Babies and Toddlers

A couple of days ago I bumbled into a debate on BabyCenter.com about "freebirthing," something I'd never heard of or even considered before reading about it on the BabyCenter forum.

Freebirthing is the practice of giving birth at home without the assistance of a doctor or midwife. That's right, just you and hubby. The theory is, childbirth is just as intimate as sex, and if you and your husband are the only ones present during sex, then you should be the only ones present during childbirth, too.

Nevermind that there aren't any historical precedents for freebirthing. Midwives have been a part of human childbirth culture since the beginning of time.

Now, there are a lot of people who are quite passionate about this subject. Some of them think that a small amount of risk to yourself or your baby is acceptable if it means that you get to have the kind of birth experience you want. Others simply deny that there is any risk, claiming that a woman and her partner can learn enough about childbirth complications to handle any problem as it arises just as well as any midwife.

Now, I know I'm not the only one out there who thinks this is naive at best and selfish at worst.

Let me just clarify that I fully support homebirthing, when it is with the assistance of a qualified midwife. It's freebirthing that I disagree with.

Now let's say that freebirthing mom delivers the head, but the shoulders won't budge. No amount of pushing, pressure, changing positions or whatever seems to be helping. Medically speaking, when this (called shoulder dystocia) happens, you have five minutes to deliver your baby or he/she may suffer permanent brain damage or death. When severe cases of shoulder dystocia occur during hospital deliveries , the practitioner sometimes has to break the baby's clavicle in order to save his or her life.

Now, it seems to me that in order to understand how to correctly break the clavicle of an infant who is lodged in the birth canal, you either have to go to medical school or be in attendance at at least two or three births where this procedure is performed. If a woman and her partner have that much experience and skill, then I am 100% behind their right to freebirth. But I suspect that is not generally the case. And all the book reading in the world is no substitute for experience.

Let's look at it like this: say your child was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, and there were two doctors on call. The first had 25 years of experience doing appendectomies. The second had never performed and appendectomy, and had never seen one in person, but he'd read all about it in a medical book. Which doctor would you want performing surgery on your child?

I think, frankly, it's a little arrogant to believe that you can handle a medical emergency just as well as a trained physician or midwife.

I don’t think anyone can deny that there are some childbirth situations in which professional assistance is the only thing that can save the life of a mother and/or her child. I don’t think anyone can deny that in some cases, medical attention might not arrive in time. These cases may be very few and far between. The risk may be very slight (or it may be greater than we realize, depending on who you ask). But to deny that the risk exists at all is simply naive.

A baby who dies because his or her parents chose to "freebirth" is just as much a victim as the little boy who recently died because his vegan parents fed him a diet of apple juice and soy milk. There are no excuses. Parents should not get to put the lives of their children at risk simply because they'd like to have the ideal birth. To do so is, in my opinion, nothing short of criminal.

Posted by Becki Bell at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I live in a very crunchy community. There are a lot of things I love about the crunchiness of this place. Almost everyone breastfeeds, which is great for ladies like me who marched through Hell and back learning to breastfeed and needed help from a lot of different sources. I also love that people keep the community clean, and that there are a lot of open spaces, and that no one wants to welcome Walmart or build a shopping mall.

But there are a lot of things about crunchy living that aren't so great. Around here, a lot of people don't vaccinate their children.

Now is that crunchy, or is it just plain naive? I'm not sure. I do know that I, personally have read a lot about the whole vaccine "debate" (and I use quotes because I don't think the non-vaccinators have enough of a point to even make it a debate) and I remain absolutely convinced that choosing not to vaccinate your child is irresponsible, not just to your own child but to all the children he or she comes into contact with.

Ah, I can hear the cries of indignation already. "If I choose not to vaccinate my child, how does that affect children who are vaccinated? If vaccines are so effective, why should it matter to you if some children aren't vaccinated?"

As disturbing as they are, I love reading anti-vaccination arguments because they show such a profound misunderstanding of how vaccinations actually work.

Let’s do a little basic math.

Vaccines are not 100% effective. For any individual child, a vaccine offers only partial protection. For the sake of argument, let’s say 95%.

If all children get vaccinated, then 95% of the population is protected from the disease. That means 5% are still likely to contract the disease if they are exposed to it, but since the other 95% won’t contract and therefore will not carry the disease, those 5% are unlikely to encounter the disease and therefore receive some additional protection just based on the fact that the other 95% of the population are protected.

If only 50% of children get vaccinated, then 50% of children have 0% protection, and 47.5% of children won’t get the disease because they were vaccinated, and the remaining 2.5% are children who got vaccinations but may still get the disease because the vaccine, for whatever reason, did not give them full protection.

But now 50% of the population is running around without protection, and all those kids are much, much more likely to encounter, contract, and therefore carry the disease. So that remaining 2.5% of the population are a lot more likely to encounter sick children and become sick themselves.

So yes, not vaccinating is irresponsible, and yes, it does have an affect on children other than your own.

The anti-vaccination arguments assume that because vaccinations are not 100% effective, that must mean they are 0% effective. It’s not a black and white world, ladies, there are many shades of gray. Vaccinating does not offer 100% protection, but it’s a lot better than 0% protection. And it works best when everyone does it.

My very favorite anti-vaccine argument: your child is more likely to develop a reaction to the whooping cough vaccine than he/she is likely to actually contract whooping cough.

That’s correct. Most kids are vaccinated for whooping cough, therefore, it’s not currently a very prolific disease. If everyone stops vaccinating for whooping cough—which is what anti-vaccinators seem to be suggesting—then suddenly the disease becomes a very serious threat and those statistics will do an about-face.

Posted by Becki Bell at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)