http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/birthathome/index.html
“…Resolved, that the undersigned concerned citizens object to any legislation, either at the state or national level, which restricts a woman’s right to choose her place to give birth, including her right to choose to birth at home.”
Great article. Take some time to read it. I’m impressed.
(pictures from the article are here)
Like any 8-day-old baby, Jimmy Gaffney spends most of his time either nursing or sleeping. Peacefully alternating between the two while cradled in his mother’s arms in the family’s sun-dappled Hamilton backyard, the robust newborn looks like a promotional photograph for parenthood. And yet, so far as the state and city of his birth are concerned, this baby does not officially exist.
He was born at home, in May, with only his mother and father, Alana and Matt Gaffney, in attendance (his two excited siblings, who had slept through most of the five-hour labor that culminated in his 4 a.m. birth, came in just as their father was placing the freshly born baby on his mother’s chest). The family is in no rush to notify the authorities about Jimmy’s birth; they have been taking it easy for the past week, sticking close to home and bonding with the new addition while Alana recovers. A call to register his birth with the Baltimore City Health Department will summon a visit from a home nurse, and the Gaffneys are not quite ready for outsiders, particularly bureaucrats asking a lot of questions about a process they regard as utterly natural–and completely private.
Although they have health insurance that would have paid for a hospital delivery, Alana and Matt managed Jimmy’s birth entirely on their own; Alana even administered her own prenatal care. Neither is a doctor; she is trained as a nurse and Matt is a wildlife biologist, so there is a certain amount of medical/scientific experience between them, but it’s hardly the job experience most people look for when hiring a birth attendant. In fact, 99 percent of women in the United States give birth in a hospital; the remaining one percent of births include all births outside the hospital, including accidental births (as in, say, the back seat of a taxi).
Thus it is impossible to say how many of the nation’s annual 4 million births take place at home. Not all states track births outside of hospitals, and those that do typically classify intentional home births together with the kind attended by taxi drivers. Furthermore, in Maryland and other states where certified professional midwives cannot legally practice, many midwife-attended births end up being recorded as unassisted to keep the midwife off the bureaucratic radar.
Disenchanted with a medical system that treats birth as an emergency instead of an emergence, seeking an alternative to the tubes and wires and monitors of a high-tech birth, some women are stepping outside of the hospital to have their babies. And some say their numbers are growing.
But is home birth safe? No studies exist for unattended births like Jimmy Gaffney’s, but there are dozens demonstrating that, in low-risk pregnancies, home births attended by a midwife are as safe for mother and baby as going to the hospital. The largest and most scientifically rigorous home-birth study to date, sponsored by the Canadian government, followed all 5,418 planned home births across the United States and Canada attended by Certified Practical Midwives in 2000. The authors concluded that babies are born as safely at home as they are in the hospital, and with vastly fewer interventions like cesarean section, the use of forceps, or episiotomy; other recent studies, including a 1995 study of 11,788 intentional home births under midwife care published in the Journal of Nurse Midwifery, have reached the same conclusion.
Despite evidence that it is safe, “I think some people shy away from home birth because of the responsibility,” Alana Gaffney says. “If you’re at home, attended or unattended, and something happens to the baby, it’s your fault for not seeking appropriate medical care. But if you go to the hospital and something happens, you’re guilt free. No one is going to say anything to you–it’s just one of those things that happens.”
I’ve been tagged… I’m never tagged
5 things I was doing 10 years ago:
- YOU – if you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged
NEW YORK (AP) — Ricki Lake is firing back at physicians groups that have singled her out for bringing attention to at-home childbirth.
The 39-year-old former talk-show host is named in a recent statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that says the home is not the safest setting for having a baby.
In her film “The Business of Being Born,” a documentary about the maternity care system that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, Lake is shown giving birth in the bathtub of her Manhattan apartment to her second son Owen, who turns 7 on Wednesday.
The ACOG statement, supported in a resolution Tuesday by the American Medical Association, said, “There has been much attention in the media by celebrities having home deliveries,” citing a “Today Show” headline that read “Ricki Lake takes on the baby birthing industry: Actress and former talk show host shares her at-home delivery in her new film.”
“It’s scary that both (the ACOG and the AMA) have sort of targeted me,” Lake told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “And, you know, I’m all about choice. This is not unlike the abortion issue. I am pro-choice when it comes to childbirth and choices in birth. Home birth was around long before hospitals were taking over — and I just think women need to know (the information) so that they can make the best choice for them.”
The AMA resolves in the statement to support state legislation “that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting” is a hospital, connected birthing center or other approved facility.
“There’s a lot of provocative things that are said in the film,” she said, “but I think it’s very clear that we need doctors, we need the care and the technology that we have. But we also need to value the process of giving birth normally.”
