NY outlaws midwives

[operator kos]

This rather glib article doesn't seem to quite capture the outrageous affront to human rights which has just been committed here...

New York midwives lose right to deliver babies at home

If you want to give birth in a hospital, fine, but what right does the state have to regulate THE most fundamental act of humanity?

"At the end of the day, hospitals are for sick people, and I'm not sick," said Jacobowitz-Kelly. "I'm going through one of the most natural processes women can go through, so why do it anywhere other than the most natural setting — my home."

[Pele'sDaughter]

They do love controlling the lives of others, don't they. I can almost hear them saying women have no business deciding what to do with their own bodies or what comes out of them. Why can't there be an emergency session to rescind this b/s. I feel certain the law hasn't prevented a single case of malpractice either. Obviously, laws prevent nothing and only provide a flimsy promise of justice after they're broken. I'm getting fed up with being nannied to death.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Many years ago there was a conference somewhere. It was a medical profession thing on childbirth.

Dunno where it was or who went the only thing I remember was one paper was called: "Childbirth too important to leave to women."

Or words to that effect.

[JackRiddler]

The Inquisition returns. Fucking wow.

[Canadian_watcher]

heinous heinous heinous.

I am so sad for the real women of the past that lived and died under sexism in its most aggregious forms.. and I also fear for the future women who will live and die without knowing the freedom I and my generation have enjoyed.

I really fear it's going to come to an end. They're going to sit us right back in our "places" before too long.

[slomo]

Speaking of rights to physical self-determination:

Feds tell court they can decide what you eat:
"Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish"

Attorneys for the federal government have argued in a lawsuit pending in federal court in Iowa that individuals have no "fundamental right" to obtain what food they choose.

The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.

"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds," states the document signed by U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose, assistant Martha Fagg and Roger Gural, trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish," the government has argued.
...

[Squatterman]

Slomo:

THAT deserves it's own thread!

I think I'll commit an act of civil disobedience and have a SECOND bowl of frosted flakes - HA!

[tal]

NY outlaws midwives

This is a highly misleading statement. Seven of thirteen homebirth midwives in New York CITY have lost their (required) hospital/physician backing due to the closing of St Vincent's Hospital. While this is bad enough, it pales in comparison to expected fallout from the death of St V's for the larger community (read Jerry Mazza's eulogy linked above).

My kids were born in NYC in the '80s, at home with a certified nurse midwife. At the time there was only one practice consisting of two midwives serving the entire New York metropolitan area. Their back-up doctor (required by NY State law) was probably in his 60s. The other alternative options at the time consisted of one lay-midwife in the far reaches of the outer boroughs who told me "if anything goes wrong, I'm out the window and you're on your own" (quite rightly as she could have gone to jail) and a Hasidic lay-midwife who would travel into the city from upstate. I never considered a hospital birth to be an option for a "low risk" birth and have had no reason to change my opinion in the intervening years.

This NYTimes article has more information on the midwife story.

[crikkett]

I learned a couple of things in the last month - one was that in England your first child must be born in an hospital. You may use midwives for subsequent pregnancies. The other was that it's common to induce labor in the US (more than half the time in some NY counties, according to this article).

How's that for human rights? A person isn't even born on their own time anymore.

[JackRiddler]

Okay, now I'm pissed.

Most of all, at myself. About once a month I don't follow a link, and trust you guys to represent things honestly. I must remember never to do that.

But of course, I'm also angry at you, OK.

You made up a false headline. Why?

The closing of St. Vincent's is a bad blow to New York. I was there for my nephew's birth just last year. The emergency room served an area of something like half a million people, and I did have occasion to go there with a stabbing victim back in the 1980s (he survived).

Because this hospital went under, midwives lost the institution through which they were licensed. That's the story.

Actual Guardian headline: "New York midwives lose right to deliver babies at home. Closure of hospital leaves practitioners without backing or insurance, driving home births underground"

Punch and Judy section from article:

The collapse of New York's legal home birth midwifery services has come as a result of the closure two weeks ago of one of the most progressive hospitals in the city, St Vincent's in Manhattan. When the bankrupt hospital shut its doors on 30 April the midwives suddenly found themselves without any backing or support.

There are 13 midwives who practise home births in New York, and under a system introduced in 1992 they are all obliged under state law to be approved by a hospital or obstetrician, on top of their professional training.

St Vincent's was prepared to underwrite their services, but most other doctors and institutions are not, and they now find themselves without the paperwork they need to work lawfully.

That's bad, but your headline suggests a fiction - afaict made up completely by you - that New York just (present tense) passed a law barring midwives.

What is accurate is that New York passed a licensing requirement for midwives in 1992, EIGHTEEN YEARS ago. I agree that this was bad - midwives should not require licensing from MD obstetricians. I do not know if it is the dread "nanny state" at work - over-regulating everything in the name of safety out of misguided belief - because that's largely a myth. For the most part, misguided or otherwise, lawmakers don't give a shit about your safety. This sounds more like basic capitalist politics: An interest with political influence, in this case the medical establishment, uses its leverage to legally disadvantage a competing interest with less influence, in this case midwives.

