Welcome, One and All

Welcome to the Hospital Birth Debate blog.

While my heart's desire is to inspire and support respectful DIALOG between those who support and provide either homebirth or hospital birth (or birth center), the purpose of this blog is to allow opportunity for viewers and posters of the blog, HomebirthDebate.blogspot.com to discuss hospital birth. Those of us who have tried to contribute information and discuss the lack of safety in hospital births (due to misuse of drugs and interventions) have been banned. Those who shared experiences of peaceful, powerful, and even feeling orgasmic during birth are called liars because there is no scientifc proof. This is the place to be heard and to post your links to support natural, physiological birth as well as your links to the science thats show us WHEN and HOW that birth is safe in the hospital, or not.

The scientific research demands that WE, as a society, look at the consequences of drugs, interventions, and other disruptions to the human baby during his or her birth and hold medicine accountable. I hope doing so will logically, scientifically, and naturally lead to a DIALOG about how to make birth safest WHERE EVER it takes place and with whomever is the primary caregiver, midwife or doctor. I wish for this sharing and discussing of the literature about the experience of hospital birth to begin the dialog about HOW we create respectful partnerships between a birthing woman and caregiver whether home or hospital, or both. I wish for us to dialog about HOW doctors and midwives (and society) can engage with a woman and her gestating baby (body and brain) as if it really MATTERS for the developing baby's brain. That discussion is on www.SafeBabyResolution.blogspot.com.

In a safe world, a woman is responsble for her body and her health and so, she is held accountable for her choices and outcomes – as she is protected and nurtured in every possible way to gestate and birth gently and safely. In a safe world she has access to the greatest technology available SHOULD she need it and she has access to cooperative, respectful, partners of midwives and doctors who honor the consciousness of the laboring and birthing baby. AND, the BIG bottom-line is that in a safe world everyone in society knows WHATEVER we do with, to, and for that gestating or laboring or birthing woman and baby WILL also be experienced by that baby.

We know now logically and scientifically that everything that happens to a baby will be recorded in his or her brain. For life.

We know that narcotics during labor and birth is not without consequence. HOW we engage with a woman and her gestating baby (body and brain) would be MY choice of a dialog, NOT a debate. How any interaction with her and any intervention affects her baby would be my choice topic. I have studied this field with pioneers in the field for almost seven years and I am practitioner of healing birth trauma. As a poster on the homebirthdebate blog, my links to the scientific researchers and practitioners were banned and so was I. Many were also banned who who support homebirth and attempted to discuss research that supports the growing importance for options outside of hospitals (ie., increasing surgical rates) and demands by women to give birth at home -- often to feel safe and respected, knowing they are very unsafe in the current hospital environment.

I feel the need to offer an opportunity to discuss what was not allowed and was banned. This is not my blog, per se; it is just to allow the silenced voices and to provide women who are looking at the debate in their researching to have both views. On the Home Birth blog women's stories are denigrated and denied as not scientifically valid and those who speak up are blanned. One of my own babies, now 23, is on the ground in Iraq proudly making the greatest of sacrifices in defending our freedoms, including speech -- never in my life have I taken my freedoms and rights so seriously. Nor, have I considered so powerfully those who defended and died for that. Our sons and daughters.

We women are silenced and violated in modern medical birth, and in the discussion of how hospital birth harms us and our babies. During his birth I was asked repeatedly to take drugs, his membranes were ruptured without my consent for other's time frames, resulting in the need for fetal scalp monitor, and of course, brutal interventions in the first moments of his life. It's about time we stopped creating warriors and spreading this way of birth around the world as "scientific".

We can contribute to a harmonious world, rather than terrorism, by intervening only when necessary and doing so with awareness, safe, and gentle touch. I won't be silenced now by a physician who refuses to listen to women and honor their stories, and so I provide the opportunity to discuss safety (or lack of) in Hospital Birth. God speed, my boy, now a man -- my hero, Lt Joe Uray, and all of your brave colleagues. Thank for you each for doing the unthinkable that our society has demanded of you, and set you up at birth to do.