Lake said she had no problems delivering her oldest son Milo, 11, at the hospital, but “looking back on it, I felt that I did not necessarily need the intervention. I didn’t need the (drug Pitocin, which induces labor). I just should have labored on my own.”
The second time around, as long as her pregnancy continued to be low-risk, she decided to give birth at home.
“I was empowered, I was transformed and I would love for women to have had that opportunity — to be an active participant in their own birth choices and birth experience,” she said.
AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION HOUSE OF DELEGATES
Resolution: 205
(A-08)
Introduced by: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
Subject: Home Deliveries
Referred to: Reference Committee B
(Craig W. Anderson, MD, Chair)
Whereas, Twenty-one states currently license midwives to attend home
births, all using the certified professional midwife (CPM) credential (CPM
or “lay” midwives), not the certified midwives (CM) credential which both
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and American
College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM) recognize[1] and
Whereas, There has been much attention in the media by celebrities having
home deliveries, with recent *Today Show* headings such as *”Ricki Lake
takes on baby birthing industry: Actress and former talk show host shares
her at-home delivery in new film”* [2] and
Whereas, An apparently uncomplicated pregnancy or delivery can quickly
become very complicated in the setting of maternal hemorrhage, shoulder
dystocia, eclampsia or other obstetric emergencies, necessitating the need
for rigorous standards, appropriate oversight of obstetric providers, and
the availability of emergency care, for the health of both the mother and
the baby during a delivery; therefore be it
RESOLVED, That our American Medical Association support the recent American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) statement that “*the
safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is
in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex, that meets
standards jointly outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and
ACOG, or in a freestanding birthing center that meets the standards of the
Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, The Joint Commission,
or the American Association of Birth Centers”* [3] (New HOD
Policy); and be it further
RESOLVED, That our AMA develop model legislation in support of the concept
that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum
period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex,
that meets standards jointly outlined by the AAP and ACOG, or in a
freestanding birthing center that meets the standards of the Accreditation
Association for Ambulatory Health Care, The Joint Commission, or the
American Association of Birth Centers.” (Directive to Take Action)
[1] <#_ednref1>
http://www.acog. org/departments/ stateleg/ MidwiferyYearinR eview2007. pdf,
accessed March 18, 2008
[2] <#_ednref2> www.today.msnbc. msn.com/id/ 22592397, accessed March 18, 2008
[3] <#_ednref3> www.acog.org/ from_home/ publications
press_releases/ nr02-06-06- 2.cfm<http://www.acog. org/from_ home/publication spress_releases/ nr02-06-06- 2.cfm>,
accessed March 18,2008
I like the WordPress blog format because it lets me know what people searched for (Google or other search engines) that got me to my blog.
Sometimes it’s key words to an article or post I’ve shared. Sometimes it’s a strange string of words and I can’t figure out how he or she landed here.
Once phrase I get a lot is “Louisville Birth Center”
Louisville currently has no birth center. Nothing remotely even close. We have no practicing Certified Nurse Midwives (CNM) and our home birth midwives aren’t really acknowledged by the ‘powers that be.’ We have big hospitals with high intervention and cesarean rates.
There have been plans for a free-standing birth center in town in the past, and I believe there are talks, dreams, and plans in progress, but I haven’t heard an update in a year or so. (things like this take time)
If you’re interested in actively helping this process, shoot me a comment and I can try to put you in touch with those who are working to give Louisville mothers a place to birth.
When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.
“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”
She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.
Ms. Robertson had been shopping around for individual health insurance, the kind that people buy on their own. She already had insurance but was looking for a better rate. After being rejected by Golden Rule, she kept her existing coverage.
With individual insurance, unlike the group coverage usually sponsored by employers, insurance companies in many states are free to pick and choose the people and conditions they cover, and base the price on a person’s medical history. Sometimes, a past Caesarean means higher premiums.
Although it is not known how many women are in Ms. Robertson’s situation, the number seems likely to increase, because the pool of people seeking individual health insurance, now about 18 million, has been growing steadily — and so has the Caesarean rate, which is at an all-time high of 31.1 percent. In 2006, more than 1.2 million Caesareans were performed in the United States, and researchers estimate that each year, half a million women giving birth have had previous Caesareans.
“Obstetricians are rendering large numbers of women uninsurable by overusing this surgery,” said Pamela Udy, president of the International Caesarean Awareness Network, a group whose mission is to prevent unnecessary Caesareans.
Although many women who have had a Caesarean can safely have a normal birth later, something that Ms. Udy’s group advocates, in recent years many doctors and hospitals have refused to allow such births, because they carry a small risk of a potentially fatal complication, uterine rupture. Now, Ms. Udy says, insurers are adding insult to injury. Not only are women feeling pressure to have Caesareans that they do not want and may not need, but they may also be denied coverage for the surgery.
“You have women just caught in the middle of this huge triangle of hospitals, insurance companies and doctors pointing the finger at each other,” Ms. Udy said.
