A few months back Kristy and I watched The Business of Being Born (preview), which is a documentary on the US birthing practice. The overall argument of the movie is that the US medical industry had drifted away from a philosophy that childbirth is a natural process towards an attitude that childbirth is dangerous and requires significant medical intervention to make it safe. The documentary then proceeded to show a couple assembly line type birthing wings where almost all the women received Pitocin to control the birth process (I have vivid memories of the nurses calling out ‘up the pit’). There were also several interviews with practicing obstetricians who claimed they had never seen a natural child birth. One point of discussion was the rapidly changing graph of cesarean rates. It does make you wonder what has changed over the last few years that has caused the cesarean rate to spike (currently around 30%). While the need for a cesarean is often clear in a particular instance, the overall trend is hard to understand.
The documentary then followed several women through natural childbirths that were assisted by midwives. In contrast to the almost 1 in 3 cesarean rate of doctors, one midwife claimed that she delivered over 300 children naturally before requiring a doctor’s assistance to perform a cesarean. Granted, some of this discrepancy could be explained by the difference in populations between the midwife patients and the obstetrician patients. I think the more important distinction to make here is the underlying difference in birthing philosophy between midwives and doctors that leads to such startling different numbers.
We loved our doctor in Charlottesville and would be delivering with him had we not moved back to Michigan. Basically, we liked his philosophy for birthing. Once we decided to move back to Michigan we started looking for a midwife to help deliver our little girl. We would still be fine with having an obstetrician deliver our child, providing they shared our philosophy. Our thinking was that we might have to interview several obstetricians to find one we liked whereas finding a midwife would be much quicker. In fact, Kristy met with three midwives when visiting Michigan and liked them all. In contrast, we meet with a couple obstetricians and were fairly turned off by their attitudes.
Write a Comment