.
it is MORE likely that is wasn’t necessary.”?
So you seriously believe that interventions are done for the fun of it, or because no-one (but you) has noticed that it is inefficient?
You seem to imply – though it is by no means easy to be sure – that your main target is the CS rate. Why or how are you so absolutely convinced that most of these are inefficient and/or unnecessary?
Given human fallibility, I am not sure that 100% unbiased information is likely to be available anywhere. Any problem with women reading the FACTUAL information given here, looking up the sources given, reading what I consider to be the extremely fanciful information given elsewhere, and figuring out for themselves what makes sense to them?
And how would we ever know if it was necessary or not? The only way I can see, to determine the “natural” rate of Csection would be to never do any (or any other intervention) and count the dead and disabled. Certainly many home birth activists seem to feel that is the best way to go about it.
Childbirth has become safer in the Western world because of modern medicine. We can look to the 3rd world to get an idea of what % of mothers and/or babies would have benefited from XYZ intervention.
I realize not everyone thinks like me, but I would much rather have an “unnecessary” intervention than take the chance that I (or my child) might not need it.
How, exactly, do you determine whether a specific intervention was unnecessary?
So would you be willing to sacrifice one of your babies on the alter of efficiency? Also if you are talking healthy full term babies it is more like 1 out of 100,000 babies.
Dude, the fact that you’re ok with two extra babies dying per hundred (not the real stats, but whatever) if it prevents cesareans says it all.
Lee, yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. She would have been 9 years old, but she died 4 days after she was born because I did not have a c-section in time and the cord was around her neck
That was in a hospital that was working to lower its c-section rate.
By the time it was clear I needed one, the OR was full. It was an unusual day, but…a little bit more conservative management and I would have been having a party for her yesterday. (Her story’s on this site, look for Emily Hope.)
How many “unnecessary” interventions do you think are worth my daughter’s life? Because when people are less cautious, that is what happens. You make the wrong call at the wrong time and someone dies. It was my daughter.
I have but one comment:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=614246088590355&set=a.479154405432858.123620.479146505433648&type=1&theater
Help is available for those who suffer from this debilitating condition. 😀
Sadly there’s not a jail cell for those who encourage it.
“Golly, this sounds great and all Missus Frawde, but where’s the feature that lets you block meenies like Dr. Amy from using my publicly accessible story and linking to it on her blog in order to highlight the willful ignorance tied to homebirth philosophy and the appalling incompetence of my unqualified birth attendant?”
— If you upgrade to the Premium version of the app (just 5 more easy installments of $95), you will unlock access to an MP3 of all the greatest homebirth hits that will help massage that wounded ego and boost your confidence so you can troll like the pros. Hits like “You’re not a real doctor!” and “babies die in the hospital, too!”
LOL
I just visited the App and found this fantastic ready made birth story just for me
Summary for
HBAC
60 hour labour
Details
Tell story of how the labour began, exactly what you were doing the more inane the detail the better.
Insert pic of you with concerned looking naked toddler in the background
Give some more details including how far dilated you were, how your cervix felt , how disappointed you were that the labour was progressing so slowly . Then say how your midwife responded eg Midwife comes and decides to leave to go Christmas (insert option Easter, Birthday, Grocery) shopping
Insert pic of you waving a fond farewell to the midwife
tell the story of how you took _______(insert name of herbal remedy that your midwife recommended. ) Talk about your contractions and how they made you feel. Now is a good time in the story to say how you didn’t allow negative thoughts into your mind and how you banned anyone in the house from having negative thoughts and how you banned one friend from the house because she started to say “I’m concerned this is taken too long”
insert pic of you hanging from the door during contractions wearing a rebozo
Talk about how your midwife told you were nearly fully dilated and you could start pushing when you wanted. (You realise now that she was probably lying to you but dont say this in your story)
insert pic of you climbing up and down your stairs
Talk about what happened when your waters broke, be careful not to say the baby’s waters because of course they belong to you not the baby. Talk about how you had a cervical lip and how your wonderful midwife pushed it back over the baby’s head for at least 3 or 4 hours before the baby was born (dont mention that she did this via a continuous vaginal exam as you dont want to make it sound like a birth rape story that all your interested readers would hear about in hospital)
now give graphic detail of how you pushed, when you pushed, what happened when you pushed, don’t forgt to add detail of when you pooped , peed and when you vomited
Tell the story of the moment of birth, dont forget to say “I did it ” at least 10 times and say I at least 30 more times in this one paragraph.
