Page Hospital has decided to not allow mothers to vaginally deliver their babies if the mother has had a cesarean in the past. I would be one of the affected patients. In February 2002, I had an uncomplicated vaginal delivery. In February of 2004, an emergency cesarean was necessary because of placental abruption. In December of 2007, I delivered a healthy 8+ lb baby boy at Page Hospital by VBAC. I received strong pressure from the hospital staff encouraging a repeat cesarean, but delivered vaginally in spite of the effort. Having had a successful VBAC since my cesarean, I don’t find any medical need for an elective cesarean for my current pregnancy. I am wary of having a surgery with no medical indication for it. I am sure it would not be ethical.
If the concern is for legal liability, the logic is flawed. If I desired a VBAC in this community whose hospital has adopted the ACOG standard, effectively denying me a VBAC, and if my cesarean birth resulted in harm to me or to my baby, I would have very strong legal standing to bring a lawsuit (for example, the Meador vs Stahler and Gheridian case in Massachusetts).
I found out about this hospital’s VBAC ban at my August OB appointment, and set about fighting it right away. I wrote a letter to the hospital, explaining my arguments about VBAC. As I was driving, I heard there was a meeting of the Board of Directors that same night. I printed out several copies of the letter, printed up supporting research and documentation, and presented everyone at the board meeting with a copy of the whole thing. I was called a few days later to have a meeting with the CEO, Sandy Haryasz. I met with her. She told me that she was an RN who had worked in L&D for many years.
I was very polite and discussed my situation with her and told her that my risk of major complications was about the same as a first time moms. She listened very sweetly and agreed that I was a great candidate for a successful VBAC. She offered to help as best as she can to find me another place to deliver. I reminded her that the next closest hospital in Arizona, Flagstaff Medical Center, also has banned VBAC. She was recommending I go to Dixie Hospital in St. George, Utah. We ended the meeting very politely.
I thought for a bit, had some unanswered questions, so called Sandy’s office again to schedule another appointment. At this meeting I asked why they are doing labor and delivery if they cannot offer a timely cesarean. She defended the hospital, saying that they can do emergency cesaereans, but did not want to accept the risk of VBAC. I asked what the hospital policy is if I show up and just refuse to consent to a cesarean. She said they would seek a court order. She repeated to me that Page Hospital does not have the facilities nessasary to handle an emergency.
At my September OB appointment, I told my doctor what I had been up to. He was filled with apathy. He was wringing his hands, and said he would have to do it if the hospital told him he had to. He told me he would lose his licence if he didn’t. I have looked into it and have yet to find where doctors lose their licence for having ethics. But it was clear to me that I was not safe in this hospital, and if I step foot in the building, I would have a cesarean, and my doctor would do it while I scream in protest.
I have decided I will have to go to Phoenix, where I might have a place to stay. I used to live down there and know the area. I will be having a consult with an OB, and hopefully that will go well.
“The times have truly changed. According to the newly released 2009 Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation, women now make up half the work force for the first time in written history! This means that our voices and skills are impacting all areas of society more than ever before.
The Shriver Report also found that for both men and women, health is their number one priority! Since women make the vast majority of healthcare decisions in their families–and have the buying power to do it–we women are in a very powerful position to influence the future of healthcare in America. Nowhere is this more critical than in the area of pregnancy and birth…”
(I’m pleased that Huff Po published this comment cause when I dump on Socialized Medicine, most of the time they don’t print it.)
Thanks Dr. Northrup!
Great, timely article. As a promoter of Husband/Wife Homebirth – it is refreshing to read a factual report on the current state of birth from an OBGyn. I see things getting much worse before they get better in our society. There is absolutely no financial incentive for the current system to reform itself. The only answer long term is to add a health amendment to the constitution assuring parents of the right to give birth in whatever setting they feel is appropriate for their family.
Socializing/Nationalizing the whole mess is just going to ensure that more mothers and babies needlessly die during medical birth. For those of us who have zero desire to give birth in that fear based environment, claiming our sovereignty over our own bodies and giving birth in the sanctity of our homes will guarantee that natural mothering survives on planet earth. I predict an 80% worldwide c-section rate by the time our grandaughters are birthing – if they decide to become mothers at all.
Pathetic? Yes, but the trajectory we are on ensures that the status quo entrenched in not only the medical profession, but also the minds and hearts of birthing women will continue on until the evidence of permanent harm to mothers and babes is so obvious, so irrefutable, that we all shift back to normal and natural out of pure survival for the human race.
