Hat tip to Kimberly Spencer, CPM, for this information!

I can honestly say I have only two regrets in my experiences as a mother.  I regret weaning (from breastfeeding) any of my children before the age of at least two years old; and I regret ever wasting the gas to drive to a worthless hospital to have my babies.  Granted, I managed to have intervention-free natural childbirths, but it’s simply not the same.  And paying someone $5,000 for the use of a room and a set of sheets for a whopping four hours is ridiculous.

If God were, by some glorious wonderful miracle, grant me baby #5 (which hubby says won’t happen, and I’m having a very hard time dealing with that!), there is no way, no how I will leave the safety of my home.  I will have an unassisted homebirth or there may be a slight chance of having a midwife here.  I really really regret not experiencing a lovely, calm, beautiful birth safe and sound in my own environment with my family beside me.

http://www.nashvillemidwife.com/safety.html

Image courtesy of “Journey to a Birth” – click picture to view blog.

I was biting it so hard this past weekend.

WARNING – RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD RANT AHEAD.  I mean a BIG RANT ahead!

Okay, you were very warned.

So a gentleman came by to purchase some baby items we had for sale.  He had a new 7 week old baby at home, a precious little girl.  His first.   New parents are just the cutest things, aren’t they??

As this very nice gentleman started regaling us with the stories of his wife’s pregnancy, childbirth, and the baby’s first few weeks of life, as well as his observations of other parents and their children now that he is a daddy, I glanced over and watched my husband prepare… waiting for me to start correcting and educating this poor unsuspecting man.  I found it funny – my hubby knows me all too well.  And I behaved and didn’t say a word.  Rather proud of myself, and if I could, I would pat my own back.

The point of this story is that I am increasingly shocked at the poor information out there.  This man said his wife was a doctor.  Now, he didn’t say what KIND of doctor, and I didn’t ask.  So she could’ve been a veterinarian for all I know.  But he began by saying that when her water broke, she knew, as a doctor and based on her doctor’s instructions, they must Immediately Rush, Without Hesitation, Without Finishing Packing The Bag, To The Hospital… because it’s absolutely urgent that she lay down in bed right that second and start being monitored.  Just because her water broke.

I hate this myth.  But I hate it more because this is coming from a doctor.  This was her first baby, she probably could’ve labored at home for hours and hours and hours before she went to the hospital and started letting doctors interfere with nature.

But I forget – she IS a doctor, so she is going to believe 100% of everything her doctors tell her, no questions asked.

And I didn’t utter a word.  I’m still beaming with pride that I didn’t let a rant go right then and there.  Of course, I didn’t have his money in my hands yet, I wasn’t about to blow a $100.00 sale because I wanted to scream that his wife and her lousy doctors were WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!

I didn’t even rant at the woman who called me and asked if I had a child leash for sale.  Well, lady, I have some for my dogs, because dogs belong on leashes… but that’s another blog altogether, isn’t it???

But then he made a comment about driving through a neighborhood and seeing children playing in their front yards alone.  ALONE??? GASP!!  THE HORROR, I was thinking!  He just couldn’t understand how any responsible parent could possibly let their children play outside without being within 32 inches of them At All Times!  I mean, if it happens on CSI Every Single Week, it must happen in your suburban neighborhood every single week too!!!

People really need to quit living in the land of make believe when it comes to their children and their safety.  I asked my husband how many scaremongering news stories we’ve heard in the past year or so about a child abduction that wasn’t committed by a mom or dad or their Uncle Bob.  We could only think of one off the top of our heads (and I’m not interested in being corrected – there hasn’t been hundreds or even dozens or even tens) and one we weren’t sure of the result of.  And the one we could think of was actually the child’s teacher or someone she knew, so still not a real stranger abduction.  But since two or three happen Every Night in prime time, people really get the lines blurred between reality and complete fiction.

