…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 [...]
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 [...]
Last night was a very strange night. It wasn’t that busy, and yet, somehow, neither the other midwife nor myself were able to take a break. The pace was very steady. We kept expecting it to settle down, but it never did. Just as we were thinking “oh, as soon as this woman is discharged, [...]
Sometimes, briefly, you feel like you’re making progress, that midwifery outreach is making a difference, that people are becoming more educated and informed, and then you read an article like this one, over at Time Magazine, and you realize that you exist in a small bubble where your philosophy on birth is far different than [...]
Forget the Oscars (well, not entirely: Go, Juno, go!); the movie I really want to see is A Walk To Beautiful. Having already won several awards at film festivals around the world, the film follows five courageous women as they travel to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopa to find a cure for the [...]
Sometimes birth is not normal. Sometimes there really are complications and problems which need to be dealt with in a hospital setting. Sometimes a medical approach to birth is exactly what’s needed. Sometimes interventions during birth ARE lifesaving. Yesterday was a perfect example of that. I was helping to take care of a woman who [...]
The BBC has put together an amazing series of articles on birth and maternal mortality in developing countries. This year, at the half-way mark towards the Millenium Goals set for 2015, we’re not even close to reaching the desired 75% reduction in maternal mortality. These articles explore the reasons behind these failures: everything from lack [...]
After signing off yesterday, I had some lunch then promptly attended three educational sessions in a row, two of which I paged. The first was entitled Cervical Ripening: What We Know and Why A Paradigm Shift is Needed for Reducing the Incidence of Preterm Birth, which focused on how our preterm labor treatments (tocolytics) are [...]
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 [...]
The strangest vaginal exam I’ve ever had so far happened two nights ago, on my first night-shift clinical rotation, when a woman in early labor came to triage. She was full term, she’d had some light spotting, hadn’t felt the baby move as much as normal in the past 24 hours, and was contracting about [...]