Now, today, the only hospital willing to license midwives just shut its doors, leaving the city without legal midwives. That's not good - but your headline and comment suggest that this was the result of a current legislative action to outlaw midwives. That is a lie, and clearly one you consciously made up, since you were selective in your choice of what information to present and which passage to quote.

Again, why did you do that?

This seems to be from the Alex Jones school of journalism, in which real-world events are taken only as useful pretexts for building a fictional superstructure of panic, one that attains "truth" only insofar as it fits the prejudices of NWO ideology.

Now that was unnecessary work. It will teach me always to follow a link, never to post without having verified, and especially: never, ever, to trust a post that makes claims based on an article without providing the full text of the article or at least a long passage quoted and archived (which is my usual practice).

[JackRiddler]

The NYT article on this clearly lays out the politics: As suspected (see bolded bits), it's about the moneyed medical establishment using their political influence to push out potential competitors (even though midwifed homebirths are something like zero percent of the total and pose barely any competitive threat for now). Also, to express their ancient prejudices (this stuff really goes back to the 1477 "Hexenhammer" inquisition and even long before that). Also, the fear of malpractice suits plays a strong role, as well as presumably the insurance industry's interest in making sure every practitioner is forced to have a policy on their terms.

Perhaps the threat of growing competition from midwifed home births is real, as suggested by the popularity of the documentary mentioned in the article:
http://www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com

If you read the following, you will note that the only current pending legislation on this matter would SERVE the midwives' cause and liberate them from the hospital licensing requirement, and that it has been stymied by doctors' organizations. The sponsor, Gottfried, represents the district where St. Vincent's is located.

In short, New York has NOT outlawed midwives, and solutions are being sought after the loss of licensing for home births due to the bankruptcy of St. Vincent's. (City hospitals are still considering providing the licenses.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyreg ... nted=print
(Article reproduced here under fair-use provisions, with original link given, solely for non-commercial purposes of archiving, education and discussion.)

May 5, 2010
St. Vincent’s Closing Puts Midwives in Jeopardy
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

As she nears the last month of her pregnancy, Piper Harrell is counting on giving birth to her second child in the same place she had her first, in her second-floor walk-up apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

But this time, Ms. Harrell, an elementary school teacher, is afraid that if she insists on having her baby at home, she will make her midwife, who has delivered several hundred babies in her 15-year career, an outlaw.

Seven of New York’s 13 home-birth midwives, including Ms. Harrell’s, had an agreement with St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan that its doctors would back them up in an emergency. But the bankrupt hospital closed on Friday, and those midwives have been unable to negotiate new practice agreements with other hospitals or obstetricians, as required by state law, leaving them in the position of risking their licenses if they choose to deliver babies.

The loss of that 25-year relationship with a sympathetic hospital has left some home-birth midwives not only fighting for the legal viability of their practice but having to justify their very existence. Officials at several hospitals said this week that while they were friendly to midwives, they were skeptical of the safety of home births and were concerned about the malpractice implications of taking over their clients in emergencies.

That attitude has left the midwives scrambling for sponsors.

“This is who we have to get a signature from — people who don’t believe in what we do and that we compete with,” said Kristen Leonard, a midwife in Brooklyn who attends home births.

The 13 midwives attend about 600 births a year, and about 50 of their clients expect to deliver in the next month.

To them and their clients, having the option of a home birth is an affirmation of their reproductive rights. It is also a reaction against the highly medicalized climate of hospital births, which, they say, has contributed to a Caesarean-section rate of more than 1 in 3 births in New York City, Westchester County and Long Island combined, with some hospitals having rates above 40 percent. While the ideal rate of Caesarean sections is disputed, the World Health Organization has suggested 15 percent.

To the medical establishment, home birth represents a rash choice by women who refuse to believe that things can go dreadfully wrong in an instant. After the release of a 2008 documentary, “The Business of Being Born,” drew attention to home birth, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement staunchly opposing home birth. It asserted that women had been swayed by “what’s fashionable, trendy or the latest cause célèbre.”

A large study of planned home births in the United States and Canada, published in 2005 in The British Medical Journal, looked at 5,418 women who were attended to by professional midwives in 2000. It found substantially lower rates of medical intervention compared with low-risk hospital births (high-risk pregnancies rarely, if ever, culminate with a home birth) and a similar rate of infant mortality. No mothers died. About 12 percent were transferred to the hospital. The midwives considered the transfer urgent in 3.4 percent of all intended home births.

Midwives in New York said they began searching for an alternative backup weeks ago, as it became clear that St. Vincent’s was closing.

Even hospitals that welcome hospital deliveries attended to by midwives were cold to those who deliver babies in homes. Dr. Barak Rosenn, director of obstetrics at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, said Tuesday that he could not support home-birth midwives because “when they come to the hospital, it’s already a train wreck.”

Officials with the city’s public hospital system, which has midwives at 9 of its 11 hospitals, met with the home-birth midwives, but were “not prepared to make such an important decision on short notice,” Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the hospitals, said on Tuesday.