I was even getting well-meaning but very ill-informed advice in another blog post about letting my children eat raw cookie and cake dough.  The chance of my kids killing themselves in a bathtub is about 60 times higher than dying from raw eggs.  More people die from venomous spider bites than eating cookie dough.  Licking the beaters is a rite of childhood, in my opinion.  Since walking across the floor and falling to their death has about a 1 in 6,000 risk, I’m not going to fret a 1 in 50,000,000 risk.  Yes, 50 million.  You’ve not even looked into the stats, or really researched the odds, have you?  Even without looking it up, I knew the odds were pathetically low and I was always a-okay with my choice.

But the naysayers are shaking their heads and shrugging “no no no – kids get killed daily by strangers and men in vans take girls from the schools weekly and it’s a bad dangerous terrible world out there”.  They look at their neighborhood map online with the sexual predators – so many then-18 year olds having sex with their 17 year old girlfriends and being on the list forever, to name a few things that totally discredit that list, IMO.  And of course, if it’s an old man, he’s waiting on his front porch with a bowl of candy, waiting to lure your children into the bowels of his vinyl siding home to do God-Knows-What to.  NO HE’S NOT!  It’s NOT a bad world!  You’re doing a horrible disservice to your kids sheltering them so.  They won’t know how to prepare for the world, because you won’t be there hovering over them.

You have to let them go.  You have to let them have their childhoods.  It’s not fair to them or you, it’s not beneficial, and it’s sad when I hear about a friend of my 11 year old son that doesn’t know how to navigate the neighborhood on his bike – he should’ve been riding in that neighborhood for years by now!  I’m so glad our kids are so safe in today’s world.

I warned you it was a rant.  I feel much better now!

“I’m not allowed to” (insert your own here) – drink and eat while in labor/get out of bed while in labor/refuse an IV/refuse constant monitoring/go home the same day/etc. etc. etc.

I know I’ve said it before.  I know I’m a broken record.  I don’t care.  I want women to have fantastic birthing experiences like I did.  Like millions of other women who take control do.

Who’s paying who for a service here?  YOU are paying THEM.  It’s no different than paying for a meal at a restaurant – you want steak, they say “oh, honey, no you don’t”, you INSIST that yes you do.  And you GET that steak. 

Your doctors are not gods.  They do not necessarily know what’s best for you at that exact moment.  If you are hungry, you need to eat.  If you are thirsty, you must drink.  If your doctor believes you can’t, then he needs to go back to medical school because that myth has been debunked over and over again.  No wonder women that labor for 5+ hours get weaker and weaker, and ultimately end up with intervention after intervention.  I wonder how many women that ended up having dangerous major abdominal surgery (okay, c-sections if it sounds better), because they couldn’t progress or couldn’t continue laboring, would’ve had wonderful normal deliveries if their docs hadn’t been wrong about them eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee or a soda or a glass of water?  You can’t drive a car with no gas!!

And being forced to lay in a bed with monitors on is horrible!  If you are healthy, baby is healthy, and you are fine, your doctor cannot force you to lay in bed.  Get up.  Walk around.  There are many experts that think being hooked up to monitors leads to interventions too – baby’s heartbeat naturally speeds up and slows down, but docs jump so fast on the panic wagon that many women are led to believe their baby is in danger, when in fact there’s no problem at all.

And nope, they can’t force you to be hooked to an IV either.  If you’re aiming for a drug-free delivery (yay you!), and aren’t having pitocin or other dangerous meds to help this completely natural process along… refuse.  You have CHOICES!! I mean, this is your body!  This is your baby!  Want to sit up to give birth?  DO IT!  Don’t want genital mutilation – I mean an episiotomy?  Then TELL THEM!  Very VERY few deliveries actually “need” an episiotomy.  This is NOT routine, regardless of what your doc says.  Just like your doc will tell you the epidural is perfectly safe… you need to keep in mind that most “rules” are not made for mom – they’re made for the medical staff to have you on a timeline so they can schedule whatever else they have going on and so that THEY have control.  This is why that horrible and completely self-defeating lithotomy (flat on back) position for birthing started – it’s easy for the doc. 

You know what?  It doesn’t matter what’s “easy” for the doc.  He’s getting paid a great deal of money to perform a service for YOU.  Not the other way around.

