Broken

[mamagotcha]

In the "duh" department: Cesareans can harm lung growth

But this won't affect THAT many moms... only 30.1% of US women will have c-sections.

And obviously the "Just Say No" abstinence campaign of the current administration is working beautifully. Right up there with those Purity Pledges (88% of the Pledged Pure had sex before marriage; increased oral/anal activity; pledges waited an average of 18 months more than unpledged kids to engage in sexual behavior).

And when Mom has to go back to work, at least she can use artifical hands to cuddle her baby. This product makes me sick to my stomach!

On the home front, the same right-wing Xian fanatics that launched a grand jury attack on magazines and dildos have started the same process to harass Planned Parenthood.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, the overall death rate for children in the US declined... yet during that same period, the violent death rates more than tripled: "...the United States has the highest rates of childhood homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death among industrialized countries."

Parents represent the greatest risk of violent death to US children: "Among children under age 5 years in the United States who were murdered in the last quarter of the 20th century, 61% were killed by their own parents: 30% were killed by their mothers, and 31% by their fathers."

Missouri and Kansas rate fifth and sixth worst among the 50 states regarding child well-being. More children are abused, beaten, starved, raped and murdered here than in most other states (only Connecticut, Arizona, Nebraska and DC did worse).

That's why I wanted to work on that parenting magazine. I wanted to support families who choose to conscientiously birth and raise their children in a way that gives them a secure and safe start to their lives. I think that we're too scared of treading on tender sensibilities and hurting peoples' feelings when, instead of being all PC, we should be outraged that it's OK in our national culture to do so much damage to our kids. Worse than OK... it's encouraged, and if you go against the prevailing attitude, you're considered an oddity.

There is something badly broken here in America. Living in the Midwest has only brought it into sharper focus for me. I only hope that I can contribute to the healing, or at the very least, slowing down the rate of injury.

I think this is one of the biggest reasons I cannot tolerate living here much longer.

Comments

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what to say. I guess I'm incredibly horrified, as someone who had two c-sections (one emergency, the second elective), to be told I'm in the same camp as right wing christian fanatics and parents who murder/rape/abuse their kids.

I guess you don't think I'm being conscientious about raising my kids? I have no idea what you must think of me, but it can't be good. I'm not going to defend my decision here, because I don't think I should have to, or that any woman should. I think the propaganda that women who have c-sections don't care about their children is both stupid and shameful. Some of us watched our kids almost die getting born the "natural" way. Whatever.

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

Reading this all over, I sound angry when mostly I'm just really hurt. I've been told I'm a bad mother for my c-sections, I've been told I'm a bad mother for not being able to breastfeed for very long, and now I'm dealing with people implying, if not directly stating, that homeschooling my kids would be doing something horrible to them. To read this morning that my choices (I'd argue that I didn't have much choice in any case) put me alongside the ranks of child molesters/killers; it's just too much. It's just too ridiculous, and it's incredibly hurtful.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Women have c-sections (at least, non-elective ones) because they have been told that if they don't, their baby will die. I know this... I've seen it happen. Nobody could fault a women for deciding to have a surgical delivery with this kind of pressure on her. The fault lies with the impatient or lawsuit-skittish health care provider.

I also know that it's not easy to breastfeed, especially after a surgical delivery... you'd be pumped full of "I'm under attack, alert alert!" hormones instead of "ah, time to relax" hormones, and that's going to sabotage you from the start. Even after a vaginal birth, breastfeeding isn't always fun... I watched my own child lick my blood off his lips as I sat there crying and crying and crying, for several weeks. For some women, it HURTS, and if you don't have the support and resources to push through the pain, then it's not going to work.

And I bet you already can guess what I think about the homeschooling thing!

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

After natural childbirth classes, and going into it with a great desire to deliver naturally, I had a C-section for "failure to progress" which more than one "pro-woman" aka "anti-Cesarean" advocate hs told me is a bullshit reason. Guess what? My only regret is that it was not done in the 15th hour of labor when I was screaming for intervention instead of in the 30th hour when a doctor finally came on duty the following morning who was willing to proceed with it instead of going home for a good sleep. By the time the operation was done, I didn't care if the baby died or if I died, I just wanted it OVER.