insert pic with you sitting in a bloody kiddy pool with ridiculous smile on your face with blue , floppy , lifeless baby in your arms here
Now talk about how your wonderful midwives said you only had a little tear and how they put a bit of seaweed mixed with superglue on it and that did the trick!
insert pic of cross eyed baby wearing “born at home t-shirt”General guidelines when filling in your story be sure to say “haha” at least 400 times. Remember to say how proud you are of yourself at least 100 times. Don’t mention your unborn baby once during the labour only say his or her name after you have told all of the details about the birth. Remember you are telling your birth story not the baby’s. BTW if you dont have any of the suggested pics then simply stage them , no-one will be able to tell the difference.
Totes uneek. You rock mama!
Perfect!
thanks Dr A I love your satire
Don’t leave out the part where the kid doesn’t meet his milestones months later, which the doctor thinks is HIE. He’s just spouting paternalistic nonsense, mamma knows those evil vaccines gave him autism!
Just look at these amazing testimonials!
This post leaves me a little cold. I get the point of this website and the message, but sometimes it just gets so mean here-like high-school mean. A dead baby, even a fictional one should never be a mockery. I prefer the more factual info myself.
I really see where you’re coming from, and I would have said the same thing three weeks ago, before I had changed my mind about homebirth.
You’ve probably been with this website longer than I have and maybe have more room to speak, perhaps with more weight, about the appropriateness of how things are presented…but, oh man, after yesterday’s two fly-bys (homebirther and BS), there had previously been so much great satire done by the regulars that I didn’t even think that these two posters were serious!
And then comes this post, and it just had me rolling. Read any HB story, and it rings eerily true.
Someone mentioned the sacrificial symbolism of HB and redemption (a smart observation!)…well, this is how cults are born. –no pun intended!
I understand the point of view here as well, but the humor here for me comes
from the way Dr. Amy’s piece was written and how she characterizes
homebirth culture. However, being satire, the overall criticism here is
still rather stark– that these birth stories have become awfully
predictable, and that is something I don’t think is very funny at all.
Let’s assume that a fetus is so wise that it knows how to be born, and exhibits decision-making behavior by controlling its own navigation of twisting and turning its body through the sub-optimally evolved birth canal. If a human fetus is such a great team player, why did I crap & piss myself for 24 months straight after I was born?
Aaaahahahahahaha- LOVE the part about the water in the birth pool having a higher hematocrit than the mom!!!!!!!!!!!
Bwahahahaha. Thanks!
“When it was over the birth pool had a higher hematocrit than I did.”
I think a peed myself a little when I read that.
Hee hee! As for me, it was, “(get it? Labor over?)”.
“When it was over the birth pool had a higher hematocrit than I did.”
This is the point when I give up reading and take a little break until I again come to myself. This is beyond endurance, really 🙂
Hemocrit (which my iPad hilariously tried to autocorrect as hemp fit) is way too complicated a word for those people.
Hematocrit. Apparently it is too complicated for me as well.
lol
OMG I laughed my ass off at this. Dr Amy you are bloody hysterical.
Here I am, sitting in my apartment, thinking “Gosh I’m a failure, I should give up on my quest to become an OB/GYN. Wait! I know! I’ll head on over to Dr. Amy’s blog!” And here I am. Thank you, Dr. Amy, for reminding me I CAN’T give up on this quest. Too much is at stake!
Are you in med school yet? Keep coming back, lots of experience shared here. (though not from me, I’m a chemist.)
Nah, I’m still pre-med, but my uncle was an OB/GYN, and my great-grandfather helped start modern obstetrics and gynecology when he practiced and when he served as a professor at McGill. Dr. Amy is ah… well let’s just say she’s VERY inspiring. She’s my example to people when I explain my urgency to get an MD and practice obstetrics and gynecology.
