The hardest thing about a post like this is limiting the number of ignorant, inane, narcissistic examples. There are simply so many to choose from.
1. She almost managed to kill her 3rd child attempting an HBAC, so the obvious thing to do was to try for another HBAC with her 4th child. Because really, what’s more important: whether her baby lives or dies or whether she can brag about “her” homebirth?
From My Journey to Home Birth after 3 C-sections – Part 1. At her attempted HBA2C, she pushed for 6 HOURS with an anterior cervical lip and then transferred to the hospital:
… I had to just take the OB on call. I didn’t care. I needed it to end. In the hospital they treated me like a leper. When I was getting the spinal I tried to lean on the OR nurse for support. She pushed me and said “don’t touch me!” Upon entry into my abdominal cavity they discovered a 10 cm by 8 cm uterine dehiscence. The only thing keeping my baby in my uterus was peritoneum…
2. The hospital had a negative view of homebirths? Maybe it’s because babies DIE at homebirth, just like hers did:
Thomas Freemantle had no heartbeat and was not breathing when he was delivered near Bendigo in October 2010…
The boy’s mother, Katrina Freemantle, gave evidence about why she decided to have a homebirth, despite complications with a previous child.
She told the inquest, Bendigo Health had been unable to assure her that she could have a natural birth in hospital with minimal intervention.
She also criticised hospital staff for having a negative view of homebirths.
3. Homebirth advocates are always whining that no one takes them seriously. Perhaps it is because of stuff this this:
The dictator/oppressor is the “Medical/Obstetrical Industrial Complex” and the oppression is massive human rights violations and the systematic destruction of choice for childbearing women in the world. We are hopeful that this will give us a focus and a way to rally together for real change for birth on our earth!
Sometime over the week I spent at the Midwifery Today Conference I started to ask myself WHY. Why are so many midwives being arrested at this time? Why are states midwifery laws being challenged? Frankly, the political activist in me started to smell a plot! …
4. The Narcissist Breeder is at it again, inflating her credentials:
As a maternal child health scholar, Certified Childbirth Educator, and Certified Doula, I now teach and guide women on their birth journeys and specialize in helping women working toward a VBAC. I also train doulas and other birth workers on how to help VBAC mothers.
Earth to Gina:
You are not a scholar of anything. You are a student, one who is nowhere near graduating. No doubt your professors and classmates will have a good laugh at your expense if they ever read that.
Most M.D.’s just want to suck money out of people.
You mean homebirth midwives work for free?
Why would you need to ‘work’ toward a VBAC if its what your body is ‘designed’ to do?!
Interesting that Claire Hall (the “midwife” in the Bendigo inquest) could travel from Queensland for the birth and can travel to Sydney to speak at the Trust Birth conference in September but can’t front up at the coronial inquest into the death of a baby in her care. http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/1660609/bendigo-health-staff-cross-examined-in-inquest/?cs=80
Wonder what excuse she gave so that she could give evidence by videolink. I’m sure she claimed to be destitute. Much easier to give self-serving evidence without having to face the family while doing so. Will she be speaking at Trust Birth by videolink I wonder?
I read the first story yesterday and kept thinking about it. Unlike many of these stories (but like many others), the woman came across to me as someone who had some very unfortunate experiences that would have made it tough for me as well to submit to further care. Would I have done it? Absolutely. I understand that my baby’s life is what’s at stake. But really, telling you that your husband needs to get you a new cervix that works – that’s unprofessional, I don’t care how riled you are. And not something likely to get the best results, as evidenced here.
I am not making excuses for the woman. But I did begin thinking about another means of combating homebirth, by the people who have the time on their hands. What about a support group – an internet support group, to have farther reach – for these women, in an attempt to prevent homebirth being the response to a negative first or second experience?
I thought of a few areas it might address – First off, just having people there who can offer logical explanations for the stuff that hit you so wrong. People who can share their own experiences (“Yeah, I didn’t want a hep lock either, but when things went south…”[not my own experience, just theoretical]). Admittedly a lot of these people aren’t interested in explanations, but I think many of them must go through a point where they are swayed one direction or another. I can’t imagine that this woman, as an RN, went into the hospital with a huge prejudice against hospital staff?