Do your homework, ladies, I beg of you.  Arm yourself with information.  KNOW what you want.  I can assure you that your doctor and nurses will appreciate you taking some control over your situation.  And you know what?  If they don’t like you taking control because then they may not make it home in time to watch Grey’s Anatomy, too bad.

Don’t end up with a childbirth experience you will look back on and be sad about.  Make it a beautiful, glorious day, make it everything you want. Don’t have a “lay there and nod” mentality.  This day is ALL about YOU.  Those doctors and nurses will go home and then deliver 300 more babies this year – this is your ONE chance to make it perfect.  You have the control, the ability, and the strength to do it.

And you know what else?  You can go home right away, within hours, to recover safe and sound in your own surroundings.  Didn’t know you could do that either?  Yup.  They can’t force you to stay if you and baby are healthy!

Here’s sending loads of hugs and prayers to those that are experiencing the wonderful journey of pregnancy.  Congratulations!

I’m weird.  Yeah yeah, not a surprise to most of you.

I’m officially a blog-surfer-addict.  I love love love being let into other people’s lives, a little bit at a time.  The tags I mostly follow are the childbirth, pregnancy, newborn, toddler, infant nutrition, and teenager tags – obviously the ones closest to home.

I read several blogs yesterday that talked about the first few weeks at home with a new baby, and they all had the same theme.

Stay. Away. From. Everyone.

These were either blogs for visitors – family members and friends of women about to have babies… or blogs for preggos themselves.  Tell visitors not to come over, unplug the phone, blah blah blah… all because you’ll want this time to “recoup”, “recover”, “get settled”,  ”whatever”.

Well, again I must go against the grain.

I WANTED a house full of people, from the minute I walked through the door!  When I came home with Ayla, she was .about 5 hours old.  We stopped at Tim Horton’s on the way home, got donuts and mochas for the kids, and walked in the door to Grandma and Grandpa waiting to hold their new grandbaby.  A few hours later, Aunt Deanna came by, then other visitors by the score.   Come see me!  Bring food!!

I LOVED it.  I love passing around the baby (nope, I don’t believe for a millisecond that no one can breathe within three feet of her for six months lest she get the sniffles – I don’t know what nasty diseases these “expert’s” family and friends always have that they say baby should not be around them).  I love feeding people.  I don’t know why every new mom is told she’ll be incapacitated and won’t even want to heat up a bowl of soup – I was able to cook dinners to feed six people the same weekend I had the baby.  I felt great. 

And I think a lot of new moms would feel better if they knew they were allowed to.  Does that make sense?  This is something my doc said to me… she said new (and veteran!) moms were programmed to think that after childbirth they are to lay around for 72 hours, then go home and be incapacitated for weeks.  Maybe even months.  I wonder if they take the recommendation (and it’s only a recommendation!) to wait six weeks for intercourse as “It will take six weeks for you to be back to YOU”.

And don’t get me wrong – before I get slammed with 300 comments and emails about bad labor experiences or risky c-sections and how you DID need weeks to recover, or health problems that you had that you needed weeks to recover, or baby has a health issue… I’m talking about the vast VAST majority of childbirths, not the exceptions to the rule.

And yes, there’s also those out there that WANTED to be taken care of for days or weeks.  And that’s fine too.  More power to ya.  I don’t like “being taken care of”.

So anyways, that’s my rant for the day.  I just don’t think it should be an across the board YOU WON’T WANT VISITORS (or you SHOULDN’T HAVE VISITORS) FOR WEEKS statement.  I don’t get the whole “stay alone cooped up in the house for weeks after you have a new baby”.  I wanted – NEEDED –  to get out and show off the new blessing, pass them around, have people in, whatever.  Besides, it’s a much needed break when you play “pass the baby” - you can get a shower long enough to shave your legs!

(hat tip to Rixa, once again!)

