Category Archives: Hospitals

Worry-wart = new midwife

By The Midwife | Published: October 31, 2007

So, you’re probably wondering how it’s going. I’m in the middle of my third week as a new midwife, and it’s going…okay…so far, I guess. I wish I could sound more confident and enthusiastic about it at the moment, but I’m having a hard time feeling very confident or enthusiastic these days. Which is not [...]

Also posted in Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Pregnancy, Vaginal Birth | 3 Comments

The Business of Being Born

By The Midwife | Published: May 8, 2007

Last Friday I was a very lucky duck: I was able to attend a screening of The Business of Being Born at the Tribeca Film Festival, hosted by Friends of the Birth Center, along with a post-show talkbalk with the Abby Epstein, the director of the movie, and Ricki Lake, the producer, followed by a [...]

Also posted in Birth Centers, Birth Education, Homebirth, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, News, Politics, Reviews | 6 Comments

UK midwife responds

By The Midwife | Published: April 27, 2007

My post last week on the UK’s new birth agenda Maternity Matters prompted a UK midwife, Anna Skye, to write the following response on her blog Tales of Midwifery—the Truth. Rather a much-needed reality check, I suppose, to someone (yours truly) whose knowledge of the matter was based only on what she was reading in [...]

Also posted in Choice, Homebirth, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Miscellaneous, Politics | Leave a comment

UK’s new birth agenda: “Maternity Matters”

By The Midwife | Published: April 17, 2007

So, I didn’t think I’d be doing much blogging over my holiday, but as luck would have it, there’s a big debate about birth occurring in England right now—so big it’s been splashed across the pages of many of the newspapers I’ve been reading, and absolutely impossible to ignore. UK Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, recently [...]

Also posted in Choice, Homebirth, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Politics | 5 Comments

Pregnant in America

By The Midwife | Published: March 31, 2007

Via The Lactivist and Women’s Health News, there is a new documentary in the works entitled Pregnant in America which explores the medicalization of birth and the creation of the birth industry—the American birth machine—for profit and corporate gain, often at the expense of the health (and sometimes lives) of women and babies in this [...]

Also posted in Homebirth, Labor and Birth, Midwifery | Leave a comment

The need for speed

By The Midwife | Published: March 29, 2007

I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately to become much much MUCH faster at my clinic visits. My clinicals are at a very high volume clinic where the midwives (two to three, depending on the schedule) can often see about 35 patients in a day. This means that each midwife, on the days that [...]

Also posted in Clinicals, Education, Midwifery | 7 Comments

Premature Rupture of Membranes at Term

By The Midwife | Published: March 3, 2007

I’ve been meaning to post this post for ages, but was never able to finish it during the school year last year. All of this comes from the research project that I worked on last year for 2 semesters as part of my research class, and even though I had to radically alter the goal [...]

Also posted in Academia, Complications, Education, Journal Articles, Labor and Birth, Research | 6 Comments

Tight shoulders

By The Midwife | Published: February 4, 2007

So, my first week of clinicals ended last week, and I am only just now having an opportunity to sit down and write about it. Let me tell you a bit about my schedule: clinicals take up roughly 42 hours a week—2 labor and delivery shifts and 2 clinic shifts—plus one day a week in [...]

Also posted in Birth Stories, Clinicals, Education, Labor and Birth, Vaginal Birth | 4 Comments

The news from the NAPW summit

By The Midwife | Published: January 22, 2007

National Advocates for Pregnant Women just concluded its 4 day Summit To Ensure the Health and Humanity of Birthing Women in Atlanta, GA, this past weekend. This summit, one of the first of its kind, was organized by NAPW and NAPW’s director, Lynn Paltrow, to explore the grey area where pregnancy, birth and the law [...]

Also posted in Choice, Feminism, Fertility and Conception, Homebirth, Issues, Labor and Birth, Litigation, Midwifery, Politics, Pregnancy, VBAC | Leave a comment

In the news: cesarean rate rises and VBAC rate declines

By The Midwife | Published: December 6, 2006

Well, huh, this isn’t really news, but better late than never: a very well balanced article from the New York Times examines many of the issues which contribute to the declining rate of VBACs in this country, including doctors’ rising fear of uterine rupture, hospitals’ difficultly in staffing the necessary number of qualified doctors to [...]

Also posted in Cesarean Birth, Choice, Labor and Birth, VBAC | 1 Comment