Women are not chicks

My oldest son is almost ten and lately I've been thinking how much he provides me with reflection and insight into how women are viewed by society. He recently learned (from television, I admit!) that sometimes girls are referred to as "chicks." This gave him, and me, great reason for pause.

"Why are girls called chicks, Mommy?" he asked me as we drove to school this week.

The answer, I thought, is long but I launched anyway into a history lesson of the sub-standard treatment of women, the glass ceiling, the derogatory labels that have been attached to women for centuries...and then suddenly my son interrupted:

"Is this why pregnant mothers are not treated with respect when they give birth?"

Well, yes!

"They're treated like chicks!," he joked. "Here chick, chick, chick! Do what I say chick, chick, chick! I'm your master...chick, chick, chick!"

Hmmm...I think he's on to something. Perhaps shifting childbirth towards a more mother-friendly system will only come once we start abandoning the negative stereotypes we have layed on women for years: when we can watch the Superbowl and stop seeing "dumb blonds" and women held up only for their sexuality, when I can go to see movies like The Pink Panther 2 and it doesn't teach my two boys that women are "less than," and when girls can open up major magazines and not see unrealistic pictures of perfect. How can we expect women to be treated with honor and respect in childbirth when women are depicted so poorly in our culture? I see it through my boys eyes every day, believing women are equal until the images and words tell them otherwise.

I want a t-shirt "Women are NOT chicks!" Make that two more - for my boys.

(by the way, I was once give a great coloring book called "Girls are not chicks." Check it out! http://www.girlsnotchicks.com/index.html )

Obama needs a birth plan

I know Obama has alot on his plate these days, and Daschle is out for Secretary of Health and Human Servives, but I've been thinking alot about the mounting press finally exposing the troubled US maternity care system and specifically Jennifer Block's December piece in the LA Times ("Midwives Deliver") that makes a beautiful case for how training more midwives to deliver low-risk births is economically smart for the United States (not to mention the emotional benefits to women).

So today I want to do a shout-out to President Obama to get a birth plan! Yes, the Lilly Ledbetter fair-pay act will help women in the workplace (hallelujah!), but what about the 4 million women every year who give birth in the United States? Don't they deserve a plan that's going to get the maternity care system to start making economic and societal sense?

Obama needs a birth plan.

Time Magazine rocks!

I'm thinking the journalist who wrote the Time Magazine piece that just came out today - "The Trouble with Repeat Cesareans" - has got to be a mother either denied a VBAC or faced denial and then went to great measures to get a VBAC. Why? Because her piece is dead-on right about today's VBAC crisis.

How did she managed to get an OB on record to say the following on the reasons doctors encourage pregnant women to have cesareans:

"It's a numbers thing," says Dr. Shelley Binkley, an ob-gyn in private practice in Colorado Springs who stopped offering VBACs in 2003. "You don't get sued for doing a C-section. You get sued for not doing a C-section."

Ain't that the truth!

And I loved this point as well:

Some doctors, however, argue that any facility ill equipped for VBACs shouldn't do labor and delivery at all. "How can a hospital say it can handle an emergency C-section due to fetal distress yet not be able to do a VBAC?" asks Dr. Mark Landon, a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist at the Ohio State University Medical Center and lead investigator of the NIH's largest prospective VBAC study.

Haven't I heard Henci Goer, author of "The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth", saying this for YEARS?!!

Another great message in the piece that women have to start thinking about is: how good major abdominal surgery is on their bodies 2 or 3 times? If there's going to be informed consent (which we all know there's not in most places) then we must tell pregnant women these risks! I've heard too many women telling their birth stories at BOLD Red Tents saying their doctor told them he doesn't do VBAC and having another c-section is "no big deal." Hmmm...I beg to differ.

It seems we've scared pregnant women into the operation room. How sick is that?

Women shouldn't just be standing up we need to be SHOUTING!

Can humanity survive the safe cesarean?

I read this today and wanted to share it with you. At the end of Ricki Lake's film, The Business of Being Born, obstetrician Michel Odent wonders if women stop giving birth naturally and the cocktail of love hormones released during natural birth ceases what will happen to our capacity to love as a society? It's an interesting question. Below Odent continues sharing his thoughts on this...

