Taking Back Our Right to Birth
By Tine Reese
October 17, 2009In a recent article on Huffington Post titled, “A Woman’s Nation: Reclaim Your Right To Birth Right,” Christiane Northrup, M.D. encourages women (who now make up half the work force!) to use that power to influence the future of health care in America, beginning with labor and birth. She argues that the media’s portrayal of birth as a medical emergency and the actual medicalization of birth has done us more harm than good. She makes great arguments, loaded with fascinating and unbelievable statistics that should be making headlines.
Making the point that progress has set us back, Northrup says, “I was a resident back in the late 1970′s when electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) was first introduced and lauded as a panacea that would prevent cerebral palsy and birth injuries. Thirty years later, data indicates that the only thing EFM has done reliably is increase the rate of Cesarean section (C-section) births.” Besides that, EFM takes the hospital staff’s attention away from the birthing woman…where it ought to be. It’s about time that hospitals take notice of the fact that this technology is not helping women or babies and train nursing staff to spend their time assisting women in labor in a hands-on way.
As far as our continued love affair with medical technology, Northrup says, “Our culture’s collective trust in C-sections and labor inductions that increase the risk of surgical birth is mind-boggling!” She is troubled by the fact that many women don’t seem to realize that a c-section is MAJOR SURGERY or that labor inductions for “convenience” carry with them increased risk of prematurity, C-section, bladder and bowel injury, and maternal death. Our c-section rate is a staggering 33%. The World Health Organization says that an optimal rate is 5-10 percent. Something is wrong here!
Northrup goes on to say, “Unfortunately, the American public in general (physicians included) has a false sense of security about the safety of C-sections because the statistics on maternal death in the UNITED STATES are misleading. …According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number of maternal deaths in the United States is probably up to three times as high as the number reported in our national statistics because not all maternal deaths are classified as pregnancy-related on the death certificate.” I find this highly disturbing. No wonder more Americans aren’t outraged at being told they need to have a c-section in a non-emergency situation. If women knew that their chances of not being alive to care for and raise their children went up drastically by having a c-section, I’m sure that we’d see that number going down. Fast.
Finally, Dr. Northrup cites multiple studies that find women with low-risk pregnancies who planned home births attended by trained midwives actually had lower c-section rates and were just as safe as hospital births, if not safer. Episiotomy rates were lower. Induction rates were lower. And so were the rates of most medical interventions, including electronic fetal monitoring, c-sections, forceps or vacuum delivery, and epidurals. Hmmm…sounds good to me!
The Solution? Women need to be armed with the facts and quit relying on the medical industry and the government to make decisions about our births. They clearly haven’t been doing a good job. As a culture, we must create an environment that fosters trust in women’s bodies and values the mind/body connection that has been lost to our reliance on technology.
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Comments
Agreed, women must be armed with knowledge and facts that support the creation of self-confidence in women, and not to always depend on technology