Herbs for Pregnancy and Postpartum Class
Local herbalist and Bloom Spokane professional member Sarah Patterson is offering a new class for pregnant and postpartum women to learn about safely using herbs to treat common pregnancy-related issues. What an awesome new resource for our community!
Class is on November 16th from 6:30 – 8:30pm at the New Moon Family Wellness Center in Spokane. Cost is $10.
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New Study on Home Birth is Skewed
All of my birth-obsessed friends on Facebook have been buzzing about a recent home birth study published by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG). Everyone, including the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS), is outraged that the publishers of the study “accepted a poorly designed and methodologically unsound study in which authors concluded there is a 3-fold increase in neonatal mortality in planned home births compared with planned hospital birth.” You can read CIMS’s full response to the study on their website. [...]
The Only Due Date Calculator You Need
I’m happy to have found a “due date” calculator that actually sets proper expectations for women. It gives you a safe range of dates in which you can expect your baby to be born and explains why our current cultural thinking around due dates isn’t helpful.
“One of the biggest obstacles to natural birth is misunderstanding your “due date.” A due date does not mean there is only one safe day for your baby to be born. It is meant to establish a range of time that your baby is mature and safe to be born. Because modern obstetrics narrows this to a specific day, unnecessary interventions, like inducing labor, come into practice.” [...]
New Controversy Over Babywearing (Slings)
Last week the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning “advising parents and caregivers to be cautious when using infant slings for babies younger than four months of age. In researching incident reports from the past 20 years, CPSC identified and is investigating at least 14 deaths associated with sling-style infant carriers, including three in 2009.” The CPSC announcement concerns “bag” slings, a very particular style of baby carrier. It does not mean that all infant slings are dangerous. [...]
The Controversy Over Home Birth
I have recently twitted about two news articles concerning the safety of home birth. For those of you who don’t follow me on twitter, I’ll catch you up on the news. Here’s the scoop: The Huffington Post article, “ACOG Up to Dirty Tricks,” reported on the organizations efforts to collect stories solely about unsuccessful out-of-hospital births from its members to use as “data” in it’s lobbying efforts against independent midwives. And on the brighter side, USA Today published the article “Study: Home Birth With Midwife as Safe as Hospital Birth” which finds that planned home births may in fact have a lower mortality rate and fewer complications that physician-attended hospital births. [...]
