Posted on 06/18/2008 7:17:43 PM PDT by Jenny Hatch
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on the subject of Home Deliveries
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists......A WALL of obstruction for mothers and families who desire to give birth holistically....
Huffington Post:
Docs to Women: Pay No Attention to Ricki Lake's Home Birth
Ladies, the physicians of America have issued their decree: they don't want you having your babies at home with midwives.
(Excerpt) Read more at naturalfamilyblog.com ...
When healthy women are supported this way, 95% give birth vaginally, with hardly any intervention.
And yet, the American Medical Association doesn't see the point. Yesterday at its annual meeting it adopted a policy written by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists against "home deliveries" and in support of legislation "that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital" or accredited birth center.
"There ought to be a law!" cry the doctors.
The trouble is, they have no evidence to back up their safety claims. In fact, the largest and most rigorous study of home birth internationally to date found that among 5,000 healthy, "low-risk" women, babies were born just as safely at home under a midwife's care as in the hospital. And not only that, the study, like many before it, found that the women actually fared better at home, with far fewer interventions like labor induction, cesarean section, and episiotomy (taking scissors to the vagina, a practice that according to the research should be obsolete but is still performed on one-third of women who give birth vaginally).
Which is why the American Public Health Association and the American College of Nurse Midwives support women choosing home birth. The British OB/GYNs have read the research, too, and have this to say: "There is no reason why home birth should not be offered to women at low risk of complications... it may confer considerable benefits for them and their families. There is ample evidence showing that labouring at home increases a woman's likelihood of a birth that is both satisfying and safe..."
The other trouble with the American MDs is that they seem to have lost all respect for women's civil rights, indeed for the U.S. Constitution -- the right to privacy, to bodily integrity, and the right of every adult to determine her own health care. The "father knows best" legislation they are promoting could indeed be used to criminally prosecute women who choose home birth, say, by equating it with child abuse.
Research evidence be damned, the doctors want to mandate you to go to the hospital. They don't want you to have a choice.
We think they're spooked. The cesarean rate is rising, celebrities are publicizing their home births (the initial wording of the AMA resolution actually took aim at Ricki for publicizing her home birth on the Today Show!), people are reading Pushed and watching The Business of Being Born, and there's a nationwide legislative "push" to license certified professional midwives in all states (The AMA is against that, too, by the way).
The docs are on the defensive.
After all, birth is big business -- it's in fact the most common reason for a woman to be admitted to the hospital. And if more women start giving birth outside of it, who will get paid? Not doctors and not hospitals.
"The AMA supports a woman's right to make an informed decision regarding her delivery and to choose her health care provider," the group said in a statement. But if it really supported women's choices it wouldn't adopt a policy condemning home birth and midwives.
Because if U.S. women are to have real birth choices, everybody needs to be working together to provide them, not waging turf wars at their expense.
Way to go girl!
Proof positive that collectivist efforts to use the coercive power of the state to grab your wallet begins from day 1!
I can imagine why not, but it's not my decision because I'm not the one in labor. It's also not the AMA's decision or the government's decision. This is one of many powers not enumerated in the Constitution that is reserved to the people - and Ricki Lake and all other women have an absolute right to make that decision for themselves
Sure they can give birth at home. BUT!! If anything goes wrong don’t let them show up at the hospital and then sue the doctor because he doesn’t get a good result. With this choice comes responsibility.
Up to and including the members of the “Greatest Generation” most were born at home. GTH AMA>
You go girl!
My wife has done homebirth with all 3 of our kids (and I ended up delivering the 2nd myself - the midwife was 2 hours away and Lydia came in 50 minutes). Like you say, it is safe or safer than the hospital environment for low-risk pregnancies.
The corruption and incompetence we’ve seen in the socialist medical system appalls us, and it’s also appalling that our midwives are operating in an essentially illegal fashion because the truly criminal institutional medical system wants to keep the revenue stream for births under their control. But with the effort to nationalize healthcare, the black market medical services we’re coming to rely on are going to be the services of choice for a lot more people in the future.
Why not???
Because it might get to be a problem when they decide to implant RFID chips in all babies at birth.