Secondly, and this would be more difficult, I wish women had a system of finding different HCP when their current ones are lacking in respect or have truly unreasonable policies. If this became a more national network, you could have some regional directories where moderators could screen reviews of doctors (and doctors could even be invited to respond). It looks to me like you need a concentration of these in the states where homebirth tragedies are most rampant (like OR).
A lot of its success would depend on careful marketing. If you could get ads displayed someway through Google on MDC or other such places that would be fantastic but maybe unrealistic. They’d probably be banned soon anyway. Overt official association with sites like this one would probably not work. It would need to be marketed as a support group for mothers who had negative hospital experiences or were afraid of hospitals going into their first birth. As much of it as possible could be private (memebers-only).
” I can’t imagine that this woman, as an RN, went into the hospital with a huge prejudice against hospital staff?” I can. Nurses are often the most difficult patients.
Your ideas have merit, but I’m reminded of a short lived site called “Hurt by Hospital Birth”. Most of the stories reported there seemed quite trivial when compared to the site they wanted to combat (Hurt by Homebirth). Hence the short life…
Perhaps a different path would be to lobby insurers to institute a code for “birth debriefing” so all new mom would have a discussion with their OB. I was happy with my births so at the six week appointment my main question was “can I have sex now? not “why did I get a shot of pitocin in the third stage?”
Ideally, hospitals would give every mother a copy of records upon discharge, but they probably wouldn’t want to do that. I wish I had my records, I’m curious now that I’ve become a Dr. Amy fan.
I asked for a copy of my records after I had both of my kids, just because I was curious. I was surprised to find that I remembered things pretty accurately (despite being in a haze of pain!) and that everything I saw in those records (procedures, medications) had been adequately explained to me at the time. The only thing that surprised me was that my son had a nuchal cord (apparently so commonplace that it’s often not mentioned). It was interesting to read about my case from “the other side.”
I don’t generally make a habit of visiting pro-natural birth websites…however, a friend directed me to a Vancouver based doula’s blog (http://www.naturalcreation.ca/2013/07/late-pregnancy-ultrasounds/). I had to scrape my jaw off the floor reading what she had to say regarding third trimester ultrasounds….she’s a DOULA who is doling out medical advice (and dangerous medical advice at that!). It makes me think that doula’s need to be regulated. Or maybe somebody ought to actually enforce the laws around practicing medicine without a license. I commented as much and true to NCB form – the comment was deleted…(funny given the number of off-topic spam comments on that blog that are ignored – comment about Chinese wedding dresses is kosher, but heaven forbid something critical and on-topic gets posted.
I’m happy my OB will be doing a 3rd trimester ultrasound. The office has a nice 3D machine. I admit that’s the main reason I want it, ha.
Noooo – I wish I hadn’;t gone there. Here is an example of her expert opinion:
”Amniotic fluid too low? This is something that can often be observed when a care provider is feeling your belly….if amniotic fluid is very low, babies limbs feel a little too poky and…exposed. ”
By the time abdominal palpation [including estimating gestational age by abdominal size] gives an indication of oligohydramnios, it is already very severe. Perhaps she was confusing oligo- with polyhydramnios, where you often can’t palpate limbs at all, and can feel the “thrill” or wave of the amniotic fluid on the opposite side of the abdomen when you flick your fingers against one side. Or perhaps she just doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
But…and it is a considerable “but”, in my experience too many U/Ss come back with “relative oligohydramnios” noted, which is usually harmless but scares mothers.
I followed your link, and, with this one, my jaw did not hit the floor. I don’t exactly make a habit of reading these ghastly, repetitive, brainwashing sites, and when I do. incredulity and rage are my usual responses – more or less along the lines of “Do people actually believe this crap? How can they?” ; followed by rage that such dangerous “advice” can be freely peddled in that way. However, the tone of this one provoked a different reaction. Its general thesis – that complications in birth are self-inflicted, and simply don’t happen if you “trust birth” came across as very, very plausible and reasonable. A woman like this at your side, and it is a very comforting and “empowering” message. And of course, for many women heeding this nonsense will work for them. Erase from memory the idea that birth is NOT to be trusted, that the consequences of thinking it can could bring consequences beyond your worst imagining and that no amount of “research” can make you impervious to Nature’s unkinder manifestations and the very reasonableness of her tone and misinformation becomes quite terrifying.
she’s pretty ignorant.
