Choices in childbirth

Sighing.

The past is back and it isn't good news for women who want to have their babies simply and as naturally as possible.

In "Birth center's possible demise ignites protest" (today's Boston Globe), Kay Lazar and Steven Rosenberg report that only two hospital-affiliated birth centers remain in Massachusetts and one of them is being led up the stairs to the guillotine.

Back in the last century, when I was pregnant, we faced the same situation here in the state. There were no birth centers then - zero - and only one hospital that permitted women to deliver in "labor rooms," as opposed to the operating theatre.

So with Joan Labby, another friend who'd recently given birth, we organized "Choices in Childbirth," a conference whose purpose was both to make women aware that they could make choices and to prod the medical community into offering more. I've written about it before here.

I don't think our conference can take much credit in the end for the explosion of birth centers around the country, even if 350 people turned out during the Great Blizzard of 1978 and we got coverage in lots of places. Market forces were driving hospitals to respond to my generation's demand for more modern approaches to women's oldest responsibility. Birth centers, both attached literally to hospitals and by affiliation, sprung up everywhere, along with midwifery centers...I won't go through the long history here though I did make a bit of a writing profession of tracking it for a while (even wrote an unpublished book about it, One Birth, Many Births, which I rewrote into a chapter of a novel, excerpted here--I know, lots of reuse of material but the writers reading here will understand).

And I won't review why hospitals and docs might be paranoid about birthing centers given the malpractice situation. Judy Norsigian, the great leader in women's health, describes the "irony" perfectly in the Globe article:

"The irony here is, if the [hospital] lawyers cave in to a not-well-thought-through judgment that they have to do this to protect themselves financially, they will worsen outcomes for women overall giving birth in that system," Norsigian said in a phone interview. "These are safe choices being denied to women who are well-informed."

The medicalization of childbirth has a sad history. Please, Beverly Hospital Trustees, don't cave. We really need choices in childbirth.