Thrive Midwives LLC

Ooooooh is this interesting! New article in the journal Birth (link below) entitled "Personal Birth Experiences and Clinician Attitudes About Cesarean Birth: A Cross-Sectional Study With Female Labor and Delivery Unit Staff" highlights a factor that can have a very real influence on people needing or choosing hospital care for their birth. The personal birth experiences of those on your birth team (nurse, physician, and/or midwife) "are associated with their attitudes about clinical practice." If they themselves have only had a cesarean in the past, their support for best practices to reduce cesarean birth is lower, they are more likely to overestimate cesarean safety, and have greater fears around vaginal birth.

This finding circles back to my prior posts about the important role that hospital culture plays in the degree to which your care team may practice in an evidence based manner. Bias TOWARDS cesarean section can change the team's "tolerance" for a slow labor or a baby who is "misbehaving" according to the fetal monitor. It will likely change the language they use when discussing a potential surgical birth. While cesareans are very necessary in some instances, being that around 33% of all births in our nation are now surgical, what do you think the likelihood is that someone on your hospital birth team carries bias that can have a direct impact on your birth journey?

This is one of the many reasons I shifted into home birth. Not because I wanted to make my clients' stories read like mine (ending in a vaginal birth). But rather that I am familiar with the complex layers of hospital power structures and cultures, and the degree to which they can have a detrimental impact on practice...no matter what a birth family wants or prefers.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/birt.70062?campaign=wolearlyview

Well said. And accurate.

They want you to stop trusting scientists, and trust only them. But then they turn around and use research and data collected by those very same scientists to support their claims. Then they cherry-pick the findings and overstate the conclusions far beyond what the evidence actually shows. And when the scientific community pushes back, they say you can’t trust them — even though the entire narrative they’re pushing is built on their work. Hard to tell. Is it nearly the entire scientific community misleading people and politicizing science? Or is it the politicians who promised to find a “cause” of a complex neurodevelopmental condition by a set date and need to say something to fit their political narrative?  And if you think most of us speaking out right now wouldn’t be saying the exact same thing if this kind of anti-science rhetoric were coming from a Democratic administration, then you’re the one letting politics cloud your judgment. Because this isn’t about left versus right. It’s about science versus pseudoscience.

Raising funds ($1000) for a Spanish speaking doula to work with a client who cannot afford that layer of care and is one of thousands of pregnant folks who cannot leave their homes safely or easily right now. Spanish speaking interpreters and doulas are being disproportionately tapped right now to help in this crisis, and it is so important that their work is at least partially funded. If you are interested in supporting these endeavors Venmo me -Michalski. If there is an overage, I'll be able to at least pay the interpreters who have been angels at my side for weeks, for mileage and a perhaps a gift card. Thank you for your support and generosity in advance!

Photo courtesy of a birth family I honor and miss so much...captured so beautifully by