Nursing Student Safely Delivers Baby In Car

Nice. Further evidence women don't need hospitals to do something they've evolved to be able to do. Nursing student in Brooklyn safely delivers baby in car.

Baby born in car. Source: NY Post

Woot woot! I've been waiting for an article like this, because there are few things I'm more passionate about than a woman's right to have a safe, natural, intervention-free childbirth. No, I'm not one of those tree-hugging hippies who host drum circles, though I do hug trees sometimes and my mom's a hippie. There are two, very strong stories, among a boat-load of evidence, that lead me to feel that at-home childbirth under the care of a midwife is the safest option for me and my (as of now hypothetical) child.

The first is the story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis (link goes to Wikipedia page). Dr. Sammelweis was the equivalent of a chief resident today at a hospital in 1847, and at the time the maternal death rate for puerperal fever was about 10%. In the midwives ward of the hospital, the death rate was less than 4%. He noticed that the doctors were going into the delivery rooms right after having performed autopsies. When a friend of his died after getting a cut during an autopsy, Dr. Sammelweis put two and two together and experimented with his own doctors ward. He found that a chlorine solution similar to bleach today seemed to work the best at removing the cadaver smell. He started to make the doctors wash their hands when travelling from autopsy to patient. The results were staggering: the death rate went from 18.3% in April to 2.2% in June (policy implemented mid-May). He took his case to other hospitals.

Instead of his solution being implemented immediately, he was laughed as, as germ theory had yet to be discovered. His proposal stated that some "unknown cadaverous particle" was being carried on the doctor's hands, and it seemed ridiculous at the time. Once Louis Pasteur discovered germs, Sammelweis's policy was revived, and maternal deaths due to infection dropped dramatically. Moral of the story: Doctors can sometimes create the very problems they seek to avoid. A modern day example of this is having sick people congregate in one location (a hospital), where illness can be easily spread in waiting and emergency rooms. Yet having a hospital over a home-visiting doctor is considered "progress."

The second story is about The Farm, which is near Summerland, Tennessee. This small community is the location of one of the longest free-standing birthing centers in the U.S., directed by Ina May Gaskin (pictured above to the left), and has been keeping statistics on its births for over 30 years. The birthing center is run by midwives, who have good relationships with doctors in nearby hospitals in case a woman needs to transfer. This rarely happens: from 1970 to 2000, less than 5% of women needed transportation, and only 1.3% of the total births were transported on an "emergency" basis (see image below). Their c-section rate was 1.4%, while the national average in 2001 was 24.4%, with some suggesting that it's as high as 33% now. The World Health Organization says that any level of c-section rate above 15% is likely to cause more harm than good.

Source: InaMay.com

The U.S. is killing its mothers with doctors who pursue courses of active management, a seemingly benign attempt at controlling a natural form of chaos that cascades into major surgery in which a woman who has just had her guts splayed out for the world to see and a baby ripped from her womb is supposed to recover in just 2-4 days (NIH). She is then sent home with a 7-9 pound baby while recovering from said major abdominal surgery. Just how is she supposed to pick the child up? Let alone breastfeed it when her stomach is sore and she's on pain meds (which probably shouldn't be fed to the baby anyway) and the meds are dulling the bonding response that is so key in developing successful breastfeeding. Modern surgical technology is advancing in the direction of being minimally invasive, yet there is no minimally invasive way to pull a 7 pound baby out of a uterus. That's like trying to gently remove a testicle. It just doesn't work.

When I am ready to have a child, I will not choose the supposedly educated M.D.s, who may have never seen a normal, non-medical, physiological birth that is supportive of the mother's ability to deliver a child on her own. Doctors go in to a delivery assuming they will be needed, and then got bored when they realized women didn't need them. Now there are monitors and drugs and guided pushing and episiotomies all to make the doctor feel a little less useless. No thanks. I don't need a busybody trying to control what my body already knows how to do.

While I know my passion about the subject comes through rather strongly, and that may even be putting it lightly, I hope that each person does their own research, and follows what their body tells them. There are many stories of women reporting a feeling of something just not being right just before or during labor, deciding to transport to a hospital, and learning that their gut feeling was correct. Get enough information to make intelligent decisions, and always keep in mind there may be alternatives you just don't know about, because either the media doesn't present them to you or because some (rather wealthy) people have an interest in keeping you ignorant.