Re: [ozmidwifery] Resounding failure of "active labour management"

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 14:52:04 -0800

I totally agree with all of your comments Janet.  My original bone of contention in this case however, is the "time line" approach where if the cervical dilatation is slower than everyone thinks is "normal" then the woman is whisked off for a caesar.  This seems to happen far too much still despite both mother and baby coping just fine.   I know what revelation it was to me 17 years ago when my friend went to Boothville in Brisbane to have her first baby and was FULLY DILATED FOR 12 HOURS.  I had not long done mid in Darwin and couldn't imagine anyone being "allowed" to go that long with a good outcome.  Her daughter is very healthy!    17 years later, I still can't imagine that happening in any mainstream setting. 
 
Tragic
 
Helen Cahill
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: [ozmidwifery] Resounding failure of "active labour management"

Rachel,
I only hear this from health professionals. I don't hear it from women, not even the most mainstream hospy birthing mamas with whom I deal. It's a very small percentage of women who embrace this technology, and an even smaller number who knowingly embrace it. If you read mainstream birth stories they usually start with "My baby was 10 days overdue so my hospital/surgeon said I had to be induced." The women are generally scared, although normal physiological birth scares them too, but have no idea of the massive risks involved. When it all goes pearshaped, as it so often does, the hospital/surgeon and those around them tell the woman she is defective and can't birth "properly". It sometimes leads to ERC solely for fear as women are so shocked by the assault of active management that they seek to control the process in future by choosing surgery without the horror of labour under these circumstances. Of course, the profiting surgeon is only too happy to oblige.
 
Apart from women transferred from BCs to labour wards, the most traumatised women I see are those who have had active management foisted on them by hospital policies and the belief that you can't say no. Not that saying no helps women in most hospitals anyway, you only need to read those same birth stories to hear that also. Whatever MWs in hospitals are being asked about induction and active management, women are really not understanding what it is and I almost never hear of a woman who *wants* to be induced, they just don't know they don't have to be. Most women now believe that without interventions like induction and ARM that babies won't come and that women don't know how to go into labour.
 
Tragic but something I see all the time. Try some mainstream birth forums to read the same story over and over and over again.
J


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