#1 – Well, didn’t you know, she needed that hbac to “heal” her. Not from almost killing the prior baby, but from having a cesarean. That’s all that matters is her “healing”. Whether or not that baby lived is sidebar.
I think there must be something wrong with me. I have no bad feelings about having had a C section at all. It was the safest way to deliver and my vagina didn’t get remodeled. It was so uneventful that I really am considering RCS at 39 weeks if I haven’t gone into labor yet.
Well that is your problem, you are focusing on the the baby, not having the “birth of your dreams” with music, candles and antique curtains at Puget Sound Birth Center. And don’t you know, the crunchies get absolutely irate when a birth is described as “uneventful”. If the only thing you get is your baby out of your uterus and into your arms and no unicorns show up, they are sure you are broken
Yup they sure do lol. The more reasonable NCB types are happy that I am happy with how things went. The crunchy types tell me all about their “fabulous” midwife that will deliver my VBAC at home. They really don’t get it when I tell them that my daughter’s birth was in a room full of my friends and I have nothing but pleasant memories of the operation itself. I guess there is an advantage to an OR crew I’ve worked with a thousand times before!
I’m still close to two of the nurses who were there for my son’s csection! One of them baby sits for me occasionally! She actually came in on her day off just to handle my care in the OR! I got very close to all the nurses and doctors during my time in the Perinatal Special Care Unit! I wasn’t always the easiest patient, but who is when they’re stuck in a hospital bed for months! They never held it against me!
I LOVE THIS STORY!!!
My mom told me about her C-section. Her doctor and his assistant were talking to my mom the whole time in Portuguese-updating her, telling her everything was ok. She said it was so calming and she felt that the whole team was amazing, especially since it was 2:30am. She had not enjoyed pushing out her babies (her body didn’t know it was meant to be pregnant or give birth) but she enjoyed her C-section.
Same thing that’s wrong with me, I guess. I just can’t understand how or why it should’ve mattered.
My csection was wonderful! I got skin-to-skin in the OR and my baby nursed right away! It was the pain afterwards I had such a nightmare time with. I would want to have a VBAC if I ever had a child again, to avoid the pain afterwards. I had no problem bonding with my baby though and really had an amazing experience! I had a csection birth plan and it was followed to a T, except the anesthesiologist wouldn’t let me watch them pull my son out, he was afraid I’d need the anti-anxiety & anti-naseua meds if he did I guess, lol! I had my hands free, no anti-anxiety meds, skin-to-skin and my husband & baby never left the OR without me. It was not what was routine at the hospital, but they were more than happy to accommodate me. Maybe because I had been living at the hospital for a couple of months and got so close to all the nurses and doctors!
Did you ever file a complaint and get resolution on your care in recovery? To think all of the c-section plan was followed and it all fell apart afterward…
Yes, absolutely! I filed a complaint and was contacted by the head of the hospital. She said there was a peer review done, but couldn’t tell me what happened. They can’t share the results of the peer review with the patient for some reason. She asked me several times what they could do to rebuild my trust in the hospital. I got the feeling she was perhaps offering a monetary solution. However, all I want is for it to never happen to me or anyone else again! She said she was confident my complaint and the ensueing investigation made a difference! My complaint was taken all the way to the hospital board and she claimed it was taken very seriously! I hope so!
Something is really wrong with me – all my negative birth related feelings are in relation to the nearly unmedicated and non-consensual VB I had – and nearly all of my positive birth related feelings are in relation to the AMAZING planned cesarean I had….
Sorry for griping about that again but can’t anything be done against the PLACID sufferer Identity Crisis Mama on MDC? She’s not only dumb and biased, she’s downright dangerous. Read the last page of this.
http://www.mothering.com/community/t/1384998/should-i-have-a-homebirth-help/40#post_17413266
I read the deleted post. The poster was just citing sources renouncing the claims of the sheeple, I mean Sheepdoc and claiming that elective C-section was, in fact, safer. Still, she got deleted and Sheepdoc is merely asked to provide sources and then it’ll be left at that – no further discussing.
Identity Crisis Mama is a criminal. She’s a babykiller in waiting. Sooner or later, a baby will pay with their life/health the fact that their mother was naive enough to believe ICM without questions.
