ElementalMom

From Alan Huber’s Birth Issues blog:

What do you call people of childbearing age? If you’re 40 and over, you would call them twenty or thirty something’s. If you’re under 40, they are known as; millennials or digital natives.

Most obstetricians, midwives, family physicians, childbirth educators and administrators are in the over 40 category. They need to get their message heard by pregnant women, i.e., millennials. Just as you didn’t like your parents music, and your children don’t like your music, most birth care providers don’t know how to create and place a message that the millennials will hear and act upon.

At the 2009 Controversies in Childbirth Conference, super geek, and frustrated birth advocate, Laureen Hudson, presented an amazing seminar on getting your message heard. Of course, one hour is insufficient to learn how to bridge the digital generation gap.

Laureen has agreed to a, full afternoon, hands-on workshop with participants encouraged to bring your laptops, so you not only learn, but you actually:

Create an online presence on; Websites, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Blogs.
Including:
How to build an audience
How much time will it take
The importance of your online reputation
How to be found on search engines
What works
What you should avoid and much more…

Space is extremely limited because of the limited number of WiFi connections and you are urged to register now at the conference website: http://www.birthconference.org

The Controversies in Childbirth Conference will be held February 19-21, 2010, in Tampa, Florida. Laureen’s pre-conference workshop will be held on Thursday, February 18th.

This is an amazing opportunity to improve your business marketing and learn to digitally connect with patients and clients. Hope to see you in Tampa!

I’m working on writing a book about moving aboard the boat. I’ll write more about that more on my other blog. But I’m doing a lot of cannibalizing of content from this blog and the other one. Most importantly to this post, this morning, I rewrote Rowan’s birth story.

Most of my readers here know that Rowan’s birth was insanely traumatic for me. An unplanned, unwanted cesarean, that birth catapulted me into a year of depression followed by some of the angriest years of my life, and a vocation of activism in the arena of birth. No woman anywhere should have to go through what I did, and yet, the (unnecessary) cesarean rate in this country continues to skyrocket. It’s a crisis, it’s a human rights violation, and it’s a complete international embarassment.

But that’s not what I am writing about this morning.

I wrote the story once, when I was still recovering, and it was the sweetness and light that women usually describe their cesareans as. “Totally necessary” they say. Bullshit, says I. But at the time, I’d have killed you for suggesting mine wasn’t. I wrote it a second time, once I was recovering, in the depths of my depression, in the hopes that women reading it would learn from my journey and not have to take the same one themselves. It was all about figuring out where things had gone wrong, in order to make different, better choices later.

This time, I am rewriting it as what its deepest meaning and highest purpose (for me) might possibly be. Rowan’s birth is what finally, unequivocally taught me that if I wanted it done right, I had to do it myself. That relying on the System for anything at all was a sure path to madness, and that while independence carries its own problems, those problems are at least unilaterally the result of your own choices, and not someone else’s. Someone else who almost certainly has their own paycheck and ass as a higher concern than your  well being.

So here’s to Version 3 of Rowan’s birth. It’s taken me seven long, hard, uphill, introspective, kick-in-the-teeth years to get to the place where I am grateful for the lesson, moreso than grieving of the process that got me here.

I am teaching a series over at Conscious Woman, “Conscious Woman Online“, to help encourage people who have good messages to offer to get online and start communicating with the Digital Natives who are already there.

Yesterday’s class was disappointingly small; only two registrants. Wah, right? Those two registrants were none other than Gloria Lemay, and Ina May Gaskin! WHOOT! I got to soapbox them both with my message; that women need to be able to find good information on birth *before* the Machine gets them. And apparently, I got my message across! WHOOT!!!! Check these review comments out!

I just had my mind expanded this morning by Laureen Hudson’s hour long online session on how to use the internet to get a message out. Laureen’s session “Creating an Online Presence,” gave me a wealth of information in a short time and impressed me with how many people are out there who completely rely on the internet for their information. I needed that, and maybe you do, too.