There is not always a clear distinction between elective or not (especially in the altered frame of mind associated with extreme prolonged pain), and even if the surgery is elective, that's a thousand times better than having to endure excruciating pain and forever associating childbirth with one of the worst days of one's life.

I wish that however a woman chooses to deliver or give milk to her baby would just be left alone by everyone else. C-sections are not always bad or last resort, and bottle feeding is not child abuse. I know you are a good and thoughtful person, and you may not mean it this way, but how I read your comment is "you are not bad for having this bad procedure, it's your doctor's fault for pressuring you into it" when in fact the procedure is often the best choice because it is the choice of the mother and/or a conscientious caregiver.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your comment, and I'm sorry to hear you had such a torturous birthing experience.

Like abortion, birth control, and other reproductive medical decisions, birthing does need to be a decision between her and her care provider. How to allow her to objectively research and choose a care provider whose ideals represent her own, and how to get the religious fanatics and lawyers and insurance agents OUT of that exam room, are the questions I need to pose.

I don't believe actual informed consent happens under the current conditions.

I'm working on a response to Hollie's comment, just wanted you to know I'm not ignoring it.

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

Women have c-sections (at least, non-elective ones) because they have been told that if they don't, their baby will die.

I was whisked away from my birthing center because my son's heart rate had dropped into the 20's. By the time they got me to the hospital, it was gone. I don't think you've read my birth story, I took it down last year (it will go up again, eventually). Even having had the c-section, my son was born dead. Twenty minutes of resuscitative efforts went into bringing him back, and the fact he's five years old with no damage other than a hearing loss and a language delay is a miracle I thank my higher power for every single day.

My choices were: no surgery? Dead baby. Surgery? Dead baby, but in a hospital they had the technology to bring him back. Had we been in the hospital all along? I'd have had that c-section a lot earlier, and he wouldn't have been without oxygen for twenty minutes while they fumbled around getting me to the (wrong) hospital, and he might not have that permanent hearing loss or the language delay. Who knows? The point is, I don't, and you don't; we all do the best we can with the information we have.

Beth's elective c-section birth was beautiful and healing, and I'm grateful every day I got to make that choice, and wasn't pressured (too hard) into a VBAC that I didn't want, and I heartily support any woman who chooses to get the information she needs to birth the way she wants.

Romanticizing birth is just as dangerous as over-medicating it. I do agree that doctors and other healthcare providers have got such a fear of lawsuits shoved up their ass that they definitely over-pressure women into c-sections when a VBAC would be a completely reasonable option. Yet implying that women have emergency c-sections just because they've been told their baby will die, and that you somehow know this to be wrong, well, it was believing that sentiment that sent me to the Seattle Midwifery School in my early twenties where I was indoctrinated fully into the natural birth fold, only to wake up six years later from heavy anesthesia not knowing if the baby they'd taken out of me was dead or alive.

I believe in encouraging natural births, but I also believe in fully supporting women, not supporting them only if they make the choices I want them to make. If your beef is with doctors who you think are coercing women, then talk about that and keep the moralistic mothering stuff out of it. Claiming that "The fault lies with the impatient or lawsuit-skittish health care provider", yet ending your essay with, "I wanted to support families who choose to conscientiously birth and raise their children in a way that gives them a secure and safe start to their lives," sounds hypocritical. And believe me, us mothers who have had un-politically-correct births can smell that hypocrisy a mile away. Just because our friends say, "Oh, I don't mean you," doesn't make it any better.

Edited to add: And yes, I think of you as my friend, even though we haven't met. Your opinion is important to me, and that's why writing this was important to me.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

My answer was too long to post as a comment, so I posted it as an entry.

Thank you, Hollie, for being willing to talk about this with me. I think of you as a friend, also, and am honored that you consider me yours. I can only imagine how hard it is to go through what you've experienced, and I feel terrible that I somehow inadvertantly managed to hurt you by writing about it.

I only hope that this latest exchange isn't pouring fuel on that painful fire. Let me know...