Hey! A fellow student! I am in medical school. Yeah I keep going from I am so excited to finally see practice to, and people will hate me for my work.
Wishful, and Meredith – the majority of people will appreciate you for your work. And many of those who disagree will respect you for treating them with compassion and providing them with choices and information. You will learn new ways of thinking about providing health care that diverge greatly from the paternalistic/autocratic model of yesteryear, which will be sometimes frustrating but also interesting and rewarding. The patients you least expect will say thank you sometimes. And sometimes they won’t, and you’ll feel the urge to poke your eye out with a fork, so you’ll come here.
I’ll argue that we’re going to be stuck in this paternalistic model for a while. Too much money is being made and not enough docs are willing to give that up. Why practice good medicine and take care of people when you can practice bad medicine and make more money?
Sorry, it’s been a cynical kind of day.
That is pretty cynical. 99%+ of the docs I know and work with practice good medicine and take care of people and do a ton of unpaid work to do so.
Well, growing up around doctors the way I did, I saw the ugliest side of medicine. And never, in my life, have I met a doctor who did unpaid work. I know they exist! I just never knew anyone willing to give up something out of their paycheck just to help someone.
That’s sad Meredith. I work with lots of doctors and they all see some patients for free. I am thinking my daughter might think that all the doctors she knows have never brought up the issue that they do that; so just because they aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean they haven’t been doing it.
I live with universal health care that works in conjunction with a private system. I started seeing my specialist that a friend suggested via the private system where I pay an additional ‘gap’ fee for care that is above the government fee (I wanted to get in quickly, although I now suspect I’d have gotten in very quickly via the public system given the nature of the problem).
After 2 sessions he suggested moving to his public clinic to get access to more drugs and testing because “it’s going to get very expensive for you in the private system”.
He even saw me once completely for free (I used to pop in to see a friend who worked on the same day he did his private clinic – he called me in to discuss some results but he wouldn’t have been able to bill the government medicare for it as my referral was no longer current for his private clinic nor did he bill me for his time).
On top of that, several doctors have met myself and my daughter and given presentations and done surveys/papers that are all helping to raise awareness and try to prevent others going undiagnosed as long as my family did.
I have been given mobile numbers for some of these doctors to ring if I have any queries, which I did use a couple of times in the early days. Some of these doctors have also rang me in the evenings to give information or ask about things.
This is due to a very rare syndrome so most of the doctors had not come across it previously in practise and many seemed surprised as to how long we’d lived with it without getting diagnosed.
My previous opinion of doctors was pretty low. In fact I even told one doctor that I’d thought ENT specialists picked that speciality because it was the ‘easy option’ for them at uni (as far as I could see they did sod all – and am probably still a bit bitter there). I have to say though that seeing how they’ve helped my family over the past couple of years I’ve been amazed and incredibly grateful for the care I’ve received. Not just that but I really feel listened to and feel that they are trying to understand what’s going on, what went wrong in the past and really trying to help us. It’s been mind-blowing and life changing stuff actually.
I don’t know if many docs in the USA do like Mark Crislip, who explained in one of his podcasts some time ago that he doesn’t bill patients who have no insurance, because in the end it would cost him more:
http://www.pusware.com/gobbet/gop431.mp3 (audio link)
I think you grew up around the wrong doctors, which is too bad! It’s true that the current system in the U.S. has some glitches that can reward bad care. An example is that it is easier and quicker to prescribe an antibiotic than to explain to a patient why the antibiotic is not needed. You don’t get paid extra to take the extra time, and I have met a couple of docs who take the easy way out, probably unconsciously. But the overwhelming majority of doctors really care.
NCB types often accuse OBs of making their decisions due to laziness or being in a hurry. I don’t think they realize how much *easier* it is to do things the NCB way. One example is inductions. There is nothing easier than a hands-off posts-dates policy: don’t scan, don’t monitor, don’t worry, just let the woman show up in L&D in active labor. It is way way way more of a pain in the butt to do all the work that is involved in doing it the non-NCB way: first you have to nail down the due date with a first tri U/S, then monitor the term pregnancy with scans and tests, then schedule the induction, then do the induction, then do the delivery. What a lot of annoying work! And it doesn’t pay you any better than it would to be lazy about it and let the pregnancy go and just say “Oh so sorry your baby died in utero, what a fluke, must not have been meant to be” the way CPMs do.
