Malpractice Tort Reform

Medical Malpractice Tort Reform: It's zero about babies, but it should be.

by L. Janel Martin-Miranda, copyright, 2002

Birth in America is in trouble as evidenced by the increasing malpractice insurance that corresponds to the increasing use of technology and poor infant mortality rates. Despite having the best resources and access to medical care and the best technology available, the US ranks twenty-eighth out of thirty-nine industrialized countries in infant mortality.

The public needs to be informed that malpractice tort reform is zero necessarily about improving maternity services and the well being of women and babies. Malpractice tort reform does zero address that obstetric medicine does not practice their own evidence-based research. Scientific research supports natural, unmedicated birth, not a purely medical, technological model of birth as safest for the mother and the baby.

Reform of obstetrics must include reforming medical practices and be based on research. Society must insist to politicians and demand that doctors practice evidenced-based research. Parties must support women’s birthing choices in partnership with appropriate use of technology and medical care. High malpractice rates for physicians is the precipitator for tort reform and the high costs of litigation is the only perspective being talked about. Tort reform is about money. Doctor’s money. Hospital’s money. Lawyer’s money. Tax payer’s money. It does not include improving women’s health care and the treatment of newborns from policy or practice perspective.

From the beginning of life in this country, children are very low on the priority list. Society must organize to demand and to support physicians to work in partnership with women and men to improve medical care for birthing women and their babies.

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
Reforming the use of medical birth practices and interventions known to harm babies that lead to increasing litigation and therefore, increasing malpractice rates (induction, epidural, flat on back, monitoring are known to lead to surgical birth).

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
Creating a social consciousness for reproductive responsibility for conceiving a child who is wanted by the adults who can physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually care for him or her.

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
the disproportionate liability placed on physicians by society and the legal system, rather than men and women being responsible for reproductive and birth choices and experiences.

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
Stopping the medical practices known in the medical literature to be extremely damaging to women and babies; and therefore, are contributors to long-term physical, emotional, and spiritual issues in society.

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
US Standard of Care for maternity care. Consistent policy and practice of safety protocols established, including political and social will to give women power over their bodies and choices so that women, not physicians, are responsible for their baby’s birth outcome. Responsbility for birth outcomes begins at conception and never ends. Women live with the choices for the rest of their lives, and the baby lives with hers and the caregiver's choices for the rest of their lives. For example, it is I who lived with headaches from forceps trauma for forty years, not my mother, and certainly not the physician. They both chose drugs, supine position, and forceps.

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
Men claiming their rightful place as protector of their wife and baby and realizing their own disempowerment in the medical system

Tort Reform is ZERO (but it should be) about:·
The BABY! Every one of the reasons for tort reform about malpractice liability is about the care and the wellbeing of the baby and the mother, in that order. Doing what is best for the baby medically is rarely dangerous for the mother.

The baby’s experience of medical birth controlled by outsiders, in a clinical, noisy, bright, germy controlled medical setting is not considered in malpractice discussion. Reform does not address that medical birth involves the use of addictive drugs in 95% of births; and, that this leads to many other inteventions that for the human baby is scary, intrusive, and violating.

What are physicians and hospitals doing? Besides engaging with politicians to cap insurance and awards? More of what causes complications and malpractice, that's what. What are women -- consumers -- doing to ensure that maternity care is safe for herself and her baby?