Reading about the next feminist carnival Lingual Tremors: Carnival of Feminists is Coming to Lingual Tremors!, I was struck by the following quote.
# That a pathology/disease approach to normal life events (birthing, menopause, aging, death) is not an effective way in which to consider health or structure a health system.
I thought it was particularly interesting in light of the article I’d been reading about five minutes earlier, Doctors back mass hospital closures, especially the quotes:
“This will involve the closure of casualty departments, small midwife-led maternity units and children’s centres in smaller hospitals.” and “The Royal College of Midwives is alarmed that the plans may see the closure of small midwife-led units, believing there is a secret proposal to move more maternity services, run by consultants, into hospitals. Dame Karlene Davis, general secretary of the RCM, said last week that she was ‘dismayed’ by David Nicholson’s ‘prejudiced views’ that consultant-led units were better for mothers and their babies.”
Now, I’m not going to get into the highly emotive debate about safe ways of giving birth, except to throw in the extremely anecdotal fact that I personally felt hugely safer second time around giving birth on my living room floor, rather than the first time, when I’d been in a teaching hospital with all mod cons and multiple midwives and doctors around.
What I am going to say is that it saddens me that birth, a completely natural event, is still so hugely medicalised. Getting old isn’t, specifically, it’s a social concern, and until a particular level of medical care is required, ppl requiring support receive it in the community. So why are women giving birth instantly whipped off into hospital? It’s the wrong model, and it’s hugely more costly than it should be because of that. It should only happen when ppl actually need the medical care, as a minority will, but just because a minority will, doesn’t mean the majority should get it too.
If ppl don’t want to give birth at home (and I can imagine any number of scenarios where that’s perfectly plausible), women should have access to small midwife led units near to their homes (unless for a myriad of medical reasons they actually needed high level medical care, in which case it could be offered in a much smaller number of highly specialised and experienced units.) If you also focussed a number of other birth and baby related services to occur out of local midwife led units, I’m sure you could make them cost effective. I’d far rather not take my newborn baby into the doctors surgery on a two weekly basis to be coughed and breathed over by all sorts of ill ppl just to find out whether they are gaining weight or not. (Let’s not touch on the whole whether we should be weighing them two weekly at all…if we get the whole baby/ birth cycle out of the hospital mentality, we can chip away at the rest of it easier).
If you really always needed hospitals and doctors to give birth, the human race wouldn’t be here. I don’t doubt that there are instances where medical intervention is required, but they should be regarded as the exception not the norm – kind of like the fact I can walk down the street any number of times without a problem, it’ll be very unusual that I might fall and break a bone or two. But I could break a bone or two, so perhaps I should only do my walking in hospital just in case? Manifestly absurd, as is the hospitalisation of the birthing process.
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