Jenny Hatch
Birth Activist and Mother of five Jenny Hatch The Natural Family BLOG “Healthy Families Make A Healthy World!” Click on the book Image to get to my Books hosted on Amazon Click here to subscribe to The Natural Family Blog on Kindle
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Jenny Hatch, expecting baby number five in “Virtual Galts Gulch” Colorado – doing my own prenatal care, preparing to give birth at home, and taking personal responsibility for the whole shootin’ match.
Recent Birth Data from the CDC Indicates: CDC Preliminary Data 2007 PDF: The c-section rate rose 2 percent in 2007, to 31.8 percent, marking the 11th consecutive year of increase and another record high for the United States according to the CDC.
My share page at One True Media
Last night I was reading the instapundit Glenn Reynolds and he linked to a pajamas media video of Ayn Rand Institute president, Yaron Brook talking about “Going Galt.” I watched all 22 minutes of the interview.
In the section of the video titled “Going John Galt”, they talked about a real life version of Galt’s Gulch and where it might exist.
In this post I want to throw out the idea that the most rational way to go John Galt in Family Life is in fact to take personal responsibility for the births of our children.
Yaron talked about a “Moral Revolution” in the interview. Challenging the underlying fundamentals in our society by doing what rationally makes sense.
Capitalism is the only way to pursue happiness because it is the only political ideology that protects the individuals right to pursue his own happiness.
After thirteen years of being steeped (brewed) in socialism during my Michigan public school incarceration from 1973 to 1986, I picked up a copy of The Fountainhead in my English teachers classroom (Bless her for having such contraband available to her students). I was just about to graduate from high school and read the book in a week. This book, along with my study of the Book of Mormon carried the day and rationality became my goal for adult life. (Some modern mothers call this Concious Parenting or Primal Mothering)
Two short years after I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time (1986), I was expecting my first baby, and entered into the irrational world of modern obstetrics as a new mother.
As I applied the principles of Objectivism to my own life, everything that I had been taught by my family traditions, our society, and all of the assumptions that pressed upon my young mind regarding HOW I was going to birth and raise my children overwhelmed my spirit. I found myself thrust into a state of insanity, as the irrational fought with the rational for control. In a state of complete overwhelm my mind broke from reality. This moment for me was the darkest time, but also the beginning of a new dawn.
For in the stigma and stereotypes that were thrust on me by well meaning but completely irrational doctors and the ideologies that they were slaves to, I found the courage and the will to run from irrationality to freedom.
These past twenty years since irrationality overwhelmed my heart, I have been able to move from medical slavery to freedom and the results have been a near constant state of personal happiness and fulfillment as a wife and mother.
I was also reading Dr. Amy’s homebirth debate blog last night and read her most recent post dismissing the Brewer Diet for Healthy Pregnancy and many of the comments that followed the post.
Her words and the so called “debate” that followed them are an exercise in Irrationality. And if you would like to see for yourself the semantics of an irrational argument, I offer it up as a prime example of the irrational in the quest for healthy children, which is supposedly what the practice of Obstetrics is all about.
The late Dr. Tom Brewer shared the idea, backed up with a mountain or horse sense, practicality, and good judgement that NUTRITION is the foundation for a healthy pregnancy. I guess the important question new moms should be asking themselves is WHY would the medical profession even waste it’s time doing research to “de-bunk” the Brewer Diet for pregnancy??? If it is such a non-entity of an ideology, why waste precious resources, time, and money to prove to families that the Brewer Principles are bogus???
Is anyone harmed or is any baby left permanently deformed by a mother eating a sound pregnancy diet during the childs gestation?
Why isn’t someone in the medical profession trying to get the word out on Anti-Depressants and the fact that they damage children’s hearts in utero?
Is it possible that the energy that has been used to discredit Tom Brewer and his amazingly researched and proven diet is because medical professionals and hospitals MIGHT lose business because babies are born healthy and don’t need all the bells and whistles of NICU care?
Can’t have all those moms eating healthy and making big, beautiful blue ribbon babies. They might just get the idea that they can take on prenantal care themselves, and then they might just give birth at home alone, and they may never even bother to come to us for help when the baby is ill and on and on and on… Nutrition works! The medical profession KNOWS that once parents take personal responsibility for eating a proper diet for pregnancy, ninety percent of their business will go down the tubes.
