HW 38

Pushed – The Painful Truth About Childbirth And Modern Maternity Care by Jennifer Block is broke up into eight chapters. Within each of the chapters are sub-chapters that have a tie within the subject of the section.

Block questions how “normal” has shifted in the world of childbirth. Personally my ideas behind the “normality” of birth have shifted as well. As a reader it is key to understand a sort of unveiling she performs and as a woman up until this point in my life, hospitals, doctors and medication have always seemed guarantees when pregnant. My initial response was, Oh! Here we go again, another “secret” our institutions keep hush hush, to move the time we have a little faster…

There is no personal connection between the mother and the receiver anymore, it’s all about getting in and getting out, ASAP. “OB is a business. It’s a volume business,” chimes in another doctor Stephen Crane, MD. “If you get paid $2400 to deliver a baby and you pay out $90,000 in malpractice insurance, you have to do a lot of deliveries to pay that fee.” (Page 60 – Pushed) “Cesareans are labeled either “elective” or “emergency.” But most are done in more of a gray zone; it’s neither a clear emergency, but nor are things progressing smoothly, and what happens next is a judgment call. “Will the woman dilate and push the baby out efficiently and easily in the next couple hours?” says Richard Fian…” (Page 59 - Pushed)

For a very long time I thought I was in the special birth category, always bragging about how I was a c-section baby and how I could of died. Little did I know though that I was not even close to alone in this category. Up until about a week till my birth I was a breeched baby, my moms OB/GYN turned me the right way but when my mom went into labor (which she had planned on being drug free) it seemed as though I was still facing the wrong way. They claimed I was stressed and that both her and I would die if they didn’t perform a c-section… “A breech birth, Jane Evans explains to her audience, can’t be induced. It can’t be rushed with artificial oxytocin or rupture of the membranes… The breech baby demands patience; she rejects active management; she demands normal, physiological birth.” (Page 75 – Pushed) I find it ironic that a process in which a woman should have full control of her body it is completely avoided by drugs, “Let’s see if this baby is coming,” she said, her fingers still inside. “That’s great!” she said. “Really?” asked the woman. “I can’t feel anything.” “Don’t worry, you just need to follow directions,” said the doctor.” (Page 68 – Pushed) You would think that it would be better to make a manual on how to give birth the “normal” way but yet both the doctor and the patient know this isn’t normal. When Hurricane Charley hit Block describes births that were natural without any intervention being completely successful… “We had an incredibly low cesarean rate. Amazingly, the babies were about evenly distributed between day and night shifts.” (Page 2-3 – Pushed)

Block has hardcore evidence backing up her ideas on the birth system. Her choice of commentators varies for every subject although most people are in the world of birthing she reveals the ideas of the patients as well. I looked up the cesarean rate in this country and discovered that Block is accurate, it has continued to rise and in 2007 1/3 of the births performed were cesarean. (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db35.htm)