Meredith, you mentioned McGill — you’re in Canada, perhaps? So am I.
I’ll preface this by saying — it’s totally okay to have a crappy day (I had one as well). But…there are good doctors out there, who do lots of things outside of the scope of their practice that don’t add anything to their bottom line.
My daughter is here as a result of three rounds of IVF, three miscarriages, and a river of tears along the way. I had a wonderful RE with a terrible bedside manner. She was brusque, abrupt, prone to looking out the window as I spoke…yet the day I had my first ultrasound during my daughter’s pregnancy, at 7 weeks gestation, she showed me who she really was.
Three previous times I’d been in that room, at 7 weeks, to see a little sea horse with a struggling heart beat, or two little empty sacs, or a gestational sac far too large to indicate a healthy pregnnancy. Three times in that dark room, on that uncomfortable bed, as the DildoCam (tm Guestll) took pictures.
So you might imagine that I was more than a little apprehensive (understatement of the century) at that first 7 week ultrasound during my daughter’s pregnancy. As it turned out, my husband was called into work for an emergency, and since we’d told no one else, I went alone.
But I wasn’t alone, because guess who showed up, on her day off, and walked quietly into the room, and wordlessly took my hand as I lay there on that bed, waiting, waiting, waiting, trying so hard not to cry? In that moment, she was no longer just my doctor, but my friend, and when the tech said, “134 beats per minute, everything looks perfect!” this brusque, abrupt, eye-rolling doctor actually CHEERED.
She took an hour out of her day to deal with a potentially unpleasant situation — to be a friend — unpaid. And that hour meant more to me than I could ever say.
There are great doctors out there. You will be one, if it’s what you want for yourself. Good luck! 🙂
Keep on it! My daughter is working on pre-med herself and I am inordinately proud of her. She may be more inclined to the research side of things though, and we always need new determined people in the OB/ GYN field.
I get paid the same whatever I do (GP in the NHS).
Personally, I’m not in this for the money and my motivations for doing my best for my patients are professional pride and empathy.
If I’d wanted to make big bucks I’d have been a dentist.
We need more sensible people like you in obstetrics! I have witnessed way too many of my friends fall for woo and put their babies at risk by going post dates, refusing to treat GD, refusing a c-section for a failed NST, and other crap just because the Internet told them everything would be fine and their OBs were too afraid of them lashing out to tell them the truth about the dangers.
What I HATE HATE HATE
is that this:
“Areola gave me the ultimate gift. Her birth taught me that my body is
not broken and that trusting birth is all it takes to attain the highest
human achievement of all, a baby passing through your vagina”
is nearly verbatim to some awful birth stories I’ve read, about how the baby died but it was still awesome because the baby gave the “gift” of an unmedicated birth at home. Yeah, pretty sure if it were up to baby you’d be recovering from a caesarean in the hospital and they’d be alive and healthy.
I see that all the time too. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say it’s just how she’s processing the grief and trying to find meaning in it, but I know too many NCB moms who really think that way. The process is more important to them than a living baby.
And never take away a parasite from a baby, because that will destroy the baby’s feelings.
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2003/Russian-Parasite-Nikita1sep03.jpg
Teratoma?
Parasitic twin. When twinning goes wrong it is one of the possibilities- think of it as a spectrum baby-parasitic twin-conjoined twins-identical twins. The two steps in the middle are rare and unfortunate anomalies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_twin
That has to be so upsetting for the parents. You have to remove the parasitic twin, but that twin baby has perfect feet! Hard not to think, however irrationally, that you are killing your living child.
Poor baby. Is it treatable?
Yes, surgery is done to remove as much of the tissue as possible without harming the baby.
Does anyone else see the parallel between homebirthers’ dead babies giving the “gift” of a natural birth and Jesus’ death giving the “gift” of redemption? Like the dead child is the scapegoat for the shortcomings of the first child. A little creepy.