Here I am at forty two weeks and three days of pregnancy eating a HEALTHY Brewer diet breakfast of soft boiled eggs, cracked wheat cereal, home baked whole grain muffins, fresh fruit, and red raspberry leaf tea. This was the morning of the day I gave birth to my nine and a half pound son after a six hour labor, and this pregnancy was the one where I utilyzed the brewer diet to its full capacity…every single day of my pregnancy.
We have been having a wonderful chat about Atlas Shrugged at Free Republic these past few weeks. If you would like to read some wonderful discussion and relevant debate, please go here. I chimed in on the most recent chat by sharing one of my favorite quotes from the book. I’ll share it here to outline how I have used Objectivism as a rational tool for raising my children. Since this philosophy undergirds all of my writings, goals as a mother, and also my hope for the future, please know that in all of this objective philosophy, I completely balance the Libertarian thought and practice with my absolute Faith in Jesus Christ and devotion to his gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to which I belong.
I do NOT see the two as being in conflict and the reason why is because no government minder stood behind my back with a gun to force me to get baptised, pay 10% of my income to the church, or spend thousands upon thousands of hours serving in my community. I have done these acts of my own free will and as a witness to my testimony and faith. When I made the sacred covenants in the Temple that were so profoundly mocked by HBO this past week, I was entering into a contract relationship with my Heavenly Father, again of my own free will and choice. Here is the quote from Atlas Shrugged:
P 784:
“The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley – two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it.
They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world – a look of fear, half secretive, half sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.
The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.
They represent my particular career, Miss Tagart, said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world…..
I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”
Jenny Hatch The Natural Family BLOG The Natural Family Company “Healthy Families Make A Healthy World!” The Brewer Pregnancy Diet Plan You must have, every day, at least: 1. Milk and milk products–4 choices
1 cup milk: whole, skim,1%, buttermilk
1/2 cup canned evaporated milk: whole or skim
1/3 cup powdered milk:whole or skim
1 cup yogurt
1 cup sour cream
1/4 cup cottage cheese: creamed, uncreamed, pot style
1 large slice cheese (1 1/4 oz): cheddar, Swiss, other hard cheese
1 cup ice milk
1 1/2 cup soy milk
1 piece tofu, 3″x3″x 1/2″ (4 oz)
2. Calcium replacements–as needed (2 per soy exchange from group 1)
36 almonds
1/3 cup bok choy, cooked
12 Brazil nuts
1 cup broccoli, cooked
1/3 cup collard greens
1/2 cup kale
2 teaspoons blackstrap molasses
4 oz black olives
1 oz sardines
3. Eggs–2 any style 4. Protein Combinations–6 to 8 choices**
1 oz lean beef, lamb, pork, liver, or kidney
1 oz chicken or turkey
1 oz fish or shell fish***
1/4 cup canned salmon or tuna
3 sardines
3 1/2 oz tofu
1/4 cup peanuts or peanut butter****
1/8 cup beans + 1/4 cup rice or wheat
(measured before cooking)
beans: soy beans, peas, black beans, kidney beans, garbanzos
rice: preferably brown
wheat: preferably bulgar
1/8 cup brewer’s yeast + 1/4 cup rice
1/8 cup sesame or sunflower seeds + 1/2 cup cup rice
1/4 cup rice + 1/3 cup milk
1/2 oz cheese + 2 slices whole wheat bread or 1/3 cup macaroni (dry) or noodles or 1/8 cup beans
1/8 cup beans + 1/2 cup cornmeal
1/8 cup beans + 1/6 cup seeds (sesame, sunflower)
1/2 large potato + 1/4 cups milk or 1/4 oz cheese
1 oz cheese: cheddar, Swiss, other hard cheese
1/4 cup cottage cheese: creamed, uncreamed, pot style 5. Fresh, dark green vegetables–2 choices
1 cup broccoli
1 cup brussels sprouts
2/3 cup spinach
2/3 cup greens
collard, turnip, beet, mustard, dandelion, kale
1/2 cup lettuce (preferable romaine)
1/2 cup endive
1/2 cup asparagus
1/2 cup sprouts: bean, alfalfa
Whole Wheat, Flax, Fennel Waffles 6. Whole grains–5 choices
1 waffle or pancake made from whole grain
1 slice bread
whole wheat, rye, bran, other whole grain
1/2 roll, muffin, or bagel made from whole grain
1 corn tortilla
1/2 cup oatmeal or Wheatena
1/2 cup brown rice or bulgar wheat
1 shredded wheat biscuit
1/2 cup bran flakes or granola
1/4 cup wheat germ
Raspberry Cinnamon Kamut Muffins 7. Vitamin C foods–2 choices
1/2 grapefruit
2/3 cup grapefruit juice
1 orange
