Routine Interventions in Labor & Birth in Canada

Wiley InterScience is offering a free copy of the journal Birth, and this was one of the articles in it (if you can’t see it, you may need to get the free sample — sometimes Wiley is a bit weird about their links popping up as expired cookies or something). It was a study of [...]

Under the Influence?

One of my readers sent me a link to a study that concluded that about 10% of Certified Registered Nurse-Anesthetists (CRNAs) “misused” controlled drugs. It noted that the results were comparable to other studies of anesthesiologists and registered nurses, except for the drugs of choice.
Pharmacists may also be prone to this (although having worked as [...]

Hospital Promotes Midwifery Approach

North Adams Regional Hospital in Vermont  has achieved…

an average of 18% C-section birth rate
better-than-average prenatal care (9 or more prenatal visits)
about 10% primary C-section rate
7% repeat C-section rate

How?
“I think what is being reflected in our numbers is that we are taking a more ‘midwifery’ approach with our practice then before,” Robin Rivinus, a certified nurse [...]

World Record Moms

After hearing about the Brazilian 9-year-old girl whose twins were aborted because they were supposedly life-threatening (although the first hospital this girl was taken to said her case was not life-threatening), I wondered if this was the youngest confirmed pregnancy for a girl in the world. It was not. Care to guess how old the [...]

“Nothing by mouth?” — not so fast!

Often when women are in labor, they are forbidden by the hospital from eating or drinking anything — perhaps they may be allowed to suck on ice chips or a popsicle or something like that, but everything else is forbidden. (Not every hospital is like that; and some hospitals have “official policies against it” but [...]

C-section Poem

Click here to read a touching poem that demonstrates the feelings a woman was left with after her Cesarean.
While I’ve been reading her blog for many months, and have read other things she and other women have said about the feelings of loss and pain after their C-sections, this poem opened my understanding in a [...]

Getting your tubes tied

No, I’m not planning a tubal ligation; I think that there will be more children in my future (although not any planned for the immediate future). I read a blog post about women wanting to be sterilized, and being turned down because they were childless and single and “may change their minds in the future.”
While [...]

Taking Blood Pressure

Well-Rounded Mama has been having a series of posts concerning “women of size” (particularly pregnant women) and blood pressure. Extremely informative. I did not realize there were several sizes of sphygmomanometers, nor that it makes a difference to have the right size cuff for your arm. But if your arm is larger than “normal” you [...]

Tiny Bubbles

I was washing dishes recently and noticed that as I got towards the last of the dirty dishes, the bubbles had all but disappeared.
Did you know that the bubbles — the suds — don’t actually do anything to make your dishes cleaner? We as consumers are just so ingrained in the idea or belief that [...]

And the winner is….

With 30 different entrants and 89 total entries, I was very happy with the response to my breastfeeding book giveaway contest. Now is the time to announce the winner. Watch the video to see if you won!

Congratulations to the winner!
As a special “thank you” to everyone who entered, for their enthusiasm [...]