ElementalMom

The amazing and brilliant Jen on VBACfacts.com posts this winner:

A Letter From A Hospital Explaining Why They Banned VBAC

And I thought I was speechless about the UHC elective cesarean thing I posted about last. This just kicks it. I may calm down enough to respond to this in a measured and analytical way sometime before I have this baby, but I doubt it.

Friends, it was never more clearly stated why birth does not belong anywhere near a hospital. And from the horses’ mouth.

A coworker of mine, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, just sent me this:

This makes me unspeakably sad for so many reasons. Here’s my take on it:

• Labor begins when the baby starts releasing hormones into the mother’s system that say that the lungs are mature and ready to go. Anything that alters that balance impairs the baby’s ability to breathe well outside the womb
• Those hormones start a chain reaction that set up every other thing; contractions, dilation, the “fetal ejection reflex” (yes, there is such a thing), placental detachment and expulsion, and lactation. Anything that alters that impairs everything that comes after in the chain.
• A hugely pregnant, uncomfortable, tired woman, when given an out, will take it. It’s biological nature to move towards pleasure and away from pain. Offering this kind of thing is sort of like handing out formula samples at the hospital; the implication is that you will somehow need the out. It steals a woman’s triumph out from under her, without her ever really knowing or understanding what happened; there’s just this vague unease.
• It is recklessly ignoring true informed consent. The implications, both macro and micro, of a decision like that, are not addressed here, nor will they be in an office visit discussing elective cesarean and/or induction, because a physician who’s tired, overworked, and profit-motivated, will take the out when given it, and a nicely scheduled birth is so much easier for them than the rollercoaster that is natural birth.

Every time I think I’m imagining at least part of how bad things in the American Birth Climate can get, something like this pops up in my face like a horrorshow. Someone talk me down?

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-02/compassion-cure

Check it out. Not only can they screw with our births, not only can they damage our kids, but then they can freaking MAKE MONEY OFF IT LATER when they figure out that ARTIFICIALLY DOSING OUR KIDS with a hormone OUR BODIES PRODUCE AT BIRTH FOR OUR BABIES can help fix what should never have been broken in the first place.

I‘m thrilled for those for whom this is a cure, a help, an assistance. And utterly terrified at what this says for the growing number of women and babies whose natural process is being willfully tampered with.

Profit, profit, profit all around. And all the costs to us.

Fuckers.

UPDATE: Angela tells me this wasn’t clear enough, so let me expand on precisely why I’m upset. Oytocin is flooded into a woman’s system with the end of 2nd stage labor. So the mother and the baby are both just swimming in the stuff. That’s why bonding is such a big deal; there’s a chemical peak of oxytocin in both their systems at the moment of vaginal delivery. Dianne Wiessinger speaks and writes extensively about this, from her background as a biologist, if you want to go look it up.

That entire mechanism is nonexistent in a cesarean.

Neither the woman nor the baby get oxytocin in a cesarean. Jostling the mother, having lights on, pretty much EVERYTHING involved in cesarean delivery stops the mammalian brain from producing oxytocin. This is why if you mess with a birthing cat, for example, she will abandon the kittens. If the oxytocin isn’t there, bonding becomes an intellectual rather than emotional/biochemical exercise. It’s also a fact that the rise in autism completely parallels the rise in surgical/medically managed births (as does violence in a culture. Michel Odent is your source for this tidbit.) So the very idea that they can force women into (profitable for them) cesareans, that mess with the oxytocin delivery, and then make those same women pay for artificial oxytocin to help heal the babies they themselves damaged…infuriating.

I haven’t had a good solid birth rant in a while. Sometimes, the Universe conspires to set me up for one, though.

Night before last, my fabulous pal Jessica invited me to a showing of The Business of Being Born, being hosted by UrbanCrunchyMama. I was really excited to be there, since other ICAN women had been seeing it, hosting screenings, and generally talking it over for a while, and I was looking forward to forming my own opinions.

More on those opinions in a bit.

We got back late, and while I was still reeling, the next day, working on this very blog post, the CDC released the preliminary statistics for cesareans in the US in 2006 (pdf).

Days like this, I wish alcohol was an option. Days like this, I wonder if the stress to the baby I’m gestating is worse than the impact of the glass of chardonnay I could hear calling to me.

31.1%, my friends. I can’t even type that without crying. 31.1% of babies in this country are ripped out of their mothers through an act of major abdominal surgery. More than one woman in three has this damned scar on her belly. And that’s an average. In some states (pdf) , it’s far higher. And you know what really sucks? Those numbers are still, even, low. In some states, cesareans for multiples (twins, triplets, etc.) are not included.

I am not even going to try to be balanced and rational about it at this point. If you want balanced and rational, stop reading.

Nothing has changed suddenly in the last 15 years about American womens’ pelvises. The only thing that has changed is malpractice insurance, and physician arrogance. Oh yeah, and women’s compliance. We just walk right in, when we find out we’re pregnant, we find an OB, and we let that person tell us what to do, because we have this blind, naive, stupid idea that they have our best interest in mind.

