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Originally Posted by skyastara  It isn't crazy, it is physiological. I wish that it weren't taboo, but it makes people very defensive. If I say anything negative about my (homebirth transfer) c-sec, I get people coming out of the woodwork to defend their c-secs whether they were planned or not. Or people who were born c-sec, now adults, and are "just fine". Well, of course they are just fine, but there is a loss there which I wish could be acknowledged.
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Yes.
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Originally Posted by thefragile7393
After reading Odent's books, I amazed that everything he says is all opinion and nothing backed up.
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Really? What books of his have you read? The only one that I can think of that doesn't list sources is Birth Reborn, which is just an account of the making of a birth clinic.
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Originally Posted by Joezmom
I guess my peeve is the insistance that a homebirth or UC is somehow 'better' than a birth center or hospital birth.
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Are you similarly peeved that most people insist that hospital birth is better than homebirth? Because really, the homebirth movement is much more tolerant of the choice to birth in the hospital than the other way around. From homebirth advocates you'll hear a lot of, "Yes, sometimes medicalized birth is necessary and sometimes institutionalized birth is prudent, and in any case a woman should birth where she feels most supported and comfortable." From most doctors and most of mainstream society you'll hear, "Homebirth is dangerous, foolish, and selfish! Do you want your baby to
DIE?"
I really don't understand why you feel the need to come here and complain that some people think homebirth is best for them. What is it to you? That their choice is different from yours is not inherently a condemnation of your choice. Trust me.
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| So.....why don't more women birth at home? |
Why don't more people recycle? Why do people continue to buy crap food to put in their bodies? Why do people hit their kids? Why do they whine about poor people getting socialized assistance, but seem oblivious to the astronomically higher cost of corporate welfare? Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why do women accept our culture's claim they aren't valuable unless they look like the photoshopped women in the magazines, buy all the latest fashions, and have vaginas that smell pretty? Why do people go along with the school system's enforcement of meaningless busywork and uesless rote memorization and teaching to the test and yet more busywork to do at home because six hours a day clearly isn't enough? Why is there an epidemic of postpartum depression, hell, depression in general in this society? Why do people unquestioningly let themselves be led to be a cog in the wheel that leads to the depression? Why why why why? Gee, I don't know... because there's such a thing as herd behavior? Because most people are terrified of rocking the boat, of not fitting in, of being ostracized? So many people are not really happy in their lives, and they know it probably has something to do with doing meaningless work and self-medicating with meaningless activities. And yet they just keep on doing what they're told.
Sure, some women do the research and they make a very careful choice to birth in the place they believe is best for them, which is sometimes a hospital. If the general trends evident in internet forums and the media could be said to be representative of the majority, most are just getting in line like lemmings, without really having thought about it. Most people I've met in my life -- that I've met from living in a middle class suburb to inner city, in a variety of schooling and social and work environments -- have been scared to question the opinion of any authority figure. Choices outside of the mainstream are routinely vilified simply because they threaten the status quo, and backed up with arguments riddled with logical fallacies like implying that someone's ego or perception of them as wise has anything to do with the validity of the information itself (because there is nothing better to base them on.) This is just social pyschology.
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| Obviously there is room for improvement in the hospital, but (I believe) Fyrestorm's horrific story is not the norm - she even managed to settle a lawsuit with a hospital and everyone involved - how rare is that? |
Successful lawsuits are exceedingly rare, because juries are made up of the general public, and the general public still believes in the sacred godhood of the medical establishment. I have a good friend who was given an episiotomy, not for a medical reason as the baby's vitals were great, against her consent. In fact, she was screaming at the doctor
"I do not consent" and he did it anyway. After months of depression and shame and incontinence and inability to have sex without pain, she consulted a lawyer, and was told that it wasn't a winnable case, because 1) she had put herself under this doctor's care and signed consent forms for whatever medical procedures he found "necessary", and 2) because episiotomy is still considered by many people to be not only not a big deal, but a
good thing. It protects the pelvic floor, dontcha know. Stories like this are all over MDC. They're also all over the more mainstream boards, only the women telling those stories still believe that their episiotomies were necessary, and whatever other degrading and damaging things were done to them, and so they suppress their suffering. There are really efficient coping mechanisms for those who can't afford to be raging against the terrible acts committed against them, either because it's too emotionally painful or because they know that those around them would not support it.
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: I had never even heard of homebirth when I was pregnant with my first. I didn't even know people still "did that." Then, after I had the textbook hospital experience complete with C-section, I dug a little deeper than the mainstream books I'd been reading and learned a WHOLE lot. I felt like screaming, "Why didn't anyone tell meee?!?!"
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