Some Pregnant Women More Equal Than Others
This author makes some interesting assumptions.
First that prenatal care is the answer for all that ails a pregnant woman. As the stats from the CDC have proven, more women in America than ever are getting prenatal care, and yet prematurity and low birth weight is increasing, and all measures of an unhealthy newborn are raising incrementally in conjunction with the C-section rate, which recently topped out at 30%.
Here is a roundup of my healthy pregnancy links from this blog: Go Here
And those that relate to birth: Go Here
And those that relate to birth weight: Go Here
The most ungrounded assesment by the author of the piece, Nancy Watzman, is that the high risk women who is not able to afford prenatal care and have a hospital delivery is going to have a worse outcome than the mother who has all the bells and whistles of modern childbirth.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, an occasional baby will die from a genetic or nutritional deficiency during a home birth. But by far the most damaging part of partuition is all the drugs and cutting of the mother during birth, followed by immediately incarceration of the baby in the NICU, and then disruption of nursing and the overwhelm of birth trauma for both the mother and the baby.
I think an illegal mother who gives birth to a baby in a bathtub after doing her own prenatal care has a better than average chance of having everything go just perfectly, and will not be required to pay even 35% for a birth abomination through Medicare.
My best friend gave birth to her sixth child in a shed they had converted to a home for her family, with no running water and no electricity. Baby and Mother did just fine after she did her own educated prenatal care, and she and her husband delivered the baby alone.
Recently she called excited to tell me about a friend of hers who gave birth to healthy twins at 39 weeks. Mom did all her own prenatals, and birthed her twins in a single wide trailer… alone.
Again, it is the assumptions that I have a difficult time with.
The equation…”Prenatal care + Hospital Birth = Healthy Baby” is just not true. And it annoys me that modern women like this author make those assumptions without any relevant data to back them up.
Jenny Hatch
PS – If you would like to do an assesment on true home birth, please do a search on your own family. Go into any geneological data base, type in your own name, and then go back six generations on any line and look at your own ancestors.
How do you think those mothers gave birth to baby 8, 12, or 16 without any modern prenatal care, electricity, running water, doctor, or trained midwife???
Modernity has not improved things much in regards to pregnancy outcomes…and based on the stats, it is open season on mothers and babies during birth.