Today, we understand that to have a baby, a woman - like any other mammal - has been programmed to release a cocktail of love hormones. Today the number of women who actually "give birth" to babies and placentas thanks to this hormonal release is ever-decreasing. First, because many women give by birth by cesarean. Second, most of those who give birth vaginally receive pharmacological interventions. Unfortunately substitutes block the release of the natural hormones and do not create the same behavioural benefits. We have to wonder what will happen, in terms of civilization, if this trend continues in future generations. Can humanity survive the safe cesarean?

~ Michel Odent, MD
Excerpted from "The Future of Obstetric Technology," Midwifery Today, Issue 85

Curing versus healing

I attended an interesting talk yesterday by Abraham Verghese. Verghese is a brilliant writer, but he's also a doctor and this is why I went to see him speak last night.

He spoke quite a bit about his position at Stanford University's medical school...it's quite unique and some might say, radical. His job is to encourage third year medical students to stop thinking of patients as "ipatients" - interacting with them primarily by looking at their test results on a computer - and instead get to their bedside, sit with them, take lengthy oral histories. This, he says, is when true healing can occur.

I saw so many parallels to what he was saying as it relates to maternity care today. The "ipatient" generation is a significant problem: pregnant mothers in labor are monitored in the hallways of hospitals, everyone standing around looking at their numbers on the computer, and few people are going in to deeply interact with these women. As a result of medicine's obsession with technology, Verghese points out,the art of medicine is being lost and it's to the detriment of the patient. In the case of maternity care, mothers are treated based on their numbers, not on their detailed physical and spiritual (emotional) history. This, Verghese stresses, results in inaccurate treatment and even worse, while the patient may be cured (ie, the baby being delivered is healthy and the mother is alive) true healing has not occurred (ie, perhaps the mother is physically or emotionally injured by the experience).

I'm thrilled to see Verghese gets it and isn't afraid to take his medical colleagues to task on this subject. But when are the majority of doctors going to get it? When is ACOG (the Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) going to get it? When are they going to put true healing first?

Make a short film about birth!

Calling all muses!

Enter a contest intended to educate women about the choices they have during pregnancy and childbirth. Birth Matters Virginia (an organization that works to promote an evidence-based model of maternity care) is inviting mothers, fathers, filmmakers, film students, birth advocates, and others to create a 4-7 minute educational video about birth. The first-place winner will receive a cash prize of $1000. Second place $500 and an "honorable mention" prize of $100 will also be awarded. The deadline for entering the contest is Mother's Day, May 10, 2009.

For rules and to see how to enter, please visit http://www.birthmattersva.org/videocontest.html

You can also join our Facebook group (whether or not you intend to make a video) to get updates about the contest and exchange ideas with other participants at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=73753459808#/group.php?sid=e146cf29ff029d1148a6a465af742146&gid=73753459808

There goal is to get as many people to enter as possible so that YouTube is inundated with videos about mother- and baby-friendly pregnancy and birth care so that more people are educated about their options.

Now that's BOLD!!!!

Octuplets versuses midwifery

I've been searching for coverage of the AP story on "home birth advocates pressing for a pro-midwife campaign" and only found one major news outlet MSNBC covered it so far. Meanwhile a mother of 6 gives birth to octuplets recently and every news station has covered every angle of this story. (If I see Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN interviewed one more time on this subject I'm going flip out!).

Do we need to throw in the word "orgasmic" for people to cover a serious childbirth story? (and we already found out where that got us -- see my comments on the 20/20 piece about "orgasmic birth").

The lack of coverage on a serious childbirth subject - one that could radically reform health care to a cheaper, saner, more compassionate place for pregnant mothers - speaks volumes of how women and childbirth are viewed in our society.

Maybe if news organizations covered childbirth more responsibly people will stop giving women "push" presents and demanding that women get better maternity care.

What news story is going to improve more American lives - getting people to think about reforming maternity care or getting people to see show after show about a woman who gave birth to 8 children? When are news organizations going to start being responsible?

Okay, I'm a little grouchy today. Perhaps it's because my son told me the groundhog saw his shadow...6 more weeks of cold winter weather!!!

Rock on, Erykah Badu

Erykah Badu just gave birth at home in Brooklyn, New York and blogged about it.

Keep speaking out celebrities!