Sign says no doulas allowed in this Utah OB/GYN,!

[dizietsma]

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My dad worked in a hospital where they induced women so they were less likely to get births at the weekend so the doctors didn't have to come in on saturday and sunday...yes, it's true.

My dad took an immense interest in the hospital where I gave birth and told me not to accept and doctor's crap.

Luckily Ithe hospital staff were lovely.

my aunt, a midwife trained in the UK in the early 70's and then practiced many years in hospitals in the Caribbean (very low interventionist) told me stories later when she moved to a private clinic with lots of US and Mexican trained ob/gyns of how they planned women's deliveries around the working week, inducing, then speeding up labour with syntocin etc. Of course with each intervention the bill goes up.

When she questioned the practice of one of these 'young upstarts' he arrogantly told her that that was what they called a 'Mexican Delivery'. to me 10 yrs before having my first so quite green about pg and childbirth, it sounded like it was all about speeding them up down the production line.

Well according to Naomi Wolf in Misconceptions, the big problem with the US system as oppose to the NHS system is that the NHS has in their interests to limit interventions in order to save money.

In the US it's the other way around - the practice directly benefits from every intervention. They can bill the insurance company more for an induction than they can for a vaginal birth. If the patient requests an epidural, they bill for that too. If it ends up with a c-section, guess what, that's billed as well.

So regardless of the issue of legal action, it's in their financial interests to persuade women into a set up where they will be unlikely to have a normal delivery. I'm sure very few doctors think about it in such cold terms, but it's amazing how practice mysteriously follows the most profitable path.

Shocking really.

Yes youngvisitor that makes sense. Dubious policy and practice in most walks of life usually seems to come back to money

I googled Bradley Birth plan and this made me ROFL.

^Here is the plan for the birth of my child. I've taken words from the dreams of 200 women. I'm translating them for the hospital staff.

1. No blue hospital gown. No sterile drapes. When I give birth, I want to be naked. I want my body to choose the colour of its growing.

1. No enema. No antiseptic wash. No shaving of pubic hair. If I wanted to shave something, I'd shave my head. Like Jean-Luc Picard. I've always wanted to be captain of a star ship. When I give birth, I explore uncharted territory, I move and writhe into new worlds. I want to go where no man has gone before.

In 1872, an English doctor named John Braxton Hicks discovered pre-labor contractions. This was sort of like Columbus discovering America. Some people already knew it was there.

1. No drugs. No epidural.

I want to feel the baby moving, his hard head pushing through layers of me. My bones shifting, my uterus contracting. I want to feel birth. I want to know fire.

1. No episiotomy. No amniotomy. I don't want anything that rhymes with lobotomy. I prefer to stretch slowly, burning in a rim of panting breaths, around my baby's head.

Pierre Vellay, MD, wrote that pregnant women must be "trained in the proper way." His vision: Laboring women "like expert engineers with perfect machines and carefully presented information (who) control, direct and regulate their bodies."

1. No Pitocin drip. No synthetic hormone to stimulate labor. Let my baby choose his own birthday. My body does not recognize the ticking of the clock on the wall.

I don't want to control my body. I want to surrender. Let the darkness soak through me, drip down my legs. Let the pulse of that unborn voice throb through me.

I don't want a needle stuck in my hand. If my labor slows, I'll lie in the sun on a fur quilt and let my husband caress MY nipples. I prefer to get my hormones the primitive way.

1. No electric fetal monitor.

I don't need a machine to tell me how my baby is doing. He kicks, he twists, he somersaults inside of me.

Robert Bradley, MD, advocated the idea of the husband as the labor coach. He liked the idea of natural birth, but still he thought that somehow a man had to be in charge.

1. No bright lights. No noise. No softball cheers. Don't give me instructions. My body knows what to do. Birth is not a team sport. I don't want a coach. I want my husband's presence. His hands to grip. His arms a sling to lean the baby bulk against. His face a mirror in which I can watch my baby emerging.

