13. Home birth is just more fun!
22. You can cut the umbilical cord when you are good and ready. The speed at which they want to snip our newborn’s lifeline is unbelievable.
32. Nobody comes in, wakes you up, and checks your vitals every half hour at home.
34. Having a home birth is different. Different is cool.
Once reserved for cases in which the life of the baby or mother was in danger, the cesarean is now routine. The most common operation in the U.S., it is performed in 31% of births, up from 4.5% in 1965.
With that surge has come an explosion in medical bills, an increase in complications -- and a reconsideration of the cesarean as a sometimes unnecessary risk.
It is a big reason childbirth often is held up in healthcare reform debates as an example of how the intensive and expensive U.S. brand of medicine has failed to deliver better results and may, in fact, be doing more harm than good.
We are the only country that routinely circumcises our infants at birth for non religious reasons. This is not the norm in other countries. In fact when speaking with a European friend of mine who was expecting a boy, she said she would not only not circumcise her son, but that she would never stand for it. When you live in a culture that does not routinely circumcise, the question becomes why would you.
The investigators found support only for inducing labor at or beyond 41 completed weeks of gestation and under some conditions when a woman's membranes break before labor. However, there is not good evidence for inducing labor in many other situations, including when the fetus is believed to be large or to have restricted growth, or when a woman is pregnant with twins, has insulin-dependent diabetes, or has low levels of amniotic fluid.
Last year, for the first time, more babies in Miami-Dade County were born by cesarean section than were born vaginally, according to state records, and Broward's not far behind, with a rate of 43.7 percent -- both far above the national average.
At Kendall Regional Medical Center in Southwest Miami-Dade, seven out of 10 babies were delivered by C-section, a rate that University of Miami obstetrician Gene Burkett called ``just astounding.''
Locally and nationally, the cesarean rate has been creeping up annually for years. In 2007, the U.S. rate reached 31.8 percent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics -- an increase of more than 50 percent over the past decade.
Obstetrician/gynecologist Lauren Plante has a remarkable essay in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics in which she condemns the rising cesarean rate and compares current U.S. childbirth practices to the industrial revolution.
It's now a woman's civic right to breast feed her baby in public. Before the new law, women couldn't be arrested for indecency while breastfeeding, now they're protected from being asked to leave.
The largest study of its kind has found that for low-risk women, giving birth at home is as safe as doing so in hospital with a midwife.
In 2001, the USDA concluded that if breastfeeding rates were increased to 75 percent at birth and 50 percent at six months, it would lead to a national government savings of a minimum of $3.6 billion. This amount was easily an underestimation since it represents savings in the treatment of only three of the dozens of illnesses proven to be decreased by breastfeeding: ear infections, gastroenteritis, and necrotizing enterocolitis.
A decade ago, surgical delivery mainly was reserved for emergency situations, such as when mothers had high blood pressure or were failing to progress in labor or the baby showed signs of distress. Today, several factors are leading to the rapid rise in C-sections, even though having one carries with it a longer hospital stay, longer recovery time and the risk of complications from anesthesia. Those factors include changing attitudes toward childbirth, the convenience of a scheduled birth for busy women, and malpractice concerns by doctors and insurance companies.
The lights of the operating theatre are dimmed and there is a mood of calm among the hospital staff. A midwife softly narrates a continuing procedure to a patient who is squeezing her husband's hand. The surgeon gives the nod: it's time. The drape across the patient's abdomen is lowered and her head is raised. Her eyes widen as she and her husband watch their baby, tiny and pink with a mop of black hair, being gently delivered from her. There is a moment of collective awe before the newborn's cry fills the air. "It's a boy!" his mother gasps, before enveloping him in a warm hug.
Doctors in Dublin’s maternity hospitals are performing an increasing number of life-saving hysterectomies on mothers who have previously had caesarean sections. The upsurge in the number of births by c-section has led to a marked increase in emergency operations to remove women’s wombs due to a condition called placenta accreta, according to a new study.
