Quote:
Originally Posted by Rach
There was an article about how a woman gave birth to conjoined twins [of course in thoes days, they were called siamese] at home, delivered by her mother.
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Wow! Good point! I had never thought of that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by mmaramba
Your hypothesis is fine-- not necessarily "racist," IMO. I just think it's inaccurate.
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I learned from my ped that a person's head size is a paternal trait. And whenever I think about "big babies" being born, I ignore the fat stats, and am more interested in the size of the fetal head, or the size of DAD'S head.
Maybe it is more accurate to pay attention to dad's head size when making CPD guesses about that 1%? I've always wondered about this...it doesn't impress me that a newborn was 11 lbs and had fat thighs...tell me how much that fetal head molded, tell me dad's hat size. And of course baby's shoulders.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mmaramba
It's a matter of using intuition to "explain" what is, in fact, counterintuitive in our society: obstetrics for low-risk women is the culprit, not women's/babies' bodies.
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Right on!
I think CPD is a
real problem. It is a
real fact that a laboring woman in a hospital today has a tremendous chance of falling victim to the environment and interventions that will "make" a head-fitting-in-her-pelvis problem.
I seem to have a similar problem, called "can't take a dump at my in-laws" when I'm visiting there. But once I'm home, in my own calm surroundings with privacy in my own bathroom, ta da, nature can do it's thing. (And hey--my in-laws aren't checking my progress or inserting IVs or any number of the "routine" elements of a hospital birth.)
How many times does a baby's hand by the face slow down decent during labor? That's not the baby's head being too big; that's a hand by the head. What about mom's full bladder arresting decent? I'd like to see a guess at how many c-secs for CPD go thru, and really, it was just a full bladder (from all those IV fluids to keep blood volume high enough to compensate for the epidural blood pressure drop.)
LASTLY, this thought: perhaps this current generation of birthing mamas contains a good handful of women who were born via c-section circa 1975-1980. That's entirely possible.
HOWEVER.....most every woman birthing today, still, was born vaginally, which would imply that the women birthing today are the result of hundreds and hundreds of years of adequate pelvises. The math is simple; if your great-great grandmother's pelvis wasn't big enough two generations ago, you probably aren't here. And neither is your "too small" pelvis, so your c-section is truly unnessary.
When my dd is having babies, and if we hear this "CPD" nonsense spewed from the OBs of tomorrow, that diagnosis would at least have a shred of science to it, since 15% of birthing women will have been born via c-section themselves (I'm taking today [2005's] stat of 28% c-secs and dividing by 2, half for boys, half for girls.)