1. No stupid jokes. No cheerful chatter. No television, please. I want to listen to the moans rising in my throat. I want to hear the child singing in my womb.

In the 1950s a French obstetrician named Ferdinand Lamaze began teaching something he called childbirth without pain. French Catholics were horrified, the Bible said it was supposed to be painful.

1. No delivery table. I am not a plate of spaghetti. Let me give birth on the bed. A table works fine for conception, but it's way too hard and far too awkward for birth.

"Male science disregards female experiences because it can never share them." Grantly Dick-Read said this in 1933. No one listened to him.

I know what I want for my baby.

No nursery. No pacifier. No bottles. No crib. No cheerful, white-coated, well-scrubbed, briskly walking, thermometer-wielding nurses, please.

Let the baby sleep against my skin, nurse from my breast, wrap his wrinkled blue limbs in the heat of my body.

10. Nothing intrauterine, nothing intravenous.

I prefer to give birth in simple words. Breathe. Push. Touch. Pain. Wet. Stretch. Bum. Birth. Yes.

For 50 years, doctors have used these terms. Braxton-Hicks contractions. Bradley birth. Lamaze breathing. But a woman knows. The mystery is too overwhelming. We can never name it.

When the baby's head crowns, I want to touch the wrinkled scalp. I want to cradle the head in my palms while he is still inside of me, his neck stuck in the warm swollen parts of me. My moans will be the guide I need to pull him out of myself.
Hot compresses. Yes.
Dim lights, a bathtub of warm water. Yes.
Hands massaging me. Yes.
My husband lying next to me, solid to lean against. Yes.
The smell and feel of a slippery newborn baby wriggling against my naked skin.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

Janine DeBaise teaches writing and literature at the State University New York College of Environmental Science and Forest (SUNY-CESF), but she says her most important job is rearing her four children (ages 1, 4, 7 and 9). Her poem "Birth Moment" was in Midwifery Today Issue No. 36.^

Damn it! I tried to put that stuff in italics but it didnt work. That's not my birth plan it comes from here:

www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/birthplan.asp

My birth plan goes like this:

1. Don't talk to me or touch me unless essential
2. Give me drugs if I ask for them.
3. Sandwiches must be made available at all times (no tuna)

brilliant

Mine went: Please confirm the date and time of my CS in writing.

Found this

Aspen Womens Centre

And this
Aspen Womens Centre2

Message withdrawn

HA HA HA at that birth plan.

"I want to hear the child singing in my womb"

In my womb was about the one time I didn't have to listen to my bloody child singing. I tell you, at 5.45am "Twinkle twinkle" doesn't sound so damn cute

The biggest thing I could find against the Bradley Method was that its basis is a technique called "husband-coached childbirth".

Er... immense sexism, anyone?

LMFAO@ Theyoungvisiter.

I like:

"I prefer to give birth in simple words. Breathe. Push. Touch. Pain. Wet. Stretch. Bum. Birth. Yes"

Bum?

What's wrong with giving birth with these simple words fuckingfuckfuckitybollocksfuck

loving "fuckingfuckfuckitybollocksfuck"

I was very ladylike during both my labours. [prim emoticon]

I think the strongest thing I said was "ow, this bloody hurts" while I was crowning.

I now realise I should have been saying "ow. bum. rim. fire."

Have to say my DHs childbirth stylee was to stand in the corner of the room looking deadly pale and terrified.

Was v helpful

VictoriaScrumptious: That birth plan is bleddy brilliant.I'm so going to print it out to show my MW-just to see her face!

A few technical problems though:

Might be a bit chilly lying in the sun in mid-Jan in Britain...

No loving husband to tweak my nipples- I'm a single mother...Can I get a handsome doctor to do it on the NHS?

I don't agree with fur-what about a fleece blanket from Primark?

Has anybody seen that amazing film "The business of being born?" It's commissioned by Ricki Lake, and it's all about evil American OB-GYN practice. Seems you pay an awful lot of money to be treated like crap in America....