From the article:

For many pregnant women in America, it is easier today to walk into a hospital and request major abdominal surgery than it is to give birth as nature intended. Jessica Barton knows this all too well. At 33, the curriculum developer in Santa Barbara, Calif., is expecting her second child in June. But since her first child ended up being delivered by cesarean section, she can’t find an obstetrician in her county who will let her even try to push this go-round. And she could locate only one doctor in nearby Ventura County who allows the option of vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). But what if he’s not on call the day she goes into labor? That’s why, in order to give birth the old-fashioned way, Barton is planning to go to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. “One of my biggest worries is the 100-mile drive to the hospital,” she says. “It can take from 2 to 3 1/2 hours. I know it will be uncomfortable, and I worry about waiting too long and giving birth in the car.”

Much ado has been made recently of women who choose to have cesareans, but little attention has been paid to the vast number of moms who are forced to have them. More than 9 out of 10 births following a C-section are now surgical deliveries, proving that “once a cesarean, always a cesarean”–an axiom thought to be outmoded in the 1990s–is alive and kicking. Indeed, the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN), a grass-roots group, recently called 2,850 hospitals that have labor and delivery wards and found that 28% of them don’t allow VBACs, up from 10% in its previous survey, in 2004. ICAN’s latest findings note that another 21% of hospitals have what it calls “de facto bans,” i.e., the hospitals have no official policies against VBAC, but no obstetricians will perform them.

Read the rest of the article here.

Rixa asks all of us:

I feel that access to VBAC is one of the most pressing maternity care issues in this country, along with the disturbingly high cesarean rate (31.1% as of 2006). Please advertise this article widely, making sure to link to the original article on Time’s website. The more traffic it gets, the longer it will remain online.

Hat Tip to Rixa for finding another great article!

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2009/02/eduadors-vertical-maternity-ward.html

Read it – it’s great information!  This is what Rixa noted at the bottom of her blog:

Vertical births have also lowered the hospital’s cesarean rate from 18% to 8%.

That is FANTASTIC!!!

Too many doctors and hospitals are overusing high-tech procedures

http://www.consumerreports.org/health/medical-conditions-treatments/pregnancy-childbirth/maternity-care/overview/maternity-care.htm?loginMethod=auto

The report found that, in the U.S., too many healthy women with low-risk pregnancies are being routinely subjected to high-tech or invasive interventions that should be reserved for higher-risk pregnancies. Such measures include:

• Inducing labor. The percentage of women whose labor was induced more than doubled between 1990 and 2005
• Use of epidural painkillers, which might cause adverse effects, including rapid fetal heart rate and poor performance on newborn assessment tests
• Delivery by Caesarean section, which is estimated to account for one-third of all U.S births in 2008, will far exceed the World Health Organization’s recommended national rate of 5 to 10 percent
• Electronic fetal monitoring, unnecessarily adding to delivery costs
• Rupturing membranes (“breaking the waters”), intending to hasten onset of labor
• Episiotomy, which is often unnecessary

In fact, the current style of maternity care is so procedure-intensive that 6 of the 15 most common hospital procedures used in the entire U.S. are related to childbirth. Although most childbearing women in this country are healthy and at low risk for childbirth complications, national surveys reveal that essentially all women who give birth in U.S. hospitals have high rates of use of complex interventions, with risks of adverse effects.

 

Hat tip to Pushed Birth for finding this article!

Did you know that YOU control your health care and the following is completely, 100% optional?

