Obstetrics
““To all the men out there, Be true warriors respect all women, stand before them, listen to them, protect them. Never forget warriors you are who you are because of our women the life-givers.”
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“Mother's guilt” is a tool of war. It is actually a measurement of how traumatized a woman is by the systemic denial of her sensory, instinctual knowing of her body and baby, and denial of true informed consent regarding birth.
Thanks to the evolved, distorted "choices" of the for-profit based system of obstetric maternity care, what is presented as choices from birth, abortion, to mothering are not what any woman would choose. The choices all emerged out of a system that has never viewed women’s body as capable of birth, nor women as sovereign beings. The choices are all skewed, designed and orchestrated by the systemic status quo and never what women would have created.
Women (and men) are trained for generations, by the culture, that accepts routine, ritualized abuse and separation of mother-baby, to feel shamed for their choices. When given the information about true informed consent and physiological, instinctual birth women’s anger at the violation is shamed.
“A USA TODAY analysis of billing data from 7 million births found about one in eight hospitals have complication rates of at least double the norm.”
Click the orange titles to read article.
““We all think we’re giving great care and we are treating everybody equally. The data doesn’t support that.”
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“Maternal deaths and injuries: Top 10 takeaways from USA TODAY investigation of hospitals”
1. Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it.
2. Hemorrhage and high blood pressure needlessly kill too many women.
3. Hospitals often won’t say whether they follow key safety practices.
4. Safety data about maternity care is kept secret.
5. Moms suffer complications far more often at some hospitals
6. Black moms are harmed twice as often as white moms
7. Many states fail to track and study moms’ deaths.
8. Congress is investigating maternity hospital care.
9. The human toll is enormous – and growing.
10. You can help hold hospitals and healthcare providers accountable.
The main goal of my film, The Other Side of the Glass: a birth film for and about men was to implore and inspire MEN to be the ones to rise up and lead the effort to address the vagaries of the medical model of birth.
All around the US, in every state and city, it is women who are going to the hospitals, courts, and legislators trying to convince them to give them power over their bodies and birth. Men need to be there. Men are the only ones who can truly change the male dominated, designed, and delivered systems women still live with.
The news is full of articles about how the US spends the most money on maternal health care but has the worst outcomes of all industrialized nations.
And, yet, the fox-in-the-hen-house, financially and politically driven answer to the problem of high mortality and birth trauma, is always “more access to medical care.”
Not more out-of-hospital midwives trained and supported to do non-medical, physiologic-based (natural) birth; not stopping the control of licensing of midwives by the medical associations.
More prenatal care in the medical system is not the answer. More interventions at birth are not the answer.
Prenatal care is not what doctors do. Prenatal care is what PREGNANT WOMEN do and how they live their lives. Women make the baby, not the doctor or hospital.
The true prenatal care is; supporting women’s lives. Prenatal care is ensuring that pregnant women have adequate and quality food; rest and free of worry from financial strain; and environments that are emotionally and physically safe and non-toxic, in which to gestate - make their babies.
The truth is the more we spend on obstetric medical intervention, the worse our outcomes. We need midwives who are free to practice in partnership with medicine.
“The United States has a higher ratio of maternal deaths than at least 40 other countries, even though it spends more money per capita for maternity care than any other. The lack of a comprehensive, confidential system of ascertainment of maternal death designed to record and analyze every maternal death continues to subject U.S. women to unnecessary risk of preventable mortality.”
The majority of births in the US have been in hospitals since the 50s. After twenty years of women fighting for the right to have a homebirth with a midwife, it is still said to be 1-6% of the births.
If you google about the maternal and baby mortality rates in the US it will almost always be that the answer is “lack of medical care”. Sometimes you will see an article that actually confronts this contradiction. But, we are constantly indoctrinated by Hollywood and our epigenetic history of our mothers giving birth in the hospital because birth is so dangerous, that we must be at the hospital.
Articles will share how the cesearan rate in the US is out of control, how it makes the hospitals money and creates a blanket of malpractice advoidance security. But over and over the answer to the problem is more of the medicine that is the problem.
The obstetric system is not expected to practice physiologic birth that is also evidence-based. They are not overseen and held accountable by any one. Obstetric medicine, like all of medicine, is a business. It is a for-profit business.
The obstetric medical system is very invested in maintaining the belief that birth is dangerous and must be in a medical facility.
““We are working every day to ensure that all women have equal access to high-quality health care before, during, and after child birth—regardless of background, zip code, or income. This summit will complement the work my Administration is doing across all eight wards to provide women and children with the care they need to live healthy, happy lives.”
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U.S. Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World
NPR and ProPublica teamed up for a six-month long investigation on maternal mortality in the U.S. Among our key findings:
More American women are dying of pregnancy-related complications than any other developed country. Only in the U.S. has the rate of women who die been rising.
There's a hodgepodge of hospital protocols for dealing with potentially fatal complications, allowing for treatable complications to become lethal.
Hospitals — including those with intensive care units for newborns — can be woefully unprepared for a maternal emergency.
Federal and state funding show only 6 percent of block grants for "maternal and child health" actually go to the health of mothers.
In the U.S, some doctors entering the growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine were able to complete that training without ever spending time in a labor-delivery unit.
““America is under the mind control of the medical-political establishment and it begins with the disruption of the mother-baby relationship at birth.” ”
I wrote the Safe Baby Resolution that was introduced into the Hawaii Legislature in January 2007. The Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) #8 “asks the legislators to order the study the early primal period of conception through infancy as the foundational time for health, wellness, and harmony as well as foundational time of the myriad of social and physical concerns of society. The resolution looks at what both our hearts and the science tell us that a human being needs from pre-conception through infancy as the foundation for a safe, healthy, and harmonious life. We seek to make gestation and birth gentle, drug-free, and safe for mothers and babies as well as for medical caregivers and society. The resolution supports all parties working together in partnership to create this foundation to support harmony for our babies -- and, worldwide.”
The Hawaii House of Representatives Health Committee passed the Safe Baby Resolution and was stopped in Senate hearings by the Medical Director of the state maternal and child health director. The cost of $200,000 was too much. In reality, the cost of our GNP by creating untraumatized humans born naturally, is the issue. Dysfunction, disorder, and disease are lucrative. Obstetric abuse creates the myriad layers of services costing billions of dollars that purport to help but are actually a result of disturbing birth.
I would like to do a Calm in the Chaos therapeutic coloring book journal for people who have experienced cesarean birth or obstetric violence, traumatic birth, birth rape, etc - as a mother and as a baby.
I am offering a half price for a personal Soul Portrait and half off for the second stage, a therapeutic process for participate in creating this book.
If you are interested, please contact me by filling out the contact form.