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gbr's comments:
on Having Fun in the Forest
My husband and I recently had the good fortune of purchasing a small cabin near Mt. Hood and have been actively exploring the trail system all summer. As hikers who, like many urban dwellers, crave the solitude and majesty of the wilderness, we have discovered how easily the sound of motorized vehicles can completely ruin that experience. From the traffic on nearby highways to vehicles on the trails, the sound carries and echoes through the valleys for miles, drowning out the natural sounds of birds and flowing water.
I'm guessing that off-roaders don't even realize how far their engine noise travels and how many hikers are affected by the sound pollution (and this doesn't even mention the destruction of the environment and affect on animal/bird life in the area). To expect that more forest should be open to off-road vehicle use is like smokers expecting that they should be able to smoke wherever, even if their second-hand smoke is bothering everyone around them. Laws have been passed to protect us from second-hand smoke pollution - let us keep similar stringent regulations to prevent the sound and environmental pollution of off-road vehicles from ruining both our forest lands and the experience of wilderness that the vast majority of forest users are looking for.
posted 2 years, 8 months ago
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on Midwifery Controversy
I think you might be missing the point, Kat. All of us who enoy having the choice to have babies at home know that hospitals are VERY necessary. I have no illusions about fairy-dust making everything okay for every birth at home - that would be foolishness. Moms and babies would die without modern hospitals, physicians, and the ability to do safe C-sections.
The point is that institutional obstetrics, a system run by hospitals who need to make a profit and doctors trained to be surgeons, often isn't the most conducive environment for pregnant women who are low-risk and desire the chance to allow their bodies to do what they are designed to do. In order to make money, they system is often set up so that prenatal visits are short, waits are long, and women often feel like cattle being herded through the shoot with little ability to make individual choices about their care. The delivering physician (and sometimes CNM) in the hospital may be present for less than 30 minutes out of an entire labor and postpartum. This is simply vastly different from what is offered by midwives in an out-of-hospital setting.
There are clearly many, many women (a vast majority, in fact) who believe that they are getting their needs met with care from an obstetrician and delivery in a hospital, and that's fine. Heather has different expectations and needs - allow her and the others who have posted on this list the ability to make the choice to seek out the kind of care and type of provider who meets their needs as well as to express WHY they hold the preferences that they do.
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on Midwifery Controversy
As a nursing instructor, I know what you went through being a nursing student and finding such a lack of supprt for homebirth. It's incredibly difficult to teach normal birth in hospitals where normal birth almost doesn't exist anymore - the doctors, nurses, and then the students all become obsessive about the notion that the hospital is the only safe place for birth while continually distorting the normal process of birth so that complications are rampant.
I'm delighted that all went well for you. Consider becoming an OB nurse or midwife and share what you know with women who need both your clinical skills and your personal testament.
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on Midwifery Controversy
I love this comment, Ann, and have heard this so many times as a midwife: This birth changed everything about how I see myself and my own strength. That's a comment that comes when women are well-supported by a capable midwife who understand that the woman does NOT need to be rescued from her labor - only loved and cared for and watched over.
All too often in the hospital, the staff not only searches for complications (and often creates them when they didn't previously exist), but they seem to think that women in normal labor are suffering needlessly and deserve to be rescued with anesthesia and surgery, short-circuiting the normal hormonal cascade of childbirth and creating increased dependence on the medical system instead of learning to rely on one's own inner strength.
Women are strong and capable - able to make good decisions with good information and able to give birth normally outside of the hospital in most cases.
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on Midwifery Controversy
And I'll bet you've NEVER seen horrible outcomes from hospital births, either vaginal or C/S... right?
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on Midwifery Controversy
I am a former certified nurse-midwife with over 20 years of experience delivering babies in both hospitals and at home. It has become clear that hospital-based health-care professionals are usually extremely biased against homebirth and steadfastly maintain that it is dangerous, even for healthy low-risk women (despite good evidence to the contrary). Part of the problem is that hospitals only see the transfers that home-based midwives bring in for obstetrical care due to complications that have arisen, a very skewed sample, and don't see the other 90% of normal, joyful births that do happen safely in the home setting.
In a decade of delivering babies at home, I never once had a complication in which the health of the baby or mother suffered because of loss of time due to transport. My complication rate and C/S rate were extremely low, as is common with out-of-hospital births that occur with well-trained professionals and well-screened women who have been given extensive information to make informed consent.
Very very rarely, there might be a major complication in which loss of time in transfer is potentially harmful, but there are far more complications that occur to normal, healthy women as a result of attempting to do normal birth inside a hospital. If is almost impossible to get a normal unmedicated birth inside of the hospital due to the incredible fear of malpractice lawsuits, over-monitoring, preventing maternal mobility, refusing women to eat and drink, overuse of uterine stimulants, inability to support women through labor without extensive use of anesthesias, and very low thresholds for deciding to do C-sections, which carry a much higher risk of both maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality (but earns the hospital and physician a lot more money).
Women deserve the chance to make their own decisions about how they give birth to their babies as long as the information is being provided by licensed professionals acting within the lawh
posted 2 years, 9 months ago
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on RX: Containing Costs
I completely agree that one problem is the expectation that our medical system can diagnose and fix every ill. Death, while inevitable, is viewed as an essential failure of the system. We are saved from our first, second, and sometimes third natural death, leading to an ever increasing population of frail elderly who are highly dependent and have costly chronic health care needs.
My mother-in-law recently died at the age of 88. The hospital bill alone for the last 8 hours of her life was about $20,000. That would have paid for a LOT of preventative care! While I dearly loved her, the extreme cost of trying to prevent her death seems incredibly unethical. (Incidentally, she did have advance directives that as for no heroic measures - just comfort care. That was ignored by the hospital in the intensity of trying to keep her alive.)
Until we, as a society, stop expecting medicine to beat death, we will continue to have costs spiraling out of control.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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on Battling Over Birth?
I am a certified nurse-midwife who delivered babies both at home and in the hospital for more than 20 years. In my opinion, the hospital environment creates far more problems than it solves for low-risk birthing women and my strong preference is for birth outside of the hospital.
Having said that, though, it has been abundantly clear that the vast majority of physicians are very opposed to losing their power over women and birth. Under the guise of "safety," they oppose all attempts that women make to deliver anywhere besides the hospital and are often outright hostile to women who, because of complications that might arise during a labor at home, have to transfer to the hospital for high-risk care.
Obstetricians are trained surgeons who spend the majority of their medical education learning to deal with complex obstetrical complications while midwives learn how to take care of women experiencing normal pregnancies and births. Because not every pregnancy that starts normal stays normal, lines of care get blurred - but BOTH specialties are necessary to maintain balance in the maternity care system.
I fully advocate supporting midwives as independently functioning health-care professionals who care for low-risk women in the birth setting of their choice, providing that care within a system that allows for seamless transfer to hospitals and/or physician care if complications develop so that the level of care is always appropriate to the level of risk.
In my former homebirth practice, with careful screening and following protocols that provided parameters around risk-assessment, my outcomes (maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality) were unmatched by anyone delivering babies inside the hospital, including physicians.
posted 4 years ago
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on Final Footprints
How does one find a death midwife in Portland?
posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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