No, scratch that. In fact, I think that any woman who reads the last page of this and decides to trust MDC on the matter is Darwinism in practice.
ICM doesn’t so much spout bad ideas herself, as moderate her section of the boards for maximum ideological orthodoxy at the expense of fact or thought. So Sheepdoc trundles in and says that c/s has 3x the mortality rate of vaginal birth, plus some idiocy about gut flora and how you can carry to 48 weeks, and then ICM deletes the posts that say that Sheepdoc is talking out (probably) her ass, and all that’s wrong. In the end, Sheepdoc looks like the voice of scientific rationality, because all the other posts with numbers or statistics were removed.
I can’t help you here, ICM booted me from a convo about homebirth because I failed to sufficiently state my not-a-homebirth mama status before pointing out that you cannot necessarily get an ambulance to your house fast enough to help with a problem like an apgar of 0 at five minutes. You have to have a homebirth under your belt to be able to say that. Merely having the experience of waiting for a damn ambulance yourself doesn’t entitle you to talk about it in the Homebirth forum.
I’m sure it’s probably BS and never happened, but I can’t imagine willingly being pregnant for 48 weeks. I’d want to kill myself probably…
48 weeks is 11 full months. At that point, I think a lot of care providers should be questioning (a) your dates, and (b) whether you’re really pregnant. That last one sounds callous, but every once in a while, particularly on UC and religious forums, a case of pseudocyesis will show up and run like that. And before you ask, yes, religious UC forums are the perfect storm for hysterical pregnancy. I saw one earlier this year where a woman (whose husband had a vasectomy) claimed that God told her that her pregnancy would be longer then usual, and this was a test of her faith. I can only imagine how painful the whole situation must have been for her and her family.
And you should intend to have another homebirth if you want to be entitled to speak. Merely having one scary experience isn’t enough.
Silly me, I forgot.
The Birth zone instructor she talks about (Liz) actually works at the Puegt Sound Birth Center while waiting for her children to grow up so she can become a CPM. She is British and insists that home birth is the norm in the UK because its midwifery led care. The midwife mentioned Roxanne Spring is a CNM, so I hope she isn’t assisting this woman having a VBAC
I know the Wendy she is talking about. Wendy used to lead the postpartum mood support group I attended. She’s gotten more into woo as time goes on but she does at least endorse real treatment for PPD and other postpartum mental issues. I don’t think I could handle one of her birth classes the woo would burn too much.
Plus you would be in a class with a bunch of women who are going to give birth at home or at PSBC and their topic of conversation is limited to which birthing room they think they are going to end up giving birth in. You would have hard time keeping your lip buttoned up about how many horror stories you know about certain midwives and their practices.
This part makes me very ragey “The dictator/oppressor is the “Medical/Obstetrical Industrial Complex” and the oppression is massive human rights violations”
do these twits understand what human rights violations are? I dare you to complain about being “forced” to labor on your back to the prepubescent girl who had her genitals mutilated. complain about it to the women mass raped as an act of war. Complain about it victims of human trafficking. Complain about it to children sold into sexual slavery.
GAH! these women are so freaking oblivious. They are angry about the medical care they received designed to keep them and their babies healthy when women around the world die in childbirth because they’re denied medical care by their husbands’ families.
Sorry, I know I sound somewhat douchy and self righteous, but I’ve traveled a lot and have seen real actual horrible human rights violations that still give me nightmares. And these women want to say that modern medical care is on par with other human rights violations. ugh.
You don’t sound douchy or self righteous-you just sound like someone who understands the definition of “human rights violations”.
Ask Nigerian mothers – in the country with the highest maternal death rate – about human rights…
Have you read the recent news? The bribery rate in Zimbabwe is so incredible there that in some hospitals they are charged 5 dollars for each scream in childbirth.
http://ww.africanoutlookonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6982:zimbabwean-hospital-charges-women-5-for-each-scream-during-childbirth&catid=99:outlookscroller
Dude, I watched the episode of Orange is the New Black where an inmate goes into labor last night, and I thought *that* was a human rights violation.
