Aiming High

This is Josh: I’m happy that we’re going with a midwife. We’ve been watching baby pregnancy shows on Discovery Health over the past few months, and so many of them go the same way. It’s a slippery slope of one seemingly small intervention after another, until you’re dug in too deep and the only way out is a C-section.

Everyone agrees doctors are great for when there’s complications or a high risk birth. Those C-sections and other interventions save lives. But it seems like doctors delivering most babies aim too low. The one and only goal is a safe birth for mom and baby. But for a large amount of women, they can aim higher than that. The doctor’s toolkit is heavily focused on drugs, surgery, and fixing problems. But this presumes that a pregnant woman is sick, which is often not the case.

Women have successfully given birth naturally throughout history. It seems like it can be an empowering and momentous event.

You can say, well, in the Middle Ages women had kids, but like all things, times are better now. Women live longer now than back then, we’re not using leaches to suck demons out of our blood, and overall medicine has gotten so much better.

But data shows that other countries, such as the Netherlands, still use midwives extensively and have very successful outcomes for birth. The data shows that American doctors’ interventions can create new hazards and in many cases, the interventions are unnecessary.

Given the different incentives that exist for doctors today, it’s not surprising that the rate of C-sections is increasing. With a C-section, doctors know that they can have that baby out in a half hour. The high cost of major surgery is not taken into consideration over the low cost of a natural birth, because of our health care system.

If all signs point to a healthy pregnancy, it seems like a natural birth can be a powerful experience. The more we’ve read, watched, and talked about it, it seems like the best way to go down this route is to have a midwife. It seems like the care we get is based more on the philosophy and perspective of the caregiver than anything else, and a midwife puts the odds in our favor that we won’t have unnecessary intervention in our birth. – Josh