The Other Side of the Glass

Part One was officially released June 2013 in digital distribution format. To purchase to to www.theothersideoftheglass.com If you were a donor and want to download your copy send an email to theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com.

The trailer

Go to YouTube

Thursday, January 25, 2007

States in the News


US State Midwifery and Safe Baby News


One of the (many) things I was discussing a few weeks ago as I researched the differences between care in the US and the UK is the lack of a NATIONAL standard of care for maternal health care in the United States.

Let me refer back to what I said earlier and to be specific --- the United States obstetrical health care does not have consistent, evidence-based care and protocols, policies, and procedures from state-to-state, hospital-to-hospital, doctor-to-doctor, and nurse-to-nurse. As advocates of women-centered care all know, a woman can get totally different information, care, and treatment in the same hospital with the same doctor and which varies greatly from individual nurses caregivers. The very same situation of one woman's labor and her baby's birth will vary vastly from hospital to hospital and from doctor to doctor within the same hospital. One labor over three to four shifts will have to adjust to the personal beliefs and preferences of every one of the nurses within that hospital setting.

While the US has NOT, every other industrialized nation -- with LOWER mortality and morbidity rates -- has developed a national standard of care since the 1930's that includes woman-centered midwifery care. During this time, American birth has cranked along on the conveyor belt of the medical machine based on physician's, drug company's and litigation needs in couched in terms such "maternal choice" and "maternal pain relief" and "scientific."
Below are some legislative actions happening in different states. Hopefully, these efforts by individual states will lead someday soon to an effort to create a national effort to create a health-based, woman-baby centered structure of maternal child birth care. Several Democrats are pre-election talking about a universal health care system. Time to get involved.


Missouri
Citizens in Missouri will once again support legislation to allow DE and CPM to practice in Missouri.

Missouri is the ONLY state where the definition of the practice of medicine includes midwifery. You can see this yourself: click here or ask your librarian to show you Missouri Statute 334.010.

Show-Me Freedom in Healthcare Political Action Committee! Check out this great site at
 
http://showmefreedompac.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=2

We are a non-partisan group of Missourians who care about the effects that certain policies and laws have on our families' health and well-being. Our goal is to increase individual responsibility and freedom to informed healthcare consumers in Missouri. We believe that individuals make responsible decisions about healthcare when they are given good information. We believe that parents are the best decision-makers for their children because of their personal interest and concern for their children's well-being and happiness. Thus we advocate for the people of Missouri to be given good information and the freedom to make informed healthcare decisions for themselves and their families.

Families do not want to see their future and their healthcare options negotiated away by healthcare systems, special interest lobbyists, medical associations, and insurance companies. We, the Missouri people, want our voice to be heard! We want to know that the people's welfare is of the utmost importance to our government, and to the men and women who make up our healthcare system.

The Missouri motto says it well: "Salus populi suprema lex esto", which is translated, "Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law."

South Dakota

2007 Legislative UPDATE South Dakota Chapter of the American College of Nurse Midwives File Revisions to 2007 Legislation to Remove Restrictions for Certified Midwives in South Dakota. This info can be found at the bottom of the page at http://www.womankindmidwifery.com/

and read the article:

A Home Birth Option for South Dakota
Certified Nurse Midwife has passion for South Dakota's Homebirth Community
by Portal Staff

While many people in South Dakota concern themselves with the “birthrights” of those who seek abortions, South Dakota Certified Nurse Midwife, Jeanne Prentice is working behind the scenes for those who want to give birth but don’t have choices. “South Dakota women are legally restricted from having a safe home birth with a qualified birth attendant” says Prentice. The current law requires that Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) have a signed contract with a physician in order to practice. Prentice says that getting a physician to sign a contract with a homebirth midwife is impossible. “Why would any physician sign an agreement with their competition? This is not a safety issue, this is purely restraint of trade” says Prentice.

Read the story on the website.

Hawaii
Star Newland, founder of Domestic Harmony (as opposed to focusing on violence prevention) and co-promoter of the Safe Baby Resolution was at the opening legislative day for Hawaii. See picture in the Hawaii Tribune Hearald below.

http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/articles/2007/01/20/local_news/local03.txt

Read about the resolution at www.SafeBabyResolution.blogspot.com.

While the resolution does not focus on legislative efforts to change the status of midwifery per se in Hawaii it is about creating social structures that support AWARE CONCEPTION, SAFE GESTATION, and GENTLE BIRTHING in order to create family and social harmony.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"Soft is the heart of a child. Do not harden it."

A public awareness reminder that things that happen behind the scenes, out of our sight, aren't always as rosy as we might think them to be. Perhaps its a restaurant cook who accidentally drops your burger on the floor before placing it on the bun and serving it to you. Here it's an overworked apathetic (pathetic) nurse giving my newborn daughter her first bath. Please comment and rate this video, so as to insure that it is viewed as widely as possible, perhaps to prevent other such abuse. -- The mother who posted this YouTube. How NOT to wash a baby on YouTube Are you going to try to tell me that "babies don't remember?" There is no difference to this baby's experience and the imprinting of her nervous system/brain and one that is held and cleaned by the mother or father either at the hospital or at home? By the way, this is probably NOT the baby's first bath. The nurse is ungloved. Medical staff protocol is that they can't handle a baby ungloved until is has been bathed (scrubbed if you've seen it) because the baby is a BIO-HAZARD -- for them. Never mind that the bio-hazard IS the baby's first line of defense against hospital germs.

