Artistic Contribution

Yesterday, I posted this video that makes fun of the "emergency c-section" and has an interesting twist at the end.

Today, I am posting a video that I created myself. I created it through the xtranormal website, which is a fabulous movie-making site mostly because it comes off as so sarcastic. The characters are limited in their animation and their voices adapt to what you actually type, making them seem like drones or robots, saying the 'same old thing' over and over again.

And so, I thought this was the perfect venue for sarcastically highlighting the typical conversations had with pregnant women all over this country. I named it "Water Cooler Pregnancy," because in my work as a birth professional I have come to realize that every pregnant woman hears this type of dialogue so often that it becomes like the soundtrack of their lives.

Listen through to the end to hear a logical way of incorporating my "Empower Me!" action in real-life!!

Video Inspiration

What Does Change Look Like?

This blog has focused on the multitude of issues surrounding justice in childbirth options for women. As it stands now, women in the U.S. are afraid of childbirth because they believe it is a dangerous process (because the profits of medical intervention benefit indirectly from such beliefs) and these ideas are passed down from woman-to-woman, generation-to-generation. Women do not believe in the abilities of their bodies. As a result, they submit to unnecessary medical interventions and processes, in general, that disempower them. So women are passive participants in a normal, natural bodily process where their bodies are disrespected and mutilated in order to preserve a feigned sense of safety.

So, what would it look like if women were empowered, respected, celebrated, and given informed choices in their childbirth experiences? Here are a few ideas, both real (based on pockets of real success in certain areas) and imagined:

• Women would look forward to the births of their babies, not just because their babies will join them, but because the experience itself is a right of passage that shows women their strength, their ability, and their right to be nurtured.
• Women will hear positive stories of encouragement and empowerment during pregnancy, so that they will yearn to share their own positive stories to other women and girls.
• Women will understand and take for granted that the choices for their maternity care are theirs--they will know that they have the right to choose where to give birth, choose their provider (without restrictions from insurance companies, etc.), and choose which procedures to accept or deny (without guilt or retribution).
• Maternity care will be subject to transparency and strict regulation regarding its practice. Women will be able to make choices based on all available evidence and providers will be held accountable for decisions that are not evidence-based.
• Profit and litigation will not be motivating factors in the decisions made for maternity care.
• The vast majority of birth (90-95%) will happen without medical interference, pharmaceutical drugs, or surgical procedures. Instead, women and babies will be helped and soothed with nutrition, manual and positional methods, personal hands-on care, adequate emotional support, and social services that employ one-on-one woman-assisted companionship to assist with the care of their babies.

In the future, women will be the main leaders in dictating their care, because pregnancy and birth are not diseases or emergencies. Birth is a natural process and a rite of passage, and the future of birth will reflect this paradigm.

Resistance & Protest: EMPOWER ME!

My project for childbirth advocacy requires that I define a platform for resistance and/or protest in my chosen social change area. So, I have been meditating on what kind of action can be taken for childbirth advocacy. Do I post signs or make buttons for women to wear? Do I organize a protest in Washington D.C.? What would make a difference and what is needed to promote change?

It immediately occurred to me that what needs to change is each individual woman's experience when discussing birth with other women. Isn't this, after all, the most potent source of discouragement for women who are otherwise powerful and independent, but who somehow feel disempowered when it comes to their births? As a childbirth educator and birth professional, I hear daily that women are disproportionately told birth "horror" stories over birth "success" stories, and encouraged to give over their power to medical intervention ("Oh, just get the epidural honey") rather than pursue the most natural, physiological experience possible.

My message for resistance/protest is this: If you are female and someone tells you the story of their baby's birth, request that they tell you how you can be most empowered by their story and in your own future experience...

"EMPOWER ME!"

If a group of women gathers and starts sharing stories of pain, medications, side effects, blue babies, fear, doubt, etc....

"EMPOWER ME!"

If another women tells you to just get the epidural, to schedule the induction or the c-section, to not be a hero or a mortar in the birth process...

"EMPOWER ME...With your stories about birth!"

Don't stand for the continuation of fear and passivity in passing on birth stories from one generation to the next. DEMAND that others' experience EMPOWER you to be as INDEPENDENT and POWERFUL as you are in every other area of your life!

Gain power from others' experience! Learn from them!

And then go out, with the strength (and blood, sweat and tears) of the women who have gone before you, and demand a quality experience in birth--for both you and your baby!

Say: "EMPOWER ME!!"

Video: Panel on Advancing Women's Health

Childbirth advocacy blends together with many areas of women's reproductive health and combines experts in many areas (medical, public health, legal, political, domestic violence, etc., all across the world). Judy Norsigian, of Our Bodies, Ourselves, begins this panel on the topic of advancing women's health in urban settings.

Elan V. McAllister & Choices in Childbirth

Here are two clips from an interview with Elan V. McAllister, actress and theater producer, who is the President of the advocacy organization Choices in Childbirth. Elan talks about how she moved into birth advocacy.

As you watch, ask yourself: What excuse do I have to not be involved in helping women to attain a better birth experience, even if what I currently do seems to have nothing to do with birth??!

Midwifery Legislation

In current news, my home state (Illinois) is in the midst of a long, bitter battle to enable the licensing of certified midwives--a type of legislation that exists in 21 other states at the time of this writing. Homebirth has been shown in multiple studies to be safe for low-risk women, but politics and profit are limiting the choice of women to have a safe birth at home. This is because there are very, very few nurse-midwives (the only legal midwives in Illinois, who mostly practice in hospitals) and/or doctors who attend homebirth in Illinois--between 5-10 in the Chicago area (a city of almost 3 million residents). Licensing midwives will enable highly trained attendants, skilled in homebirth care, to provide alternatives for women who wish to have a low-intervention birth at home.

This is important, because it's not that doctors or nurse-midwives are incapable of attending a homebirth. It's because malpractice insurance is impractically high for doctors who attend births at home, and laws inhibit the practice of nurse-midwives, thanks to the requirement of a written collaborative agreement.

According to this press release by The Big Push for Midwives, there is a clear COST issue in the politics of censoring homebirth. In fact, Consumer Reports, citing a well-circulated publication by Sakala & Corry via Childbirth Connection, often referred to as the Milbank Report ("Evidence-Based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It Can Achieve") stated that induction of labor, use of epidural anesthesia, excessive cesarean surgery, use of electronic fetal monitors (which have never been shown to improve outcomes in any valid study), rupturing membranes, and episiotomy are being used too often, to the detriment of womens' and babies' health!

"The reasons for this overuse might have more to do with profit and liability issues than with optimal care, the report points out. Hospitals and care providers can increase their insurance reimbursements by administering costly high-tech interventions rather than just watching, waiting, and shepherding the natural process of childbirth."

According to the same Consumer reports article, underused and higher-touch modalities such as vitamins, use of midwife or family physician (not an obstetrician), continuous support in labor, use of various positions (and general mobility) in labor, increased availability of VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean, rather than a repeat cesarean), and immediate skin-to-skin contact of mother and newborn are effective in improving outcomes.

To learn more about midwifery, including the distinctions of the different classes of midwives and how they are different, see: http://cfmidwifery.org/midwifery/faq.aspx .

Please find out if midwifery is legislated in your state. If not, urge your state legislators to support it, if they would like to get your vote in November.