So-called written practice agreements with hospitals or doctors have been a condition for all midwives to practice in New York State since 1992. But obstetricians have become increasingly wary of signing with home-birth midwives since the Congress of Obstetricians put out its strongly negative statement in 2008, the midwives said.

A bill that would abolish the requirement has been stymied in Albany by opposition from doctors’ organizations, said Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried, a sponsor. Fifteen other states, including Arkansas, Connecticut and Minnesota, allow midwives to practice without them, according to the bill memorandum.

Given the passionate commitment and somewhat subversive nature of those who choose to have home births, several midwives said they expected that at least some of their clients would insist on delivering at home even without signed hospital backup. (They can still go to an emergency room and be treated.)

Ms. Harrell, 33, said she trusted her midwife, Ms. Leonard, who delivered her first child, Lucy, now 20 months old, despite an initial breech presentation. And she said she was leery of trying to build a relationship with a doctor so late in her pregnancy. But she worried about putting Ms. Leonard in an untenable position.

“I’ve never felt not able to make a choice about my body for myself and my family, and it’s a paralyzing feeling,” Ms. Harrell said.

Ms. Leonard said she would find it ethically trying if not impossible to let her clients give birth at home without her, even if attending the birth meant breaking the law and jeopardizing her license.

“I believe it’s also illegal for me to abandon my patient,” she said.

[operator kos]

I think you're the one flying off the handle, here, Jack.

This city of more than 8 million people, with its reputation for being at the cutting-edge of modern urban living, now lacks a single midwife legally permitted to help women have a baby in their own homes.

Midwifery organisations are scrambling to persuade other hospitals to take over St Vincent's role by signing the so-called "written practice agreements" the midwives need to be legal. So far 75 hospitals have been approached; not one has replied.

I'm sorry I didn't word it exactly to your liking, but the fact remains that women in New York can no longer legally have a midwife deliver their child at home.

[JackRiddler]

I think you're the one flying off the handle, here, Jack.

This city of more than 8 million people, with its reputation for being at the cutting-edge of modern urban living, now lacks a single midwife legally permitted to help women have a baby in their own homes.

Midwifery organisations are scrambling to persuade other hospitals to take over St Vincent's role by signing the so-called "written practice agreements" the midwives need to be legal. So far 75 hospitals have been approached; not one has replied.

I'm sorry I didn't word it exactly to your liking, but the fact remains that women in New York can no longer legally have a midwife deliver their child at home.

Simple question:
Did New York outlaw midwives?
a) yes.
b) no.

I submit the indisputable fact is that New York did not outlaw midwives. Seventy-five hospitals failing to reply (untrue - read the NYT treatment) would not mean that New York outlawed midwives. The hospitals are not New York. They do not make laws.

New York outlawing midwives can only mean one of two things:
a) New York state passed a law to that effect or
b) New York City passed a law to that effect.

Neither happened. Ever. Certainly not in the present tense used by your panic-serving headline.

I am the one who's flying off the handle. Absolutely. And justifiably. Because you misled me.

It's not that you didn't word it to my my liking. It isn't to my liking, but that's not why I'm angry. I'm angry because I fell for your wording, and your wording is a LIE.

Like many people, I dislike being deceived.

I really hate the part where I kick myself for having fallen for a deception.

lie 2
noun
an intentionally false statement

New York did not outlaw midwives.

It is obvious from the article you linked that New York did not outlaw midwives.

Although you linked to it, you did not include the relevant parts of this article, those which make clear what actually happened, which had nothing to do with New York outlawing midwives.

Therefore you have made a false statement, and (unless you wish to explain how it was a mistake) I feel justified in ascribing intent to your falsehood.

You may think you're making a higher point about a general trend. Perhaps you are. Perhaps I even agree. You should make that case, if you believe it so.

But that doesn't entitle you to MAKE SHIT UP THAT'S NOT TRUE just because it fits your imagined higher cause.

You may think this is an acceptable fuzziness, or a small inaccuracy in the service of a greater cause. You may think that since you're serving the good cause that I supposedly also do, I should never call you out when you MAKE SHIT UP THAT'S NOT TRUE.

Sorry. Not how it works. You deceive me, I reject you. Even if I think you're a great guy and a worthy ally. The deception is unacceptable.

Again, your headline raises a simple question:

Did New York outlaw midwives?
a) yes.
b) no.

[operator kos]

Okay, fine, I was wrong, I apologize. This isn't worth fighting about.

[JackRiddler]

Okay, fine, I was wrong, I apologize. This isn't worth fighting about.

Truths large and small are always worth fighting about. That's an article of faith, one that as far as I can see you also profess, with a passion your web site makes visible.

If you're truthful in admitting you were wrong and apologizing, then you should change your thread headline to reflect accurately the truth of what happened in New York recently with regard to midwifery, and thus no longer deceive the casual reader who might not click and might not follow the thread all the way to the corrections and apologies.

Your bad luck here is that I spent some time today believing that New York outlawed midwives, which I then found to be untrue. This is your fault. Being deceived on simple matters of fact enrages me, and may prompt disproportionate reactions. Tough.

Finally, I again challenge you at least to give a single-letter answer to the simple question that your original headline raises.

Did New York outlaw midwives?
a) yes.
b) no.