First, let me state my beliefs that:

• birth is neither safER or safEST in either enviornment -- at home with a qualified midwife or in the hospital with a qualified physician.
• birth is a physiological, biological process of the human being's sacred passage into this world.
• birth is truly safe only when there is mutally respectful partnership between midwifery model of physiological birth and the medical science model of obstetrical medicine.
  women must be given social, political, and systemic rights to her body and to choose where and with whom she gives birth.
• it is the responsbility of medical caregivers to embrace the evidence-based science and to participate in building the bridge between home and hospital birth.
  

Those who support homebirth, I think it is safe to say and let me know if otherwise, we generally agree with these:

Yes, birth at home without medical care is dangerous for a high risk woman.

Yes, sometimes, no matter where a woman chooses to give birth to her baby, unforeseen complications will arise and medical technology can save her and her baby. And, some babies are doomed to not survive where ever they are born. It is so rare that it does not justify forcing every woman to adhere to medical birth interventions on "in case" basis, which is unnecessarily traumatizing to the newborn.
Yes, a woman who has the right to keep or terminate a pregnancy, ought to have the right to choose where and with whom she labors and gives birth WHILE having the best, evidenced-based medical care available.

What some supporters of midwifery, homebirth, and physiological birth know intuitively, but not necessarily consciously yet is that:

The field of pre and perinatal psychology embraces physiological and medical models of care; and, importantly, teaches HOW to be with these mothers and babies who need medically necessary intervention in ways that can faciliate a NON-traumatic experience. The science from a mulitude of scientic studies merge to show us how it is that AFTER birth we can assist the mother and baby to heal – even from cesarean surgery. It leads us to:

• knowing and demanding that we must first, “DO NO HARM” in medical birth.
• seriously evaluating the physiological, hormonal consequences of disrupting birth and we can work differently to avoid undue trauma.
• demand for medical caregivers (mothers) to stop what they are doing that we know is traumatizing.
• seeing the laboring and birthing human baby as a full present human being who is violated and who voice is ignored at birth.

It IS known in the literature that the experience of the labor, birth, and early hours are as critical as the prenatal period. The baby's experience of HIS or HER birth is that human being's first experience. It is known that the joys and traumas of birth are a part of that human's earliest brain experience and this is a foundation or lens for the rest of life. The physical experience -- gentle loving touch or rough handling, forceps, or vacuum, needles, resuscitation -- are all remembered – in the early, emotional, reactive, non-verbal brain.

On the Home Birth Debate blog, the blogger refuses to allow any of the scientific evidence showing that interventions are dangerous, that they lead to further interventions and create lifelong issues to be discussed. So, bring it on here!

This is where we talk about the inherent safety issues of hospital birth. It is NOT a place to bash doctors or nurses – they are trained to believe that the human baby is not affected by rough treatment and drugs. They are trained to believe the human being doesn’t remember labor and birth experiences, just pre and postnatal ones. Be kind to one another here, and keep the focus on the research in the context of what a woman and a baby need physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually during labor and birth.

So, with that said, I must provide an overview of the Homebirthdebate blog where the debate grinds on about the loss of life and a live baby as the measurement of where birth is safest.

The debate ignores and disallows anyone to post research or theories or questions about the immediate and lifelong effects of using unneccesary drugs and interventions that are known (inside and outside of medicine) to be for medical staff convenience and litigation avoidance, not about the baby's needs and timing.

The debate further disallows a DISCUSSION about HOW to use these inventions with consciousness and compassion in the cases where interventions are necessary to ensure a live baby and mother.

The debate ignores the socially and politcally evolved "standard of care" that now allow medical caregivers to routinely use unnecessary medical interventions on otherwise healthy women and babies.

The debate ignores and disallows a discussion of how this "standard of care" purports safety of drugs at birth by instead focusing on a woman's right to chose drugs for pain relief, despite the lack of scientific research that drugs were EVER researched for safety for the baby or the mother.

The debate ignores the poor scientific methods of NOW comparing control groups of women and babies exposed to different narcotics (never shown safe) or situations or interventions.

The debate further ignores the science of basic physiology that clearly shows the complications of drugs, artifical hormones, interventions (especially surgical) to the health and wellness of the human baby, despite the scientific understanding and facts that we do know about the effects of introducing artificial hormones and narcotics on the adult brain and body.

These are the issues about which I invite you to participate in discussing and sharing your information.
Janel Martin-Miranda