…i wanted a safe place to labor my baby. i did not want or need strangers working for a pharmacy supported hospital anywhere near me. i wanted to be with in arms reach of my three other children. i needed them to witness the beautiful transition from being one inside of me to being a completely independent being. My dh wanted to relax and smoke pot while I labored.
my birth space was the living room with a water filled inflated pool.Our rescue dogs which we took into our home just the day before, instinctively became my midwives, ready to lick clean any spilled body fluids.
Now please tell us about the part where your stoned hubby and three children joined you in the pool so they could all be part of the motherbabyplacenta experience that would bring your angel earthside
Good thing nothing went wrong because I’m not sure how much help a stoned partner, three children and some dogs would be. The dogs could help clean up after a PPH….?
TBH, my favorite breeds are livestock guardian dogs who have been know to clean newborn lambs and kids, and to guard and shelter them when the mother isn’t able to. I’d trust them with that much, but their midwifery skills don’t include dialing 911 or neonatal resus.
(I have an adorable image one LGD owner uploaded of a dwarf goat kid suckling on his Komondor bitch.)
I am with you there, my Samoyed and Cattle Dog/Lab mix know when something is wrong and can be trusted to try and get help.
Some midwives? They hide people’s cell phones and block cars in.
We had a Pyrenean when I was growing up. My mother used to park my sister’s pram outside shops (back in the days when orams were roughly the size of a small family car and you couldn’t fit them into an average high street shop) with the dog tied to the handle. Nothing like a giant guard dog to protect a sleeping infant. That dog was not smart, but boy was she good at guarding children!
Stoned hubby and three children bring to mind that one hippie lady having a UC on her dirty looking bed with intermittent shots of her naked children wandering around looking helpless.
Oh yes, and that video was supposed to be an endorsement for having a UC. I think the part where her husband was holding the bedpan so she could have BM on camera was too much for me
It was WHAT? Ugh.
Yes, they wanted to share the beauty of their child’s unmedicated, UC with the world. Why else put it on Youtube? There were some words to that affect on the video.
That and doing an awful job of cleaning it up.
I feel the bile rising so I won’t think on it any longer. Loved the clean hospital birth without excrement covered toilet paper around.
There is something to be said for laboring in place with unlimited chux pads. Even if you buy a birth kit, they only have one in there.
What video are we talking about?
http://youtu.be/Dnv6WhJkGZI Please be warned, everyone is naked in this video and nothing is blurred out
Good grief, you had to ask tND…
I’m sorry! I don’t know why, but I was expecting a short explanation… Not a link to the bad part of Youtube. (Links in the sidebar to this video included “10 Botflies Removed From Dog’s Snout”. (Yes I clicked that link too.))
wow. I can never unsee that.
I knew the NBC crowd was against obstetrical intervention. Apparently they have broadened their scope and are now against hygiene too. Those naked kids climbing up and down the bed eating drippy fruit, those soiled sheets, the bedpan with the feces,….
This is what it must be like to give birth in the third world. Only she chose it voluntarily. People are strange creatures…
The feast of melon, I forgot about the fruit.
I have no idea why I watched that. Well, I do – trainwrecky reasons. Ughhh why. For some reason the absurdity of the “melon feast!” cracked me up. Really? Half of a honeydew plopped on an old towel on the bed where your mother is laboring? Yum! (Also “Poo! There’s poo! Get the poo!” over and over and over….)
Am I the only one who was sad at the end, even though poor little Areola isn’t a real baby?
Definitely not the only one. It changed from hilarious to awful.
No. I was sad too, because this satire is based on a whole lotta reality.
The sample story doesn’t contain enough paragraphs about the evils of hats.
I think my hospital was in cahoots with the anti-hat groups. Their hats were crappy and refused to stay on my baby!
It’s because your baby had an odd-shaped head.
The first time I saw the post about hats on this blog, I tought it was a parody by Dr Amy and that it was a bit over the top. Then I found this:
http://birthanarchy.com/hat-hat-strange-conundrum
There really is no need to make fools of these people when they do such an excellent job themselves!
Of course, most NCBers will disavow it, but to them, the question is, yeah, you disavow THIS, but what do you do about it? Do you call out those who promote it? Or do you sit back quietly and let them spout on, providing tacit approval?