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Of course there are emergency sections. Thank the Goddess we have them... I've attended 30 births myself and two were sections (not emergency, but definitely heading that direction).

Can you see that I'm taking aim at the culture that causes the unnecessary sections, NOT the women who were sectioned?

One of the quotes in the articles I was looking at was a doctor saying that she didn't think women even knew there were potentially negative risks to having a section (so much for informed consent). Surgical deliveries are rising not so much because we have more emergencies or because humans suddenly evolved in a way so that vaginal birth was more dangerous... but because of convenience and impatience and fear of lawsuits.

Hollie, I doubt that anyone who could be reading this would be among the disadvantaged families I'm wondering about. Reading in the paper on a daily basis about local babies dying of shaken baby syndrome, or toddlers beaten to death, or moms leaving newborns in the toilet... these people are not among my friends.

I had the great good fortune to have a brief interview with Joseph Chilton Pierce at a midwifery conference years ago. His work was moving towards why the primary directive (care of the next generation) seemed to be shortcircuiting around the globe, but especially here in the U.S. Things like violent birth practices and lack of support for new parents were symptoms of a larger problem... the one I'm trying to grasp now, I suspect.

Obviously I'm being terribly clumsy at it... which is why I'm trying to start exploring these ideas at this level, rather than my usual practice of writing for periodicals. There must be language and phrasing that will express myself better. I'm working on it.

Finally, I want to apologize for my words causing you distress. I hope you can see that that last thing I want to do is attack anyone (except politicians and community leaders who shortsightedly create policy that hurts families, and health care professionals who succumb to the edicts of insurance companies to make more money).

Did you see anything in what I quoted to be in error? If you have another theory about why the c-section rate is over 30% now, I'd really like to hear it.

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

Can you see that I'm taking aim at the culture that causes the unnecessary sections, NOT the women who were sectioned?

No, that wasn't clear to me at all. I think that's the thing you'd want to work on, if you talk about this to wider audiences.

Hollie, I doubt that anyone who could be reading this would be among the disadvantaged families I'm wondering about. Reading in the paper on a daily basis about local babies dying of shaken baby syndrome, or toddlers beaten to death, or moms leaving newborns in the toilet... these people are not among my friends.

What I don't understand is, what does this group of people have to do with women who have c-sections? Why are those two things juxtaposed, with no explanation, like it should be obvious?

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

I doubt that anyone who could be reading this would be among the disadvantaged families I'm wondering about.

Perhaps not, but they might be the children of such families. They might have, at one point, been lumped in the same bucket with the "disadvantaged families" because they received Medicaid and because one of the couple was diagnosed with a mental illness. They might have a baby with "failure to thrive" (and all that implies) written in the medical records, and gone through the continual anxiety of being guilty until proven innocent by virtue of the baby actually having a physical medical condition after all. (They might wonder, deep down, if the only reason they weren't seen with even more suspicion was that they were Caucasian and married to each other,or on the other hand seen with more suspicion because they voluntarily lived in a "black" neighborhood.) They might have a family member who died young that they suspect but cannot prove WAS a shaken baby (due to the combined symptoms of blindness, severe mental retardation, and inability to walk - this was my husband's twin sister).

If you make it about "those disadvantaged families", I venture to say that you might want to consider your stereotyping and the potential of class (or even racial and religious) bias. I'm reminded of a particularly nasty social worker I went to see when I had just finished graduate school with honors, had a job offer in hand, and couldn't afford security and first month's rent on an apartment. She informed me that I shouldn't search the Internet for apartments because "the Internet is for intelligent people!" (In other words, intelligent = rich, or at least not in financial crisis.) She also wanted to know what physical disability prevented my husband from working to earn the money for the move, when he had just gotten out of the psych ER for the second time that year due to suicidal ideation. Apparently psychiatric disabilities aren't valid in her world.