I just recently heard the story of a woman whose doctor told her that her baby was in distress, and not a few minutes later, overheard the nurses talking about how what was really happening was that the doctor had a new wife who demanded that he be home for dinner promptly at 6PM.

31.1 fucking percent. Women cut. Babies cut. Women and babies dying (pdf). Families disrupted. Biology disrupted. And oh, how the money rolls in to the pockets of the hospitals. I hope the shareholders are fucking happy, safely counting their earnings, drowning in blood and pain they never touch. How many Americans are enrolled in a 401(k) that includes shares in Kaiser or any of the other big “health” organizations? Go check your plan. Do it now.

So meanwhile, back to Business of Being Born…

I forget, sometimes, because I am so immersed in the politics of birth, how far I’ve come in the last five years. I was trying hard to keep my cynical mouth shut, with fairly limited success.

I found the portrayals of the births themselves to be fantastic. Women at home, moving, vocalizing, whining, complaining; doing all the things that real women really in labor do. The midwife had filmed her own birth, and she was the biggest whiner of the lot; a fact she admitted with no small degree of humor. I found myself indulging in some equally funny memories of my own homebirth, and chuckling.

It was really really nice to hear other people saying what we say in ICAN all the time, and get branded as being “bitter, hysterical, angry women” over; that American birth is dangerous, pathological, and all about the cash flow. That the lithotomy position is evil. That birth is a natural bodily function. That OBs are surgeons with no training in normal birth. That most medical professionals have never seen a normal birth. That when you start in with interventions, you are playing with mechanisms that are poorly understood, and that nothing good comes of it. A few times, I flat-out applauded.

I have to say though, that while the film is a great start, I am wildly disappointed by the end. And again, maybe that’s just because of where I am, and who I know, and how immersed I am in the whole birth thing. For those of you who haven’t seen the film, basically despite everything she’s seen in making the film, the director (Abby) opts for a classic American McPregnancy, early ultrasounds, OB care, the whole enchilada, and ends up with an emergency cesarean for a breech baby. Oh sure, there are some other complications, and I suspect that we’ll never know the whole story, nor should we necessarily have the right to. But what women are going to take away is that cesarean for breech is acceptable, and it isn’t.

Breech birth is a variation of normal. It has a few special techniques involved, that require some additional training to be able to manage correctly. But instead of simply acquiring that training, midwives who practice more in the medical model, and obstetricians, simply declare breech to be an automatic cesarean, and that’s that. I know a lot of very dedicated women (I’m talking about you, Christie!) who have dedicated themselves to fighting back the tide on this one, and Abby’s inclusion of this debacle in the film sets them all back, and hard.

One step forward, two steps back. Good news, a film about the insanity of American birth culture is getting attention. Bad news, it ends with an unnecessary cesarean. Good news, people are talking. Bad news, they’re talking about how great it is that Abby and her baby were saved. I could beat my head against the wall.

Abby was one of those 31.1 percent of women, cut in 2006. Face to the statistic. Just one out of so very many.

This is Teresa’s journey to HWBA3C. And while I like birthstories, and read them from time to time, this picture montage of her entire journey has had me sobbing in joy each and every time I watch it.

http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/view_shared?p=2a4e81fbf0f66accb8afce

I showed it to one non-parent friend of mine, who said she was utterly unmoved. I find myself wondering if I’ve changed so much, that this impacts me so hard. Let me know what you all think.

I‘ve been studing extreme sports pretty much since I got told that I was participating in one (freediving), and decided that our culture’s view of “extreme” is ridiculous.

I can tell you that, judging by what gets written about the things people do to themselves in the name of sport, the human body is astonishing in what it can go through, and heal from. Astonishing. There was one motorcyclist, his name escapes me, but in one wipeout, they had to staple his face back onto his head. Very frankensteinian. I read an interview with his mother, who basically said that she’d relaxed years ago, and just kept up good medical insurance.

In the name of sport, people shred themselves in all kinds of fascinating ways.

And yet never, not ever, will you hear someone be told not to get back in the ocean, not to get back on the bike, not to climb the mountain, just because a few years back something went all weird and pear-shaped on them. They broke, they heal, they keep coming.

And yet if you’ve had a cesarean, they’ll tell you you can’t birth any other way, that trying is too risky, that you must at all times be safe safe safe, and of course being safe happens to be doing what they tell you to do, which is to get another cesarean. Why? Because there’s a chance the scar on your uterus will rupture. You know, because it’s a scar.

I really do think that our culture wants to control birthing women, and iconicise athletes, without recognizing that the human body is a constant form. Being a birther doesn’t change how you heal, being a biker doesn’t change how you heal. So unless a single injury starts banning men from the sports they participate in, I think it’s absolute crap that an injury (and a surgical injury at that! Darn sight easier to heal from than having your face ripped off your skull!) should ban a woman from the birth she wants.

Oh sure, increased stats for risk of blah blah blah Charlie Brown’s Teacher blah blah blah. When extreme athletes pick themselves back up and keep going, we idolize them. No one would dare chide a downhill skier for getting back on the skis, but somehow, we’ve let them do it to us.