OB-GYN-L Messages for December, 1995: Re: fetal monitoring--response to Dr. Nagey

Re: fetal monitoring--response to Dr. Nagey

From:

EvelynMcH@aol.com

Fri Dec 22 22:27:40 1995

>I am incredibly happy to hear that someone is seeing that machines are not necessary to deliver babies. It appears to me that the deliveries in hospitals today seem to be high tech extractions of the precious newborn under epidural anesthesia using an operative approach. What has happened?
>Why have women given back their god given right to birth a baby to the technology that was begun in the 70's? For me birth was a life changing event. For the women that I serve it is the same. As much as you might think differently, the pain of childbirth is empowering and uplifting, and connects us to our bodies. It is so painful for me to see 95% epidural
rates >in my local hospital. It is so disappointing when people that I respect are so disconnected with the normalacy of birth. An article published in ACOG states that in the normal woman a nurse taking the heart rate with a fetascope is just as effective as the monitor. I hope that the return to the bedside is a trend that develops in the United States.Lonnie Morris

Amen to your comments. As a woman that recently had a birthing experience where a mildly elevated BP due to a gastrointestinal flu at 35 weeks led to a series of more and more drastic interventions, each directly caused by the prior, I know that there has to be a better way to deal with childbirth than treating it as if every mother and child have to be totally protected against every eventuality, no matter how remote, irregardless of the damage that the INTERVENTIONS can do in and of themselves. As a result of these interventions to protect me and my baby, she ended up a month premature, underweight, and spent her first three weeks in the NIUC. I ended up with a medication overdose, neurological damage from the combination of medication to lower my BP and the medication overdose, a forceps delivery that caused a fourth-degree tear into my rectal muscles that is still painful enough to prevent me from sitting down for more that a few minutes on a hard surface nine months after the birth and kept me out of work more than seven months. And all of this caused by that one first step in intervention and all of it preventable.

Childbirth is not a disease. And rather than medicating it to the point where the only natural part of the birth is that it is not done through an incision, there ought to be serious thought given to all the "what-if's" and the consequences of preventing all those remote possibilities. Life is risk, after all, and risk can't be medicated out of existence....or should every woman giving birth expect the lawyers for the medical team and the facility to also dictate the process?

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