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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

News Link Roundup: Articles You Should Read!

The CNN Home Birth After Cesarean story everyone is talking about this week: Mom defies doctor, has baby her way

A mom has a VBAC at home. Shocking to those not in the birth world. Excellent that this story has started the conversation that it has! Yes, women should be able to attempt VBACs "in facilities with staff immediately available to provide emergency care," as the ACOG suggests, but unfortunately doctors will not agree to even allow women to attempt it. And so they turn to other options.


(Bonus: the doula in this article is the woman I shadowed when I first became a doula!) 
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Another highly talked-about article worth reading, all about how people are discovering that Kangaroo Care is the BEST: The Human Incubator

"Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat."


"Kangaroo care, however, is modern medical care, by which I mean that its effectiveness is proven in randomized controlled trials — the strongest kind of evidence. And because it is powered by the human body alone, it is theoretically available to hundreds of millions of mothers who would otherwise have no hope of saving their babies."
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Should Black Women Feel Guilty for Not Breastfeeding? on Blacktating

"Until we can change the circumstances for working class moms, how can we expect to convince them to breastfeed? Isn't energy better spent securing real paid maternity leave for women and laws to protect a woman's right to express milk at work, even at blue collar jobs?...When it comes to the working poor there is not even the guise of an even playing field. How do we expect breastfeeding rates to change when the life circumstances for these moms is still the same?"
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Birth Around the World at Stand and Deliver:

A Tale of Two Births in Canada and European Court of Human Rights Rules Home Birth Legal in Hungary

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U.S. Cesarean Rate Reaches Record High, Rises for 13th Consecutive Year at The Unnecesarean 

The national cesarean rate, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) report Births: Preliminary Data for 2009, is now 32.9% (which is up from 32.3 in 2008) and is especially on the rise for Black Moms (via Time)

Possible factors, according to the Time article, are obesity and other health problems, maternal choice, patient education, and physician practice patterns. 

“The rate is going up but we are not really improving the health of babies or moms.”
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