No, you’re right. I hate the term “birth rape.” You know what’s rape? Rape. Having an OB deliver your baby is not (although having IMG violate you, could most definitely be birth and rape…)
Ugh – that whole EarthBirth rant. I knew there was a reason I worship a God who is up in the sky…
You know, the God in the sky you speak of, assuming it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is also a God who is present in the Earth as well. “In the sky” is a description of a spiritual concept, not exclusively a literal reality.
I was really joking as ‘sky gods’ such as Uranus, Cronus and Zeus, etc, are male gods tend to be sky gods that ‘dominate’ the ‘female’ earth. Which just would piss off HB maniacs.
In fact, I’m a Christian who rejects ‘earth worship’.
Christians are not separate nor opposite of earth worship. Christ is in the world, nature, earth, etc.
I’m reminded of a story my step-mother, a former OB nurse, once told me…
She had a patient who was pregnant with twins and had had a prior classic c-section. Patient missed a couple of appointments and so she called her to find out what was up. What was up was that patient had decided to go for a home birth with an untrained doula.
Step-mother played dead baby card and asked, “Do you want a live baby or a dead one?” In so many words.
After who knows what deliberation, pt apparently decided to go with “live” and presented to the hospital. In labor. With signs of fetal distress. They did a stat c-section and it turned out that the labor had saved them the trouble of opening the uterine wall….it had ruptured and there the fist baby was, waving its hand through a still intact amniotic sac. Apparently, all got out alive, through sheer dumb luck.
What I found most annoying was the stupid comments below VB3C’s photos. “Crying for mom” Really? Perhaps the kid was finding breathing oxygen annoying. Or missed being able to float upside down in utero.
I found the complaint about baby being sent to NICU for labored breathing “despite Apgars of 8 and 9” pretty hard to take.
My DD’s Apgars were 9 and 9. She needed three doses of lung surfactant to get through her first 24 hours. Apgars! They’re not everything!
I am totally NOT woo, but really, I had NO IDEA that really good Apgars weren’t enough. I think I, too, would’ve been surprised with excellent Apgars and a trip to the NICU nonetheless. Would’ve consented, of course, but would’ve been surprised.
APGAR doesn’t rate work of breathing and usually we do have to have the MD sit down with the family for explanation.
Yeah, Apgar doesn’t look at heart or breathing rates, or difficulty of breathing. A pulse is a pulse for apgar, and breathing is breathing, and the kid gets all the points. A child with perfect apgars can still be in need of a lot of help.
No, pulse is one of the Apgar areas.
Yeah, the baby gets 1 point for having a pulse at all (which is what I meant by “a pulse is a pulse for Apgar”) and 2 points for over 100 bpm. Apgar records that, but doesn’t subtract for tachycardia, or a whooshing sound that indicates a heart murmur.
Wouldn’t a good majority of babies have a pretty good murmur going since the ductus arteriosis is in the process of closing (again, in normal cases) as soon as that first breath is taken?
So what is APGAR for then? I always thought it showed the baby’s condition at birth and consequently the level of care the baby needs. But obviously not.
It’s more of a “What does the baby need right now and in the immediate short term” test.
Atul Gawande wrote a really cool article touching on this called “The Score”. Historically, the apgar is a measure of whether and how emphatically the baby is alive. Because when doctors and nurses used their subjective judgment on that question, it was Virginia Apgar’s observation that the results were inconsistent, and that sometimes a baby in apparently worse condition would be worked on and saved while a baby in apparently better condition was considered irretrievable. The apgar is a means of encouraging at least five minutes of post-birth observation and care for every baby.
My daughter had across the board APGAR scores of 9s and she was in intensive care within 6 hours because she wasn’t breathing right. It happens and it scares the hell out of you when it does.
Same. As I understand it, APGAR is a measurement at a point in time. My baby took about a half hour to show signs of problems.
These people haven’t got the sense they were born with. They are so filled with the romanticism and absolute rightness of natural birth, that they honestly believe a baby of half an hour old doesn’t see his mother in the room, wants her to come back to look after him, and cries when she doesn’t come. They say sentences like “crying for mom” without any embarrassment because they just don’t realize that they have all but stopped thinking.
Leboyer’s basic claim to fame was that dipping the newborn immediately into a warm bath so it wouldn’t cry would make it a happier child, having avoided “birth trauma”. He was such a fraud, but very loved by his patients, who swore their children were more intelligent for being “gently born”. On one of his speaking tours [paid for by his publisher] he asserted that “his” children had higher IQs, and gave as scientific evidence: “I get letters from the mothers”. Such a fraud, but he was immensely popular until Adrienne Rich skewered him in an article in the NY Review of Books back in the 70s.