I quit doing OB after 16 years this past October and part of the reason was b/c of nurse mid-wifes. I have no problem if someone wants to have the birth at home with the dog watching over them but I have a BIG problem being responsible when they coming running to the hospital when something goes wrong and thrown into my lap at the last second. I know nothing about the pregnancy and most of the time no much pre-natal care was done. I will not be put in that situation again. Enough was enough.
Not only should we have our babies at home, we should NOT register them with the government. No S.S. card. Home school them and teach them to work off the books.
I agree with you...but I will add that we probably in the minority here. I support home delivery as an option/choice...but moms to be need to not see this not as an ‘agenda’ but a rational choice. There is a reason why maternal/infant mortality rates have dropped in western countries...medical intervention. Does a hospital/clinical setting take away from the ‘personal, homey, family centered atmosphere?’ yes. But the average stay is less than 48 hours...can I rationalize 48 hours of impersonality, a hospital bed and visiting hours for the security of knowing that an OR is moments away if needed or NICU is just upstairs...yes. To me that is important...because I know how fast things can go wrong.
I can see where the liability comes in here. However, there probably is a happy medium. I think combining a home birth with ample pre-natal care can be helpful to both physician and mother.
This, I think, will flush out the possibility of most things going wrong as well as keep the patient's physician in the loop of both the pregnancy and the mother.
In England they are encouraging this, no? Keep them out of the hospital and away from expensive liability lawsuits from the John Edwards’ of this world?
Fine if a physician agress to cover for them. But I have no such agreement. They just show up at the hospital and expect ME to handle their problems. Not going to happen again as I said. The woman ended up a few weeks later having the child at home WITHOUT any mid-wife there. It was her 3rd child and the mid-wife lived 2 counties away. Never did make any sense too me.
What would you do if someone showed up who gave birth unexpectedly at home or in the car or in some other unplanned emergency childbirth?
Are you implying that the only women who doctors have trouble with is those of us who plan to give birth at home with or without pre planned doctor back up? Not too many doctors are willing to back up homebirthers, even if they have a midwife attend.
Just curious what your really mean.
Jenny
I mean that I do not like having the responsibility of an OB patient who had NO local OB care on purpose. Then when something goes wrong thinks it is a good idea they have done so. Plus the fact that the mid-wife works without any contact with the local physicians. We have no idea what they are doing till they show up in the ER. This by their choice not mine. That is bad care. If they would ask and let us know and have records at the hospital if needed then that would be another thing. But they do not ask they demand. The nurse mid-wife does not even call to let us know they are coming or what is going on. Bad care. It is called dumping a patient when a physician does something like that and can get you sued pronto.
Oh, please. Now a midwife is “the dog”? Don’t try to BS us; if you quit OB it was probably because of the outrageous cost of malpractice insurance, not because of nurse-midwives. (By the way, please learn to spell if you are going to bash midwives. I insist.) We can all understand high insurance costs and unethical litigation-intoxicated attorneys forcing providers to retire, but reading your post makes me shudder for your patients if they had to put up with your attitude.
No midwife I know, either nurse-midwife or direct-entry midwife, ever fails to give outstanding prenatal care - far better than most OB’s do. Did you spend at least an hour per appointment with each patient?
And when I have to transport a mother, she is taken to the hospital where my backup doctors practice, along with all of her records. My patients meet the docs during their pregnancy, and we review records together. (I assist at their births, too. Isn’t that a scary thought?) Why weren’t you working with the midwives, so that you would know something about those mothers’ pregnancies?
I am a licensed direct-entry midwife with 8 years of college (soon to be PhD), and I work in a clinic with OB’s and deliver in hospitals as well as at home. We all get along incredibly well, and no one dumps blame on anyone unless they do something stupid. (Then we just take them out back and slap the hell out of them repeatedly until they grow a brain. Just kidding; actually that has never been an issue because I only work with good people, but for an attitude like yours I could learn to be nasty on demand.)
So really, what was your problem? Sounds like it may have been caused by the very monsters who now want to legislate birth - the AMA, which doesn’t want us to work together like sane grownups.
Too bad we can’t all get together and legislate some common sense...and get rid of the criminal organization known as the AMA. You might even want to go back to work. When my new clinic opens, I’ll be hiring an OB...
:-)
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