Missouri Senator Louden Speaks

Finally, A Birth Film for Fathers

Part One of the "The Other Side of the Glass: Finally, A Birth Film for and about Men" was released June, 2013.

Through presentation of the current research and stories of fathers, the routine use of interventions are questioned. How we protect and support the physiological need of the human newborn attachment sequence is the foundation for creating safe birth wherever birth happens.

Based on knowing that babies are sentient beings and the experience of birth is remembered in the body, mind, and soul, fathers are asked to research for themselves what is best for their partner and baby and to prepare to protect their baby.

The film is designed for midwives, doulas, and couples, particularly fathers to work with their caregivers. Doctors and nurses in the medical environment are asked to "be kind" to the laboring, birthing baby, and newborn. They are called to be accountable for doing what science has been so clear about for decades. The mother-baby relationship is core for life. Doctors and nurses and hospital caregivers and administrators are asked to create protocols that protect the mother-baby relationship.

Men are asked to join together to address the vagaries of the medical system that harm their partner, baby and self in the process of the most defining moments of their lives. Men are asked to begin to challenge the system BEFORE they even conceive babies as there is no way to be assured of being able to protect his loved ones once they are in the medical machine, the war zone, on the conveyor belt -- some of the ways that men describe their journey into fatherhood in the medicine culture.

Donors can email theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com to get a digital copy.
Buy the film at www.theothersideoftheglass.com.

The film focuses on the male baby, his journey from the womb to the world and reveals healing and integrating the mother, father, and baby's wounded birth experience. The film is about the restoring of our families, society, and world through birthing loved, protected, and nurtured males (and females, of course). It's about empowering males to support the females to birth humanity safely, lovingly, and consciously.

Finally, a birth film for fathers.

What People Are Saying About the FIlm

Well, I finally had a chance to check out the trailer and .. wow! It's nice that they're acknowledging the father has more than just cursory rights (of course mom's rights are rarely acknowledged either) and it's great that they're bringing out the impact of the experience on the newborn, but I'm really impressed that they're not shying away from the political side.

They are rightly calling what happens in every American maternity unit, every day, by its rightful name - abuse. Abuse of the newborn, abuse of the parents and their rights, abuse of the supposedly sacrosanct ethical principal of patient autonomy and the medico-legal doctrine of informed consent, which has been long ago discarded in all but name. I love it!

In the immortal words of the "shrub", "bring it on!" This film needs to be shown and if I can help facilitate or promote it, let me know.

Father in Asheville, NC


OMG'ess, I just saw the trailer and am in tears. This is so needed. I watch over and over and over as fathers get swallowed in the fear of hospitals birth practice. I need a tool like this to help fathers see how very vital it is for them to protect their partner and baby. I am torn apart every time I see a father stand back and chew his knuckle while his wife is essentially assaulted or his baby is left to lie there screaming.
Please send me more info!!!!
Carrie Hankins
CD(DONA), CCCE, Aspiring Midwife
720-936-3609


Thanks for sharing this. It was very touching to me. I thought of my brother-in-law standing on the other side of the glass when my sister had to have a C-section with her first child because the doctor was missing his golf date. I'll never forget his pacing back and forth and my realizing that he was already a father, even though he hadn't been allowed to be with his son yet.

Margaret, Columbia, MO

In case you don't find me here

Soon, I'll be back to heavy-duty editing and it will be quiet here again. I keep thinking this blog is winding down, and then it revives. It is so important to me.

I wish I'd kept a blog of my journey with this film this past 10 months. It's been amazing.

I have a new blog address for the film, and will keep a journal of simple reporting of the journey for the rest of the film.

www.theothersideoftheglassthefilm.blogspot.com

I'll be heading east this week to meet with a group of men. I plan to post pictures and clips on the film blog.

I'll keep up here when I can -- when I learn something juicy, outrageous, or inspiring related to making birth safer for the birthing baby.

Review of the film

Most of us were born surrounded by people who had no clue about how aware and feeling we were. This trailer triggers a lot of emotions for people if they have not considered the baby's needs and were not considered as a baby. Most of us born in the US were not. The final film will include detailed and profound information about the science-based, cutting-edge therapies for healing birth trauma.

The full film will have the interviews of a wider spectrum of professionals and fathers, and will include a third birth, at home, where the caregivers do a necessary intervention, suctioning, while being conscious of the baby.

The final version will feature OBs, RNs, CNMs, LM, CPM, Doulas, childbirth educators, pre and perinatal psychologists and trauma healing therapists, physiologists, neurologists, speech therapists and lots and lots of fathers -- will hopefully be done in early 2009.

The final version will include the science needed to advocated for delayed cord clamping, and the science that shows when a baby needs to be suctioned and addresses other interventions. Experts in conscious parenting will teach how to be present with a sentient newborn in a conscious, gentle way -- especially when administering life-saving techniques.

The goal is to keep the baby in the mother's arms so that the baby gets all of his or her placental blood and to avoid unnecessary, violating, and abusive touch and interactions. When we do that, whether at home or hospital, with doctor or midwife, the birth is safe for the father. The "trick" for birthing men and women is how to make it happen in the hospital.

Birth Trauma Healing

  • Read Miracle Boy's story

    • Ani DeFranco Speaks About Her Homebirth

    Ani DiFranco Interview with Mindful Mama Magazine from Mindful Mama Magazine on Vimeo.

    "Self-Evident" by Ani DeFranco

    Patrick Houser at www.Fatherstobe.org

    Colin speaks out about interventions at birth

    Dolphins