The hospital staff isn’t allowed to defend themselves and explain their side of the story. It’s easy to believe one or two people being rude but each hospital experience was full of staff that treated her awfully? I think she had a mindset that she was going to hate the hospital experience and she saw the staff actions through that filter. Of course the staff is going to hate HBAC, its dangerous and we often get sued even if we do manage to save the mother and the baby when a uterus ruptures at home.
Yeah, I’m sure when she got to the hospital, she was a kind and gentle princess, who didn’t treat the staff with contempt.
Well, sure. And the hospital staff has to take that – they take it a lot. People in pain are often not very nice. Professional standards require hospital staff to suck that up and act like grownups, and then not talk about it in public.
It may be that the people on duty had awful bedside manner, but it may also be that benign actions were misinterpreted.
A police officer friend of mine is required to wear a little camera device on his chest. They are trained to turn it on in any situation that contains or is likely to contain any conflict at all. I have occasionally wished I had one for clinic use…..
I often wished I had one to use with my husband… “Yes you did say that, see?” 🙂
I wonder if the specific directive “don’t touch me” had something to do with a sterile area that was about to be contaminated.
I wonder about that too. If I accidentally sound rude or curt during a procedure I usually issue a quick apology and explain why you have to wear gown, mask, and hat to be able to handle the baby during the sterile procedure.
More likely to have been in the storyteller’s imagination anyway.
I don’t know why the home birth crowd makes out hospital staff to be such monsters. I admit, sadly, that I bought into it. Then I transferred to the hospital and was treated not just with respect and professionalism, but kindness and warmth. And this was the kind of huge hospital the natural birthers like to criticize for being a cold, impersonal factory. When I was released, I left a note thanking all the nurses for such compassionate care.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I think there are certainly rude hospital staff and certainly hospital staff that can get snotty with a patient they think has willfully risked her life and the life of her baby by say, trying for a HBA3C. But the labor and delivery nurses I’ve known have been the kindest, most compassionate, most caring people I’ve met in the medical profession. Mine came and sat with me, talked me through a sudden onset of precipitous labor, and gave me a homemade hat for my child to wear.
Oh, right, Hats are evil. I forgot.
So #2 also had cryosurgery, presumably for a SIL … Isn’t that a contradiction for vbac anyway?
I had wondered the same thing. The author is also either disingenuous or very vapid if she didn’t realize that the CS is probably related to the scarring of her cervix not the hospital staff.
It is not a contraindication, but something that may influence dilation of the cervix which can be resolved if needed.
I would love to know which home birth midwife told her that an HBA2C was a bad idea and that she would be risking killing her baby. The midwife deserves some praise for not encouraging her.
Interestingly the lady in the first one does chastise the midwife/doula/lyman pretty badly at the end. I don’t get why she thinks that giving the baby caused thrush..wouldn’t you use that to treat it?
No, thrush is a yeast infection, you need antifungals to treat it. Sometimes abx can cause yeast infections.
You’re right. What was I thinking. For some reason I thought that thrush was bacterial and not fungal. Still, that seems like a very long time for an infant to have thrush.
My daughter and I had it for FOURTEEN(!!!) weeks. The most painful weeks of my life–way worse than my unmedicated labor. We were treated repeatedly with different medications, but unfortunately, thrush is becoming resistant to many treatments. Gentian violet finally kicked it for good, of all things.
I had a bad case of thrush while breastfeeding my first. It did not get properly treated for months. My daughter and I passed it back and forth. My nipples were cracked and bleeding so badly that breastfeeding was ore painful than my C-section recovery. I would sit in the rocking chair and weep while feeding my daughter. Nystatin did not work, and neither did any of the creams that I was prescribed. It finally took 2 two week rounds of diflucan to kill it. The lactation consultant I saw told me to put yogurt on my nipples and breastfeed more. Not so helpful.