This does not even touch on the freezer full of milk she pumped for Areola that will now be donated to other mothers through an underground milk bank. I’m glad it mentions how stupid and unloveable her c section baby is though. What a dumb child.
Yeah, he was probably formula fed too, since he was ruined at birth (extraction?) by the Csection, no need to squander precious liquid gold for that human waste of space.
You mean “baby”.
OT: http://www.aims.org.uk/effectDrugsOnBabies.htm
I don’t get it. Do drugs during labor cause autism or not?
No, toilet seats. Do try to keep up.
NO it was the decline of big vinyl record collections at home!!! People!
I thought prevented HIV?
Yes. Because in 1953, Virginia Apgar would never have seen a child born to an unmedicated mother.
this actually reminds me of a few homebirths i have read about 🙁
Ima Frawde CPM, meet your friends http://www.improvingbirth.org/
They’re still using that old “15% c-section rate” that someone at the WHO pulled out of someplace dark and smelly.
I see that ALL. THE. TIME. on natural birth message boards.
What is sad is that if they don’t care if their babies live or die, then they certainly don’t care if anyone else’s do, so enforcing a no greater than15% Csection rate would make them happy, despite the inevitable rise in morbidity and mortality. Can you imagine? “Well, Mrs Frawde, this hospital has already reached its 15% quota for the month…we can send you to hospital out in the boonies that has a lower rate (due to lack of 24hr anesthesia), or you can just stay here and give birth like a real woman.” “What’s that? Yes, we know the baby is transverse…stupid baby doesn’t know how to be born, then it doesn’t deserve to live. At least it will die on the altar of affirming your womanhood.”
A transverse lie is death for both mother and baby if something isn’t done. The only option for both surviving is a c-section, but if the quota’s already met, maybe they can saw the fetus up and take it out bit by bit to save the mother (yep, this is a real technique in places where c-section isn’t available. Sorry.)
I read something about this, only it was for a footling breech. It was also in a novel, but the technique is about the same.
Jeevan has to remove dead babies vaginally that way sometimes. Very sad. You can tell he hates to have to do it.
Good point! But…it would still be passing the baby through her vagina and that’s what counts. Not counting how many pieces baby has been reduced to, since it all adds up to only one baby.
That is horrifying. Thank God for C-sections and hospitals to have them in!
My baby didn’t die that way because of a c-section. And I didn’t die of the post-partum infection that I didn’t get but would have gotten because they would have waited at least another 24 hours before getting desperate enough to actually do the procedure. (With a c-section, I only had a mild chorio that cleared after delivery.) So, not so into baby must pass through vagina.
Veterinarians occasionally have to do this when calves or foals are too big to be born (cows and mares DO make babies too big for their bodies!). There’s a special instrument for this, calles a fetotome (google it!).
Perhaps we should introduce it to human medicine and use it to attain this WHO norm?
Notice how their idea of “improving birth” is to make sure that women are scared into giving birth as THEY think it should be. My idea of improving birth would be getting an epidural and sleeping through the labor part and then having the baby beamed out all clean and dressed in something really cute.
Why go through labor at all, really? Just beam the baby out from the get-go.
But don’t you know that the labor is necessary because it helps the body produce the “love hormone”? I wouldn’t want to risk those crucial three seconds I have to form the cement like bond I need so she will always be attached to me.
She WILL always be attached to you if you leave her cord intact and retain her placenta permanently like a good mama..
Good point, Bombshellrisa. That’s why today’s anesthesiologists are always equipped with muzzles (adequatemother can confirm); it prevents the anesthetized woman from accidentally eating her young before she leaves the hospital.
It’s true! I was supposed to have a second sister, but NOoooo, my mom ate her.
Avoid inductions, so more babies will be stillborn.
Now *this* is genius.
🙁
Nothing about how precious Areola would have survived had the interventionist EMTs not insisted on ripping her from her mama’s arms to put her in the unnatural medical monstrosity that is NICU? Tsch. I demand my money back.
Oh dear.
You forgot the satire warning.
It’s sad because it’s true.
Including the names…they really come up with some winners.