31
Dec
Archive for December, 2008
31
Dec
Doulas in Demand
Having a Doula is more popular now than ever before. Part mother’s assistant, part birthing coach, doulas are showing up in delivery rooms and quickly becoming an important part of the maternity healthcare team. Recent studies have shown that the use of a Doula results in improved physical outcomes and emotional well-being of a mother and her infant. JustMommies.com sat down with Cheryl K. Baker, Founder of Birth Partners. Cheryl is a twenty-nine year veteran of the labor room, a DONA certified Labor Doula, a Certified Bradley Educator and a Certified Lactation Educator from UCLA. She has been a birth attendant for hundreds of births and is going to fill us in on everything we need to know about Doulas…
30
Dec
Doula World
DoulaWorld.com is an online, searchable, interactive directory that lists Doulas, Midwives, Lactation Consultants and childbirth educators. Our main goal is to help doulas and pregnant couples to find each other and learn about what the doula spirit is all about.
30
Dec
Birth Partners
Find natural childbirth options in your area. BirthWithLove.com offers your business advertising on the internet for an affordable price. Your advertising is placed on at least two sites, BirthPartners.com and Mothering.com. If you provide midwifery services we have additionally invested in specialized domains for every state and province of the United States and Canada. BirthPartners.com alone garners over 15,000 visitors every month.
Vitamin D deficiency greatly increases a pregnant woman’s likelihood of having a Caesarean delivery, U.S. researchers report.
During the two-year study, Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center researchers examined the relationship between vitamin D levels in pregnant women and Caesarean section. Of the 253 women in the study, 43 (17 percent) had a Caesarean section.
The study found that 28 percent of women with serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25 (OH) D] less than 37.5 nmol/L had a Caesarean section, compared to 14 percent of women with 25 (OH) D greater than 37.5 nmol/L.
Performing chorionic villus sampling (CVS) for prenatal diagnosis may lead to an increased rate of blood vessel malformations called hemangiomas in infants, according to a review in the November Journal of Craniofacial Surgery. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Lewis B. Holmes of Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, Boston, reviews past research on the possible link between CVS and the development of hemangiomas, limb defects, and certain other malformations. According to Dr. Holmes, the findings suggest—but do not prove—some possible ways in which CVS might lead to “vascular disruption defects or hemangiomas.”
28
Dec
Commonsense Childbirth
Commonsense Childbirth’s mission is to ensure access to timely maternity healthcare particularly for minority, low-income, uninsured, and under-insured women; and to provide practical, social, educational support, resources and referrals as a means to improving the chances for a positive pregnancy outcome.
28
Dec
Beautiful!
http://www.jenniejoseph.com/node/2
Announcing the arrival of Jennie Joseph’s New Book: Beautiful! Images of Health, Joy and Vitality in Pregnancy and Birth.
“To me all pregnant women are beautiful, but maybe after having spent a lifetime working with them, I am somewhat biased. So why a book about Black pregnant women and babies specifically? Why not? Have you ever seen such a book? Amongst the plethora of “Omigod I’m (She’s, We’re) Having a Baby” books have you come across any uplifting or encouraging pregnancy photography books? There are many cute baby photo books, brimming with pictures of healthy, happy cherubs which touch and move us all, so much so that you don’t even have to be pregnant to enjoy them.
27
Dec
ACNM Art Contest
Let the artist in you shine! The American College of Nurse-Midwives, the oldest women’s health care organization in the U.S., is sponsoring a contest that captures the spirit of midwifery.
ACNM members, student midwives, and clients of midwives are invited to submit original artwork—drawings, paintings, photography, etc. Winners will have their artwork featured in the new 2009 postage stamps.
Entries must be received no later than February 27, 2009.
Yukoners for Funded Midwifery is a consumer group working to get midwifery services integrated into the Yukon Territorial Health Care Insurance Plan. Every Yukon woman should have access to choices about her pregnancy and her birth experience, whether she wants to use a doctor, a midwife, have a home birth, or give birth in a hospital.