Yes, oral thrush can be due to antibiotics, but is fairly common in babies anyway (without antibiotics) and easily treated.
it sounds like that woman got stuck with one of the “PowerBirthing” creeps – this isn’t the first time they’ve come up, and *every* darn story we seem to hear about them runs the same way. There’s “massaging the cervix”, there’s some poor woman with a midwife’s hand in her for hours on end, there’s pushing against a lip on the cervix, verbal abuse from the midwife, and a traumatized mom. I am sure this flavor of midwife delivers some babies successfully at home now and then and has some happy clients, but the UNhappy clients have such a uniform experience that they could almost be cut and pasting from each other.
I wish there was some better way for women to communicate with each other about these midwives, and put them out of business. NO ONE signs on for this. If any part of it happened to you in a hospital, you could have that care provider removed from your case, and replaced by someone who wasn’t a power-tripping crazy person. No one sane would ever invite someone into their home and give them money to arrange for this to happen, so it must be that the information isn’t getting around.
I got one of those PowerBirthing creeps (manual dilation, no progress, eventual transfer and cesarean for failure to progress/posterior/CPD). I read the story linked above and couldn’t figure out the midwife or even the area of the country. The “inventor” of PowerBirthing is Lydi Owen of Las Vegas, a long-time midwife who has trained many in the intermountain west. where PowerBirthing tends to be “popular.”
This is the first experience where I’ve heard that PowerBirth has been associated with a rupture (isn’t a dehiscence that large actually a rupture with blessedly non-catastrophic consequences?). But that doesn’t surprise me, since the PowerBirthing midwife I used (Elizabeth Camp Smith of St. George, Utah) was really dismissive of pain, and abnormal pain is a major symptom of rupture.
Sometime over the week I spent at the Midwifery Today Conference I started to ask myself WHY. Why are so many midwives being arrested at this time? Why are states midwifery laws being challenged?
Amazingly, it never occurs to her to wonder why so many midwives are having the bad outcomes that lead to arrests.
It has to be a conspiracy. It couldn’t possibly be growing antipathy for people who purport to provide health care while actually knitting quietly in corners.
I mean, I knit quietly in corners all the time, but I don’t pretend it’s a service worth paying for.
yeah, but do you sell the hats you knit? The evil. evil hats?
Just ignore the growing pile of dead babies. Nothing to see here.
*whistles and walks away*
I wonder how any other profession would treat someone that hadn’t completed their training yet practicing. Electrician? OBGYN? Architect?
OBTW, is there a court date yet Amy? I haven’t seen anything lately.
Even someone who wants to do nails at the local salon has to have completed their training AND have their license to be practicing.
Christ the guy that tarred my driveway had some sort of certification. It amazes me sometimes about how people want to operate without any sort of oversight.
Well, I like to call myself an award-winning novelist. I mean, it’s only a matter of time, right?
I’m an award-winning novelist for reals and I don’t go around calling myself that.
I don’t know why not. You could help guide women on their novel journeys–especially ones who plan to self-publish after Big-Five rejections (SPAB5R).
Hey hey hey! I’m more qualified then all of you! I’ve read a couple of books myself and watched heaps of movies about books – not ALL of them on youtube either. Plus I’m really good at holding a pencil.
I spent 3 years walking around hospitals in a white coat being VERY careful to introduce myself as a “medical student” or “student training to be a doctor” and correcting anyone who called me Dr ASAP.
In fact there was a whole lecture about it every year: the wonderful gift patients were giving us by allowing us be involved in their care, how they were often vulnerable and sick, how we must NEVER pretend to be something we weren’t and must be very careful that nothing we said could be construed as medical advice.
We were know-nothing idiot children with big egos and we needed to hear that misrepresenting ourselves could have really, really bad consequences. People trust Drs, or people who look like Drs, and that trust is necessary, but the boundaries have to be clear.
GCC- a medical student is no more a Dr than you are an authority on public health.
My initial thought when I read the “scholar” crap was the same as Amy’s. Scholar? Bah, you’re a STUDENT.
As I said the last time this came up, no one normal runs around calling themselves a “scholar,” not even those who legitimately are (disclosure: I are). I’ve never heard anyone actually use that to describe themselves.
In fact, the only place I think I’ve heard it used is in the Little House books (Silver Lake, maybe?), maybe where they had the evening performance at the school, and the “scholars” (students) did their bits. However, in that case, it was absolutely just used to refer to students.
It’s obnoxious pretense, that’s all.