• GBS test (it’s rare that a baby will contract it, and studies show use of antibiotics to mom doesn’t reduce infant deaths anyways).  My labors, and millions of others too, have all been so fast that a postive wouldn’t have made any difference – no time for the meds anyways.  Do some research!  Take it if you want, but it’s optional.
• Any fetal testing such as nuchal fold, etc.  Do your own research.  False positives run RAMPANT here.  And what would you do with the results?  Would you terminate?  Can you really be “prepared” for a baby with Downs Syndrome?  It’s perfectly fine if you want them, just be aware of the options.  But don’t let a doc tell you that you MUST have them.  I personally just loved the ultrasounds, and I always wanted to find out the sex, but that’s as far as I’d want to go. 
• Any and all internal exams?  Dilation means ZILCH (less than zilch, actually) - you may be at zero and have that baby in 60 minutes, or at 4 and have it in two weeks.  Don’t let the doc do these uncomfortable exams, they’re not medically necessary in a normal pregnancy – I’m not too sure there’d be many reasons for them in a NOT normal pregnancy. 
  * They can cause cramping, bleeding, infection, and premature breaking of the waters.  They’ve even been known to start early labor. Refuse.  Better yet, ask the doc why.  If she says dilation, ask her what that means.  If she says anything other than “nothing”, find a new doc.  Oh, and hey, if you like these, more power to ya.  Whatever floats your boat.
  Internal exams during labor are optional too.  Personally, I only let the doc check ONE TIME when I think I’m going to want to start pushing, just to make sure I’m fully effaced and dilated.  Otherwise, it does me no good to have every nurse, medical student, and doctor messing with me.  See * above.  NO.
• Did you know that you don’t have to rush to the hospital (if you’re having a hospital birth) the millisecond your water breaks?  The “risk of infection after the water breaks” comes from the medical practice of 54 people must jam their hands up you to check your cervix from the minute you get into the hospital until you push out the baby.  Since no one will be doing that (see above), you don’t run the same risk of infection.  Stay at home as long as possible, labor comfortably and happily. 
• Continuous fetal monitoring in the hospital  (this, and all my pearls of wisdom, is of course based on a normal, low-risk pregnancy/childbirth).  This restricts mama to laying in a bed, which is the last position you should be while laboring!
• Don’t let them tell you that you can’t eat or drink either.  If you’re hungry, eat.  If you want a cup of coffee or a soda, get it.  This myth dates back a very VERY long time ago when the drugs used on moms for emergency c-sections were much harsher.  Also, your stomach is never truly empty, so have a cup.  The nurse is not the boss of you, and sometimes they don’t know better.  Not having something during longer labors actually weakens the mom, making the chance of drugs or risky surgery higher.
• The IV or even the heplock.  These frankly bug me, so I wouldn’t have one anyways, but I’ll bet the vast majority of moms who have had hospital births thought they HAD to have this.  Nope.  That’s what’s totally cool about it being YOUR body – you can say NO!  If, on the rare rare RARE chance you would need IV fluids or meds, the nurse can set it in a matter of seconds.  No need for the puncture and discomfort if it’s not necessary!
• Stirrups in labor?  This is ghastly to me.  First, laying down flat on your back is second only to standing on your head for horrible positions to be in to labor.  It defeats gravity.  Sit up, stand, get on all fours, or squat.  Let gravity work with you, let the natural shape of your cervix open wider and you’ll have a much better delivery.  The doc cannot force you on your back if you don’t let her.
• Immediate clamping of the cord and delivery of the placenta.  There is no rush for this.  Let it happen naturally.  Unless your baby has a problem and must be rushed off to the NICU, spend some time bonding, let the cord blood go to your baby (it belongs to her!), let the placenta come out when your body is ready. 
• This is a biggie:  A 48 or 72 hour hospital stay after a normal vaginal delivery.  I’ll bet the same is true here as in the IV – most moms think they’re not “allowed” to leave.  Well, you’re not a hostage, and if you feel good in three hours, GO HOME.  There are no laws, no rules that state a healthy mom and healthy baby have to stick around a nasty hospital (don’t fool yourself – they’re nasty).  Go home and recover where you’re comfortable.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve been there four times and learned a lot from experience.  The information on medical tests is out there, and the rest is common sense.  Talk with your doc, be a PARTNER in your healthcare, have the pregnancy and childbirth you’ve always dreamed of – one that YOU are in control of.

Better yet, just get a midwife and STAY HOME to safely have your baby.  You’ll feel better, baby will feel better, you will be in charge of your own body, and it will be a beautiful experience!!

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2009/01/just-birth.html

At its core, birth is so simple and yet such a mystery.

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2009/01/born-free-unassisted-childbirth-in.html