Prove it.

A Standard of Care in obstetrics is long overdue and much needed. Adequate and reliable research on just about any aspect of hospital birth is impossible because of the lack of a standard of care and non-peer oversight. This allows non-researched, non-science-based procedures and interventions to continue to be used in non-medically necessary ways while continuing to promote them as safe. Meanwhile, ancedotal stories collect about the experience of women and babies in birth. Mainstream journals report serious consequences of interventions, but the practices continue. This is allowed in part because there is no apparent way to research the effects of interventions.

Medical science and doctors are big on studies with control groups rather than retro studies -- as they proceed through the decades of studying obstetrics on on non-consenting, non-informed babies and women. For example, researchers have divided birthing babies into groups to receive different doses of epidural bupvicaine and fentanyl mixtures (drugs NEVER shown to be safe in the first placce!! Animal research has more stringent rules and ethics to protect animals than for our own babies. It's a shame. Meanwhile, we ought to have many decades worth of data to do retro studies, but we don't because obstetrics polices itself, makes the rules, decides who, what, and how -- based on self-serving needs and based on peer-research and peer-overseeing. The fox is guarding the hen house.

"It seems pretty clear that there is a serious problem with relying on birth certificate data to determine pregnancy complications..." From How Well Do Birth Certificates Describe the Pregnancies They Report? The Washington State Experience with Low-Risk Pregnancies, Dobie, Baldwin, et al., Maternal Child Health Journal, 2:3, September 1998.

Nearly ten years later this information has not translated or transformed into meaningful change to make birth SAFER for women and babies (it's the baby's birth!!). When I spoke to the person in charge of Missouri's state data collection bureau I was told that it is impossible to do research on birth related subjects, such as the incidence of intervention and cesarean birth -- because there is not a mandated or consistent format. If you know of even ONE state that has a "Standard of Obstetric Care" please let me know. A physician I worked with explained the "categories" under which complications from cesarean section can be distorted -- and it ain't for the benefit of the mother or baby, but for the hospital. Women and babies are merely objects to be manipulated. Each hospital has the freedom to work it's own magic to create the data it needs. Doctors, the worker bees, meet their quotas to create the revenue and avoid malpractice loss.

A few years ago I ordered the hospital records from my daughter's birth in 1994. Imagine my surprise to find not even a mention of the Cytotec and epidural anesthesia. Forget it being on the birth certificate. It's not important to the birth certificate, but it is important for the medical history of a child? You bet it is --- even though not one pediatrician will use labor and birth experience information in making a diagnostic determination of anything whatsoever. For the medical community, birth which supports 60+% of the hospital coffers is insignificant.

How can a civilized, research/science-based society even begin to evaluate the outcome possibilities of the use of decades of research when there is no documentation of the birth experience? Correlations and patterns emerge over time (increase in asthma, ear infections, behavior disorders) in induced, epidural, and surgical births, but how to truly study their effects on the human and on society? Obstetric medicine will not financially support such studies. Drug companies won't. Hospitals institute rules about records, proctols, filming that serve their privacy and protection - not the mother and babies.

What was interesting about my daughter's birth records was that I received detailed documentation of a three hour visit to the LD floor about three weeks before her birth. I had a gall bladder attack and it was ORDERED that I be monitored to make sure I wasn't in labor. I'd had three previous labors and many episodes of gall bladder "attacks". I knew the difference, but had to be monitored. But not even the documention or mention of receiving narcotic epidural anesthesia. And, I was "high risk" -- age 37, if you believe that is high risk. But no mention of the Cytotec and epidural, both life-endangering.

Recently, I attended a birth where the RN spent a considerable amount of her time tapping away on the computer monitor taking notes. About what??? And, it was so annoying to hear -- so disregardful of the mother and baby. With all that documentation goin' on there surely must be mountains of documentation to provide information for mulitple studies in pre and perinatal psychology and to begin to make correlations between events, interventions, complications and the impact on the human. It would extremely easy to look at the cat scans of baby's brains and compare homebirth experience to hospital experience. A recent study showed brain bleeds but did not apparently look at the inteventions -- such as induction, supine position, epidural -- but concluded vaginal birth as the cause. How about scanning the brains of babies born at home and comparing them to babies born in hospitals and looking at the impact of different interventions?

Who would fund such a study to look at the incidence of induction and epidural, planned vs emergency cesarean, with homebirth and natural labor, without interventions?

We need to begin to demand that hospitals and doctors submit to outside oversights, that every aspect of the birth experience is documented, and we need to demand that obstetrics PROVE that drugs and interventions are safe for the birthing baby. PROVE that the baby cut by surgeon's knife, under narcotic sedation, and separated from her mother is "just fine" and that the myriad of social, relationship, and psychological issues in our society are NOT from the early experience of birthing with our mothers on her back, tied down, drugged, alone, separated from her baby.

Prove the safety of drugs and interventions! Stop experimenting on our babies. You, me, we are all one long medical experiment. It's like a science-fiction movie and we can't get out of it.