1/2 cup orange juice
1 large tomato
1 cup tomato juice
1/2 cantaloupe
1 lemon or lime
1/2 cup papaya
1/2 cup strawberries
1 large green pepper
1 large potato, any style 8. Fats and oils–3 choices
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 tablespoon mayonaise
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/4 avocado
1 tablespoon peanut butter++ 9. Vitamin A foods–1 choice
3 apricots
1/2 cantaloupe
1/2 cup carrots (1 large)
1/2 cup pumpkin
1/2 cup winter squash
1 sweet potato 10. Liver–at least once a week (optional)
4 oz liver
beef, calf, chicken, pork, turkey, liverwurst 11. Salt and other sodium sources–unlimited
table salt, iodized–to taste
sea salt–to taste
kelp powder–to taste
soy sauce–to taste 12. Water–unlimited
Drink to quench thirst, but do not force fluids
Real juice or milk might make better use of limited stomach space. See more info about water here
Avoid pregnancy teas and juices which include nettle, dandelion, alfalfa, bilberry, or celery (they have diuretic properties). 13. Snacks and additional menu choices–unlimited
More foods from groups 1-11
14. Optional supplements–as needed
Vitamin pills, powders, herbs, yeast, oils, molasses, wheat germ, etc.
“Note: Vitamin supplements are in routine use in prenatal care; they do not take the place of a sound, balanced diet of nutritious foods.
Study: For Some Women, Memory of Childbirth Pain Intensifies Over Time NEW YORK — Research shows that for about half of women who give birth, memories of the intensity of labor pain decline over time. However, for some women, their recollection of pain does not seem to diminish and for a minority, their memory of pain increases with time. “The study also shows that the memory of childbirth pain is influenced by a woman’s overall satisfaction with her labor experience.
Dr. Ulla Waldenström, from the Department of Woman and Child Health at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm and colleagues queried 1383 mothers about their memories of labor pain at 2 months, 1 year and 5 years after giving birth. Women who elected to have a cesarean section were excluded.
Five years after the women had given birth, 49 percent remembered childbirth as less painful than when they rated it 2 months after birth, 35 percent rated it the same, and 16 percent rated it as more painful.
“A commonly held view,” Waldenström noted in an email to Reuters Health, “is that women forget the intensity of labour pain. The present study…provides evidence that in modern obstetric care, this is true for about 50 percent of women.”
However, a woman’s labor experience was an influential factor. Women who reported labor as a positive experience 2 months after childbirth had the lowest pain scores, and their memory of the intensity of pain had declined by 1 year and 5 years after giving birth.”
Sarah sent me an email last night asking that I share information about this new birth documentary video contest!
Hi there–I am a mother of two in Richmond, VA (one midwife-assisted birth center birth, one home birth) and just stumbled upon your website today.
Anyway just based on what you’ve written about birth and your apparent feelings on the subject, I wanted to write you to see if you’d be willing to help us spread the word about a new contest intended to educated women about the choices they have during pregnancy and childbirth. Birth Matters Virginia (an organization that works to promote an evidence-based model of maternity care) is inviting mothers, fathers, filmmakers, film students, birth advocates, and others to create a 4-7 minute educational video about birth. The first-place winner will receive a cash prize of $1000. Second place $500 and an “honorable mention” prize of $100 will also be awarded. The deadline for entering the contest is Mother’s Day, May 10, 2009. We actually got Ricki Lake, Abby Epstein (makers of the Business of Being Born) to agree to be guest judges of the contest along with Sarah Buckley, the OBGYN who wrote Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering. Birth Matters Contest Web Site You can also join our Facebook group
Email Sarah at Richmond@birthmattersva.org with any questions.
We want to get as many people to enter as we possibly can so that YouTube is inundated with videos about mother- and baby-friendly pregnancy and birth care so that more mainstream audiences are educated about their options. Thanks in advance for any help you can give us!! I’d be happy to send you a blurb that you can just cut and paste onto your blog and into email if it would be helpful…
Sarah richmond@Birthmattersva.org Here is the movie I plan to enter into the contest:
