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

Sunday, April 15, 2007

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?

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"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

Ani DeFranco Speaks About Her Homebirth

"Self-Evident" by Ani DeFranco

Patrick Houser at www.Fatherstobe.org

Colin speaks out about interventions at birth

Dolphins