I do think that there is too much fear surrounding childbirth, but I also think, at a societal level, that there is too much fear surrounding parenting at all, and that is affecting people's birth choices. I think that most people see two options - have an unintended or semi-intended baby before you turn 20, or wait until you are at least 25 (probably 30-33), "established", married, "successful" dual-career or one person making LOTS of money so the other can stay home, in a house, no other debt, blahblahblah...and if you can't do that you can't parent successfully. I think it is a matter of the consumer culture playing havoc with reasonable expectations.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

I see some of your points, but in this comment you move from discussing children of disadvantaged families to discussing the families themselves without making the distinction clear. It muddies your argument, which is a good one.

(This is what I mean: "They" start out being "children of such families" and seamlessly transition to being the parents of those families:
Perhaps not, but they might be the children of such families. They might have, at one point, been lumped in the same bucket with the "disadvantaged families" because they received Medicaid and because one of the couple was diagnosed with a mental illness. )

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

Isn't being "among" the families being "among" them, regardless of one's position in them, though? *shrug* That's the problem I had with the statement to begin with.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

Your facts are true enough, but the writing is not clear, and that gets in the way. This isn't taking any issue with what you say, just giving you some writing-advice to help with clarity. I do this for a living you see (write stuff, and edit other peoples' stuff), and I find that clear writing helps lead to clear thinking.

One change would make a large difference. In your post, you say "They might have" and the last actual noun used was the babies in question. Pronouns always refer back to the last noun used, you see. But if you change "They" to "Those families", all become very clear.

Here, this is what I mean:
Perhaps not, but they might be the children of such families. Those families might have, at one point, been lumped in ...

Do you see what I mean? It makes it clearer who's under discussion - which is really the parents of the children, for the rest of your comment.

[jinxleah.livejournal.com]

I knew that I'd moved to the wrong place before the ink was even dry on my lease. My brother-in-law and I had gone to a Memorial Day family picnic, Zig's Pig, last year and a plane flew overhead with an anti-abortion banner, complete with full color bloody abortion picture on it. Yup, I might have made a mistake! I still can't believe that someone had the balls to fly that over a Memorial Day picnic with kids around.

But...Zig's Pig is a great event. Everyone from bikers to hippies to rednecks and everything in between. All races creeds and maybe even religions. Always at least two bands and everyone happy and smiling. Its one of the events the I'm going to try to make it back up to when I move back down to Austin.

[via-lens.livejournal.com]

I don't know why some parents have so little regard for their children's well-being, but I do know that many parents all around the world and here in the US, and even in Missouri, love their children with a love that knows no bounds.

And frankly, if you start out your parenting career with that basic tenet, there are lots of things you can do differently, either from the norm or from what other people think is the only right way to raise your children, and still be a good parent.

I think it's important to remember, too, that people who were born during the years of Twilight Sleep and raised on formula because pediatricians wanted to be able to know exactly how much of what nutrient was going into each baby at what time are now some of the women who waited until they were in their 40s to have babies. In the 60s and 70s the assumption was that science could triumph over nature. Now we're trying to find our way back to balance again. The pendulum doesn't have to swing all the way back in order for it to be progress.

I was born by C-section. I was fed formula. I went to daycare, and I attended public school. And my parents wanted a baby more than anything, and they loved me more than anything else in the world, and I never doubted that. I turned out pretty well.

But maybe for people who are less sure about being ready to have children, who feel like they have no other options, having all of that medical and scientific intervention serves to make it easier for them to distance themselves from their progeny.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

...I do know that many parents all around the world and here in the US, and even in Missouri, love their children with a love that knows no bounds... And frankly, if you start out your parenting career with that basic tenet, there are lots of things you can do differently, either from the norm or from what other people think is the only right way to raise your children, and still be a good parent.

I think I ambled the direction you were expressing above in a more recent post, so I won't babble on here. But I did want to thank you for your thoughtful reply.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

You said this: I wanted to support families who choose to conscientiously birth and raise their children in a way that gives them a secure and safe start to their lives.

You don't state what the families' choices need to be, just that they should give the children a "secure and safe start to their lives". It seems very hard to argue with that statement.

And yet some of your commentors seem to be projecting a *lot* of judgement into your posting. I know that moms get hit with outrageous amount of that from outsiders, but I don't see it in your posting. All I can say in reply to them is, "Wow."