http://www.bellytales.com The Diary of a New Midwife Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:54:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The AMA has recently issued a resolution supporting ACOG's Statement on Homebirth which agrees that the safest place to have a baby is the hospital, of course, where obstetricians work and get paid.  What's really awful is that they're using Ricki Lake's movie, The Business of Being Born, as a ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/06/21/the-ama-joins-acog-in-homebirth-bashing/ Here's a lovely birth story to share, my 99th delivery: We were all expecting a big baby. Her estimated fetal weight from Leopold's palpation was judged to be approximately 4500 gms. The baby felt huge: fat and happy, and we were all duly nervous, because her first baby was ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/06/09/a-miraculous-birth/ 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 ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/04/24/choosy-mothers-choose-cesareans/ Chlamydia is the sexually transmitted infection du jour in our clinic. On a daily basis I probably encounter at least one, often 2, and sometimes 3-4 women per day who have it. For the majority of the women I see, learning that they have an STI is often ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/03/11/like-trying-to-put-out-a-wildfire/ Without getting into a huge amount of detail here...I had a new OB patient recently who came in for her initial visit and eventually told me that she wasn't sure who the father of the baby was....becasue she had been raped by four men. She had gone to a different ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/03/05/birth-after-trauma/ 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 ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/02/24/a-walk-to-beautiful/ I cut my very first episiotomy last week. It was my 70th delivery. Somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that my first episiotomy would come after a hundred births, at least....probably more. After all, there are absolutely no advantages to cutting routine episiotomies, and it ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/02/23/my-first-episitomy/ The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recently issued a Statement on Homebirth which condemns homebirth and all those who are willing to attend homebirth (aka midwives), concluding that only "...the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate postpartum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/02/11/acogs-statement-on-homebirths/ I've sort of fallen off of the blogging bandwagon, but what's the point of a blog if you can't be political with it? So, with that in mind, we now take a break from our regularly scheduled midwifery for this brief political message: I'm voting for Barack Obama I like the fact ... http://www.bellytales.com/2008/02/04/barack-obama/ I've been sick as a dog for the past three days, for the second time this season (I was so sick right before Thanksgiving that I actually lost my voice and had to call in sick to work...something which I NEVER do).  Luckily I've had the past 3 days off ... http://www.bellytales.com/2007/12/17/question-cpd/