AMA vs. Ricki Lake?

adies, the physicians of America have issued their decree: they don’t want you having your babies at home with midwives. We can’t imagine why not. Study upon study have shown that planning a home birth with a trained midwife is a great choice if you want to avoid unnecessary medical intervention. Midwives are experts in supporting the physiological birth process: monitoring you and your baby during labor, helping you into positions that help labor progress, protecting your pelvic parts from damage while you push, and “catching” the baby from the position that’s most effective and comfortable for you — hands and knees, squatting, even standing — not the position most comfortable for her. When healthy women are supported this way, 95% give birth vaginally, with hardly any intervention. And yet, the American Medical Association doesn’t see the point.

That’s because the AMA is seeing some big money leaving their hospitals and practices.

Yesterday at its annual meeting it adopted a policy written by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists against “home deliveries” and in support of legislation “that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital” or accredited birth center. “There ought to be a law!” cry the doctors.

And this folks is scary. Because of big medicines goes after a law, young childbearing women are going to have to fight very hard and raise a lot of money to present any sort of feasible challenge. That’s how it works. This is America.

The other trouble with the American MDs is that they seem to have lost all respect for women’s civil rights, indeed for the U.S. Constitution — the right to privacy, to bodily integrity, and the right of every adult to determine her own health care. The “father knows best” legislation they are promoting could indeed be used to criminally prosecute women who choose home birth, say, by equating it with child abuse. Research evidence be damned, the doctors want to mandate you to go to the hospital. They don’t want you to have a choice. We think they’re spooked. The cesarean rate is rising, celebrities are publicizing their home births (the initial wording of the AMA resolution actually took aim at Ricki for publicizing her home birth on the Today Show!), people are reading Pushed and watching The Business of Being Born, and there’s a nationwide legislative “push” to license certified professional midwives in all states (The AMA is against that, too, by the way). The docs are on the defensive.

The whole article is worth a read. This really is unfortunately something that our daughters, nieces and daughters-in-law are going to have to face in the next decade.