Legal, illegal, or alegal; certified or noncertified?

Certified Nurse-Midwives can legally attend births in all 50 states (although not all can attend out-of-hospital births, due to various rules, regulations, legislation, or just plain politicking); Certified Professional Midwives can legally attend births in 26 states, with the remaining 24 states either outright making it illegal for them to attend births, or just not [...]

C-sections and postpartum infections

With “women of size” being more likely to have C-sections (I’ve read one nurse who said she can’t remember seeing a vaginal birth in a woman weighing over 200 lb. pregnant), and C-sections causing more postpartum infections than vaginal births, Well-Rounded Mama has written an important and salient post.
For what it’s worth, I weighed more [...]

Who can you trust?

This article doesn’t have anything specifically to do with birth, but is instead about knee replacements. However, it tangentially affects every medical decision in this country. The FDA has admitted that it approved a knee replacement device that doesn’t work. The agency’s scientists said it didn’t work, but approved it anyway. It was a political [...]

You Have a Choice

Click here to go see the video, a short documentary. The thing that I remember most is the nurse at the beginning, talking about the standard assembly-line procedures they do when a woman in labor comes to the hospital. So mechanical; so rote.

Abortion and Preterm Birth — a new study

Sidney Midwife, one of the blogs I read, had this as her most recent post: Study Showing Abortion-Premature Birth Risk Points to Cerebral Palsy. Since this is National Infant Mortality Awareness Month, and since premature birth increases infant mortality, this newest study has implications for this topic.
When I read about the study, I read the [...]

But it was just…

NavelGazing Midwife has written a thought-provoking post on birth trauma and birth rape.
One thing that stood out to me (probably because of the recent posts “At least you have a healthy baby” and “You should be grateful“) was the discussion of trauma in the setting of societal norms. In part,
Is Postpartum Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PPPTSD) [...]

Let Labor Begin on Its Own

Science and Sensibility is having a blog carnival on the Six Healthy Birth Practices, starting, quite naturally, with the first, which is Let Labor Begin on Its Own. Of course, there are sometimes reasons why labor should be induced, or skipped altogether and the woman given a C-section; but primarily it is best for both [...]

Artificial DHA & ARA may be not so good after all…

Good news for women who choose to breastfeed — you don’t have to worry about what they may find out about infant formula in the future.
Click here for the whole blog post, but the highlights — 98 reports of complaints of babies who suffered vomiting and diarrhea and seizures on formulas “enhanced” with DHA and [...]

Pollution and Prematurity

Since September is National Infant Mortality Awareness Month, and since 67% of infant deaths in the first year occur in babies born prematurely, if we can lower the premature birth rate, we can lower infant mortality.
In June of this year, a new study was released, which showed a higher rate of preeclampsia and preterm birth [...]

Risk Factors for Autism

This article intrigued me — a review of 64 studies of prenatal risk factors for autism.
Over 50 prenatal factors were examined. The researchers found that the factors most strongly associated with an increased autism risk are:
- Being born to an older mother or father.
- [...]