Category Archives: Complications

Home Birth Debate Heats Up

By The Midwife | Published: August 27, 2012

I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile now.  The debate about home birth, usually relegated to the side-lines in the larger debate about birth, has hit the big time recently (well, back in June) as some of our nation’s top female journalists waded into it full force.  First, Michelle Goldberg at the Daily […]

Also posted in Choice, Homebirth, Hospitals, Issues, Labor and Birth, Midwifery | 4 Comments

NRP with Karen Strange

By The Midwife | Published: June 6, 2012

I took the most amazing NRP class today (NRP stands for Neonatal Resuscitation Provider, for those who aren’t hip to all of the gazillion acronyms in this crazy profession) with Karen Strange of newbornbreath.com, and I am so buzzed from the class that I have to sit down and write about it tonight before I forget […]

Also posted in Academia, Education, Homebirth, Labor and Birth, Miscellaneous | 5 Comments

Experience and Personal Practice

By The Midwife | Published: December 6, 2011

Personal experience always changes the way you practice in some way.  Anyone who denies this is probably not being 100% honest with themselves.  It’s the nature of us being human, and it’s inevitable because humans (as opposed to future robots?) provide health care, and by and large it’s a very good thing.  This can be […]

Also posted in Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Labor Support, Midwifery, Vaginal Birth | 1 Comment

Wax Study Revisited

By The Midwife | Published: October 9, 2011

Imagine the following scenario:  a meta-analysis comparing planned homebirths to planned hospital births is published, but it has so many statistical flaws in it that the journal which originally published it goes on to print several letters to the Editor critiquing the flawed research, in order to give the authors a second chance to explain […]

Also posted in Choice, Homebirth, Hospitals, Issues, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Politics, Research | 1 Comment

Back in the saddle again!

By The Midwife | Published: September 13, 2011

Friday was my first day back at work on L&D.  I was a little bit nervous about it.  Not that I have forgotten anything or lost my skills over maternity leave, but only that my life had slowed down to match my baby’s pace, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep […]

Also posted in Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Vaginal Birth | 2 Comments

The Obstetrician’s Lament

By The Midwife | Published: May 19, 2011

There is an astounding collection of writing going up on The Unnecesarean regarding the growing rift between obstetricians and the out-of-hospital birth community.  All of this is in response to the The Obstetrician’s Lament, written by OB-GYN Anette Fineberg, MD, which came out in the May edition of ACOG’s Green Journal (Obstetrics and Gynecology).  I […]

Also posted in Cesarean Birth, Hospitals, Journal Articles, Labor and Birth, Politics, VBAC | Leave a comment

NIH Consensus updates on VBACs

By The Midwife | Published: March 3, 2011

One of the advantages to being a midwife is being on all kinds of funky mailing lists, which means that all softs of health information, conference invitations, and sometimes even free samples often show up on my doorstep.  A few days ago, I got just such a mailing– the NIH Consensus Development Conference Statement on […]

Also posted in Cesarean Birth, Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Research, Vaginal Birth, VBAC | Leave a comment

Vaginal twins at 25 weeks

By The Midwife | Published: February 24, 2011

So one of the advantages of working as a midwife in a hospital is that I get to participate in many births that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to experience in private practice.  If I were working as a private practice midwife, and as a homebirth midwife in particular, there is no way I would […]

Also posted in Birth Stories, Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Vaginal Birth | Leave a comment

A case in point…

By The Midwife | Published: May 4, 2010

…just to illustrate the bind that the homebirth midwives find themselves in at the moment after the closing of St. Vincents hospital and the subsequent loss of their back-up hospital/ written practice agreements (see yesterday’s post): Last night I was working (at the HHC public hospital in Brooklyn where I spend a good deal of […]

Also posted in Homebirth, Hospitals, Issues, Labor and Birth, Litigation, Midwifery, Politics | Leave a comment

Newsworthy 11/11/08

By The Midwife | Published: November 11, 2008

One week after our historic election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, here’s a very interesting article on what his presidency might mean for Women’s Health (of the non-“airquotes” variety), namely improved access to birth control and sex education (i.e. the federal government no longer funding abstinence-only programs), a reversal […]

Also posted in Choice, Contraception, Education, Feminism, Labor and Birth, Politics, Pregnancy, Research, Sex and Sexuality, Women's Health | 4 Comments