Midwifery is currently practiced in the Yukon as a private service, and there are no laws against it. Because midwives are not regulated or integrated into the health care system, they do not have hospital privileges and so currently provide services only for home births.
The trend towards Caesarean births in place of natural delivery has led to a “deskilling” of the profession of midwifery, with non-interventionist methods of care becoming less and less common, midwives warned yesterday.
The trend towards Caesarean births in place of natural delivery has led to a “deskilling” of the profession of midwifery, with non-interventionist methods of care becoming less and less common, midwives warned yesterday.
Carol Bates, of the Royal College of Midwives, said the choice of many women to seek a relatively pain-free labour, particularly with Ceasareans and epidurals, and the decline of home deliveries had led to childbirth becoming increasingly interventionist.
Before the advent of modern certified nurse-midwives who now work alongside physicians and deliver a great number of babies each year, there was the neighborhood midwife who often performed her service without formal training.
In 1976, the Alabama Legislature outlawed midwifery. However, for decades the midwife was the only help for most black mothers who couldn’t afford or didn’t have access to medical care.
http://www.enewscourier.com/homepage/local_story_019213931.html
25
Dec
Merry Christmas
24
Dec
Birth Issues Magazine
Birth Issues gives a voice to the alternative birthing community of northern Alberta. Every issue contains birth stories, often local homebirths, and other regular features include book and website reviews, editorials, birth announcements, poetry, and even recipes. Birth Issues is full of pregnancy, birth and parenting information, health information for the whole family and much more. Our magazine emphasizes choice, awareness, and a natural, healthful approach to these topics. Birth Issues is distributed to all ASAC members and is available to the public at a variety of locations around Alberta.
FOR mothers of a certain age, the name Westow Croft will bring back fond memories as the place where they brought their children into the world.
The maternity home closed in the mid-70s as thinking moved towards mums giving birth in hospitals, and the property eventually became a private house.
Moving on three decades and the house has once again regained some of its maternity status as the home of independent midwife Anne Adamson.
The Association for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth is a part of a growing network of parents and health professionals who believe that childbirth is a normal, healthy part of life, of special significance to the pregnant woman and her family.
ASAC was created to encourage alternatives to the technological approach. We believe parents have the right and the responsibility to make informed choices about childbirth and that a full range of options should be available to them — in the hospital, at home, in a birthing centre and with professional care givers of their choice.
People have often said to me, “You must really love babies to be a midwife.” And “Wow, how you can stand all that blood?”
Of course midwives love babies. We work hard to provide care to ensure that a woman has a healthy pregnancy and thus a vigorous baby. But in actuality, midwives love women. We love to see them happy during their pregnancy, supported during their labor, honored in birth, sustained while breastfeeding and nurtured as new mothers.
My role as a midwife is to help a woman and her partner celebrate her newness and embrace her sensuality.
22
Dec
VBAC Facts
Information about vaginal birth after cesarean.
Our first child, head askew, had to be delivered by Caesarean. We loved the obstetrical surgeon who extracted him: Dr. Burgee worked fast, made us laugh, and left almost no scar. He saved the lives of my wife and son. I thanked my stars we lived in a Caesarean world.
But the operation hit Alice hard. Her legs ballooned with fluid, stranding her in bed; her incision hurt every time she moved or nursed; and her milk production faltered, stunting Nick’s growth so that he required hospitalization. Mother and baby both took months to recover. So, two years later, when Alice got pregnant again, the first thing she said to our midwife, Martha, was, “Please tell me I don’t have to have another Caesarean.”
21
Dec
Is Homebirth for You?
Today in the United States, at the end of the twentieth century, advances in science and technology account for many positive changes in our quality of life. Yet more and more women from all walks of life are choosing to give birth the old-fashioned way — in their own homes. Why?
The fact is, in spite of all the good that has come from scientific discoveries and experiments, medical science has not been able to improve the human body and the way it was designed to work. Yet when our bodies are not functioning the way they were created to function, we are more fortunate than our ancestors in that modern medical science can sometimes help.