Mrs VS"
This is not an "ignorance" movement. We are a group of mothers, largely supporting each other on the web in various chat rooms and web discussion boards, that is actively looking to MITIGATE those problems that you just outlined. Mitigation is the key to Provident Living.
Mitigation What I have done is systematically looked at everything that can possibly be mitigated by knowledge and then put it into practice. At some point you have to say enough is enough, women have been giving birth for thousands of years and the species has survived and let it go and get into a faithful place. But for me my mitigating efforts have largely focused on nutrition and deep tissue cleansing of my liver to prepare for childbirth.
Gestational Diabetes is the red headed step child of modern medicine - Emperor has no clothes
And toxemia is a disease of malnutrition. Preventing eclampsia : an interview with Tom Brewer, MD
Not every women would feel comfortable giving birth at home, not to mention doing her own prenatal care, but I do, and I have tried to come up with a model of living that will ensure to the greatest extent possible a beautiful outcome.
And no, I am not willing to go to the hospital for those things. I feel that most of prenatal care is fear based cover your butt type of testing, and barring a justified c-section situation like a prolapsed cord or placental abruption, I would not go to the hospital to give birth. I have two women in my aquaintance who gave birth with an abrupted placenta and a nuchal cord however, and despite some hairy moments and a bloody mess during the placental detachment, both mother and child did fine in those two unassisted birthing situations. I also am intimately aquainted with moms who have given birth to 12 pound babies at home no problem, and one gave birth to an eleven pound footling breech.
Prematurity? that would be the biggest baby killer of them all with an emergency situation because prematurity can be caused by dehydration and too much adrenaline in the mothers body and both of those situations would be present for everyone during a huge terror or natural disaster event.
However, some of the most damning studies that have been done regarding prematurity have been those countries where NICUs do not exist and the mother is encouraged to put her preemie to breast in a kangaroo care incubator and those babies have just as good outcomes as our american babies without all the bells and whistles of our NICUs and the million dollar price tag for the family and society.
I don't claim to have everything figured out, but I have spent the past 18 years thinking about emergency childbirth and putting into practice what I have learned in my own family life.
I'm grateful for a paper's willingness to share more about our lives, even if they don't tell all of the reasons why we traveled down this path.
Here is a UK Guardian article that showed up this week as well on this topic Going it alone
Jenny
“I feel that most of prenatal care is fear based cover your butt type of testing, and barring a justified c-section situation like a prolapsed cord or placental abruption, I would not go to the hospital to give birth.”
Ok Jenny,
I probably shouldn’t even respond since this story makes me so emotional. I respect your determination and your desire. To ignore the possible consequences...I am sure my brother-in-law would have been even more crushed had he also lost his wife.
Meet my niece, Samantha. She is dead from a placental abruption.:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1173102/posts
Thank goodness my sister wasn’t at home. She would be dead too.
Luckily their SECOND child, Alex had EXTENSIVE testing. Even though there was no indication that what killed Samantha was likely to happen again.
He was born with 3 congenital heart defects and had open heart surgery at 2 days old.
Meet my nephew:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1173102/posts?page=186#186
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1481273/posts
I lost a baby to preeclampsia and came close to dying myself. It is not a disease of malnutrition - Brewer is selling a line that has women beating themselves up and blaming themselves. There are plenty of women who have followed his diet to the letter after a first bout and still have come down with preeclampsia a second time. Or just happened to be eating superhealthy according to Brewer and taking supplements and got PE a first time. There is evidence that women who are truly malnourished (third world conditions) are more at risk.
You have a almost zero chance of salvaging a pre-term baby earlier than 30 weeks outside of a hospital. If you know pre-term delivery is inevitable, steroid shots will help lung maturation. Magnesium can help stop contractions, a cerclage can help an incompetent cervix.
Sometimes low-tech can accomplish amazing things - the McRoberts maneuver for shoulder dystocia - essential for the home midwife. But there are some diagnoses and treatments that can only be done with modern medicine.
My point is, “no man knows the day or hour,” and you might lose your baby or your life living as if that hour has come.
I always thought that what Jesus said referred not to mothers’ suffering during childbirth, but their suffering watching their children suffer and die. Paul recommends celibacy, not childbearing, when the end times approach.
Mrs VS