- Ina May Gaskin

I just hung up the phone from doing the hour long session with Laureen Hudson on “Creating an Online Presence”. Laureen’s know-how and expertise were enough to wake up even the birth oldtimers like me and Ina May to the many unused opportunities of the internet. Laureen’s engaging and easygoing teaching style made even those scary (to me) terms like “hypertext, streaming, wordpress, technorati, feedreader and trackback” start to make sense. Her passion is to reach the generation of young women who have not yet given birth BEFORE they fall into the black hole of aggressive obstetrics. I came away from the class today with lots of ways to improve my website and make it more modern, usable and interesting for readers. This class will run again this coming Friday (August 22) and I heartily recommend it.

- Gloria Lemay

How incredibly spiffy is that?

I‘m teaching that class that they took one more time, and there are two more classes in the series, one on SEO and one on blogging, which I’m honestly more excited about than I was about the first two classes in the series. Hopefully I can drum up some more registrations… cause that means I’ve managed to convince more people to get out there and actually reach the folks who need the messages most.

As usual, things are nutty in the birth advocacy world. It’s not worth going into the details, but recently, I was questioned by someone who basically said that because I was a mother of sons, not daughters, my birth advocacy work didn’t have the urgency that the work mothers of daughters had. You know, because my boys were never going to get subjected to what women here routinely do.

That part’s true. My sons will never be the direct physical victims of the physical, emotional, and mental abuse that passes for birth care in this country.

My sons, like their father before them, are likely to end up being helpless observers as the women they love are gutted like halibut. Woken up from a restless sleep in an uncomfortable chair to discover that other people have decided that it’s time to take your firstborn child by surgery. Completely discounted, completely marginalized, completely ignored. Here, put this surgical suit on; we’ll let you into the OR so you can see your wife’s intestines, smell her skin roasting when we do cautery, hold her hands when she starts convulsing, and have a moment of sheerest panic when we take the baby to the nursery; here, decide on a dime who needs your presence more, your helpless newborn or your helpless wife. Try really hard not to guilt yourself for either decision, but do so anyway.

My sons, like their father before them, will head home with a woman who underwent a surgery that everyone minimizes. Who is a shell of herself. Whose world was ripped apart and reassembled with vicodin and steri-strips. And they will be looking at between a year and as many years as the rest of her life, wondering when they get the woman they married back. And in the meantime, if she’s lucky, she’ll figure out that it’s the system, not her, and get her act together. If she’s not lucky, she’ll spend her days sitting in a rocker pulling on her hair, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Maybe she’ll get medicated, maybe she won’t. And my sons will be there, trying to deal with that and a newborn, and wondering where it all went wrong, and powerless to do a damn thing about it.

I have nothing to worry about. I’ll just be the mother in law, watching the impending train wreck, with no way to get in there and be useful to prevent … anything.

Friends… my urgency is huge. And there’s not nearly so much time as we think. In the time since advocacy groups began howling about the rate of cesareans, ours here in the US has skyrocketed from 5% to just over 31%. At that rate… by the time my sons are having children, my scenario is far more likely than the chance that the mother of their children will have a normal birth.

I could get lucky. They could hook up with women who know the score, who know how to fight, who are strong enough to have a normal birth. And of course I wish that for them with all my heart. But you know… *I* didn’t know any better. And in the years I’ve been doing this birth advocacy thing, I have met all kinds of women who are the sorts of women who could love, cherish, and honor my sons, who didn’t know any better. Not the first time, at any rate. Sometimes not even the second or third, and by that point, the fight to birth normally is insanely difficult, and uphill every step of the way, in the snow, both directions. I can’t assume my boys will hook up with women who are birth advocates. I have to assume they’ll be normal women, having normal lives, who are unaware of the monster of US obstetrics.

I can pray that I’ll have a relationship with them based on respect and support, and that maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll have earned the right to be involved in their process. It does happen; I myself have a wonderful MiL. But I can’t assume that.

Which means that I have serious work to do, on behalf of all women. And there simply isn’t much time.