Posted on 07/14/2011 8:47:22 PM PDT by Nachum
Women should no longer assume they will give birth in hospital with a doctor on hand. In a watershed moment, leading medical experts declared that mothers should be given more opportunity to have babies at home because a maternity ward is not necessarily the 'safer option'. A report by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists suggests that as many as a third of all women should give birth 'without a doctor going anywhere near them'. It calls for a radical shake-up in the NHS which could lead to thousands more women having babies at home, as was the case
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Coming soon to a hospital near you! Thank you Obamacare!
In the UK (’round 1999) they sent me home to labor for a WEEK because a bed wasn’t available at the hospital. Almost lost my baby.
Coming soon to a bathtub near you.
Never mind that if the baby was in dire need of a doctor, the mother might not have time to get to the hospital in time. Check the mortality rates from pre to post hospital eras and then repeat that with a straight face.
I deliberately had my babies at home.
Big push for home births: Too many babies are being born in hospital.
This is England, where the waiting period for prenatal care is 10 monthes.
I’ve got 4 kids. I delivered 3 of them at home. 1st kid was born in the hospital. The next three came so sudden there wasn’t time to get to the hospital.
Next, the NHS will be recommending do-it-yourself appendectomies. Isn’t government health care wonderful?
More home births will lead to more dead babies. Sad fact.
I understand they want to cut costs but they shouldn’t do so by lying to mothers.
Don’t get me wrong, home births CAN go fine obviously with a trained midwife but implying there’s something wrong with going to the hospital? Poppycock. There are a lot of stupid young (and not so young) parents out there. The government tells them stay home to have the baby and they will and something will go wrong.
Case in point. Tell her to have her baby at home. I dare you.
I foresee a sharp rise in boiling water usage in the U.S..
Not sure that anyone will do anything with it though.
'59 to now appears to be more than triple from what I could find.
I’d like to have every male doctor have his pelvic bones stretched and then to have him give birth to a 8# baby thru his man part....then we’ll talk....
My sister-in-law just delivered a beautiful boy at the end of June. She had visions of, and made preparations for an at-home, perfumed, lightly lit, midwife-proctored delivery. Pre-eclampsia and other issues forced an early and immediate induction. She insisted on continuing with her home delivery plans. I played no small part in coaxing her to have the wonderful doctors at Johns Hopkins handle it. She grudgingly agreed. Her baby and cord came out simultaneously in prolapse. Had it not been the doctor quite literally knocking her husband to the floor to get to her, that child would have died within seconds.
Needless to say, she’s a changed woman, and a grateful mother.
I don’t have a problem AT ALL with women who make the choice to give birth at home with a trained midwife. In fact, I think it’s great. Unfortunately, the ‘midwife’ in the UK NHS only goes so far. You have the baby at the hospital. They only come back AFTER the baby is born to visit the home to make sure ‘baby’ is OK for a few days. Then they send a f***ing NAZI ‘case worker’ to make sure ‘baby’ is doing ‘thriving’.
That’s another story......and my blood pressure doesn’t need to rise.
I didn't read the whole article, but there's a whole lot going on here. Sanitation is a big part of this issue. In 1959, the general level of sanitation in England was about at the level of refrigeration: About nil. Infection has been the biggest factor in medical risk everywhere in the world since about forever. So for a country that was pretty backwater, soap-and-water wise, you can imagine why moving to a hospital setting would have improved things.
But since then, hospitals and houses have been moving in opposite directions with respect to sanitationwashing hands, cleaning cuts, and so on. Ordinary people are much more sophisticated than they were. Meanwhile, at a hospital, you're keeping company with a lot of really sick people, so the germs are really flying. At the same time, hospitals these days are much more . . . unionized. There is a dazzling level of stupidity available. After my wife had given birth to our 2nd in a hospital, she was getting some well-earned sleep. An aide appeared and woke her up to give her . . . a sleeping pill.
Another problem: At hospitals, most of the docs we met had never had children. They seemed to have no sense or experience with kids, and misdiagnosed some obvious things.
We had 2 of our 5 at home with a midwife, the other 3 at various hospitals. The vast majority of the time, complications are something you can see coming weeks or months in advance by signs in the mom or the baby. And at home, you always have a backup plan for which doc you will meet at which hospital if something starts going funny.
For our family, for a straightforward birth, home is way easier, safer, and more comfortable for Mom and kid. Yes, some judgment in your choice of "providers" is called for. But some judgment is always called for.
A competent midwife can tell when things are going normally and when things are headed into the abnormal zone. Yes, some deliveries do need ready access to sophisticated medical care, but these are in a small minority. My wife, who was a home birth, has had four home births. If one can find a competent midwife, I would recommend going that route, and trusting the midwife to judge whether the hospital end of things is needed or not.
“. . . as long as you have a competent midwife.”
That’s just for the birth. And that’s if everything, ahem, comes out alright. But the amount of, well, bleeding that occurs in a complicated birth makes a head wound bleed look like a scrape. It is quickly life threatening.
In any case, access to a pediatrician and emergency equipment is the reason to deliver in the hospital (with a competent midwife if one prefers). Most moms and babies (after a non anesthetized delivery) could go back home (with housekeeping assistance) within hours.
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