More Cesareans Than Even Before.

The CDC has just released the  report on births for the US, and yet again the cesarean section rate has risen. The National C/Section rate went up 2 % from 2008, hitting 32.9% for 2009!!!

Not surprisingly to any natural childbirth advocates, the national birth rate fell by 3 percent less than 2008  with a birth rate of 4,247,694 in 2009, compared with 4,131,019 in 2008.  Is it any wonder that it fell?!  It is a fact that many women are actually choosing to forgo having another baby due to the fear of having a repeat Cesarean Section.  Add to that fact that many women who do decide to have another baby after  a C/Section suddenly discover that they are incapable of getting pregnant again naturally, because the surgical scar can cause infertility problems.  When as many as 1 in 3 women suffer from fertility problems after a C/Section is it any wonder that the American National Birth rate is falling?

Last February  it was announced   that having a VBAC birth (Vaginal Birth after Cesarean Section) was actually safer than they originally thought, especially for women with multiple uterine scars. BJOG  ( an International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology), found that women with 3 previous Caesarean Sections have similar outcome rates of success as women with only one previous Caesarean section in a study of 25000 women attempting a vaginal birth after a Ceasarean section. The study shows that not only did the women with 3 previous C/Section uterine scars have a very similar rates of success in having a VBAC birth, but that the rates of morbidity were also very similar between the women that had a VBA3C and those that chose to be delivered by elective repeat caesarean.  A few month later ACOG made an official announcement that:

ACOG states that VBAC is a safe and reasonable option for most women, including some women with multiple previous cesareans, twins and unknown uterine scars.  ACOG also states that respect for patient autonomy requires that even if an institution does not offer trial of labor after cesarean (TOLAC), a cesarean cannot be forced nor can care be denied if a woman declines a repeat cesarean during labor.

Shall we gather here again at this time next year to see if the new official party line has had any effect at all on the rising Cesarean Section rate?  Are you holding your breath?  Me neither.

ACOG can make all the grand pronouncements they want, but if the hospitals and Doctors and Midwives don't listen and change their policies accordingly, then it's all just a  waste of the paper that the studies were printed on.

After I wrote: "New ACOG guidlines for VBAC births"- I sat at the computer and once the initial high of elation had worn off, I had a bit of a sad.  I stared at the words on the screen and thought to myself "how many women out there are reading this news with a sense of unbearable sadness for the births they didn't have.  Couldn't have.  Because last week these people and their grand pronouncements said they couldn't."  Five months ago I fought tooth and nail, and had to signed a stack of waivers pretty much as tall as my eldest son, to have a VBAC birth.  And I live in Canada and have the good fortune to have a Charter of Rights that gives me the legal Right to refuse a surgeons knife, I can't imagine  how my American sisters feel.

We, the women and mothers, have been  telling them for years. We have been in a ridiculous battle against the "powers that be" to be able to birth our babies OUR way.  To follow our intuition and allow ourselves the  dignity of choosing where, when and how we will give birth. It has ALWAYS been OUR births. We shouldn't of needed a big green light from a commercially motivated "association" (just another word for "corporation") to tell us this- to allow this to be denied to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mothers!!

Mama Birth said it so well in her article "ACOG Still Sucks"

Thousands of women have fought, bled and died for this change to come about. They have gone through the stigma of birthing at home in order to have a birth that they chose. They have been attended by supportive midwives. Some of them have birthed unassisted. Some of them have had hospital births in hostile environments where they were disrespected but in the process have shown hospital staff that VBAC is possible.
These are the women who deserve the praise for this recent statement.

Not ACOG. To ACOG I want to say this:

What can you do for all of those women who were denied VBAC because of you? Can you remove their scars? Can you remove their fears? Can you give them their births back? Can you change what you have already done?

You can do none of these things. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women have already suffered at your hands. Many more will because of the refusal of many OB's within your community to even acknowledge these new recommendations. You can not fix the pain that you have caused.

Thank you ACOG for changing your policy.

Shame on you for all of the bad births, scars, pain, depression and death that have come at your hands because of your unwillingness to do this sooner.

So will the leopard change it's spots?  Will the American national   Cesarean Section rate fall for this year?  Maybe next year?  Yea, I'm definitely not holding my breath on this one.

Immunization Graphs: Vaccine effectiveness & dangers

Immunization Graphs: Vaccine Effectiveness and Dangers

I posted this link earlier this week and then somehow the link broke.  After much searching (and cursing) I managed to find the Link again.

This information is vitally important for every parent to read and research before making the choices of whether or not to vaccinate their child/ren.   WE continuously hear from vaccine pushers that vaccines are the be all and end all of protecting health.  That the vaccines are directly responsible for lowering the incidents of infection and the deaths that these infections caused. If you review the data in these graphs, which all the information gathered is from approved, well regarded professional medical associations, you will see that the incidents of these diseases had already dropped radically before the introduction of each vaccine.  What does this prove?  That vaccines have not done the "wonderful" jobs that Big Pharma and the governments say they do.  Further, graphs twenty-five  through thirty five  graphically illustrate that increases in the number of governmental mandated vaccine doses correlates with significant increases in death rates for children under the age of five; and that the practice is linked to sudden infant death syndrome; various degenerative diseases, including diabetes; and appears to cause general immune system impairment in infants and children. Evidence also points to the practice of immunization as a principal factor in the recent massive increases in neurodegenerative conditions such as autism in children.

Please take the time to review the information in these graphs and share widely.  Parents need to be made aware of the truth and risks of childhood immunizations.

Unfortunately, due the original document being a PDF I am unable to copy & paste the graphs here, but please click on the link below to view all the graphs.

Immunization Graphs: Natural Infectious Disease Declines; Immunization Effectiveness; and Immunization Dangers

Amnesty blows the whistle on Maternal Mortality rates in the US

Even Amnesty International sees it, yet main stream medical organizations seems to think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Maternity care in the US (...and don't be fooled, it's almost as bad in Canada). The maternal death rate has almost doubled since 1987- 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006. And since there is no federal reporting requirements in the US, the actual death rate may actually be much higher.

Amnesty points a finger at the lack of accessible health care as a reason for America's horrifying statistics (They are currently ranked 40th out of 40 developed nations), but also points to the high rates of Inductions and Caesarean Sections causing the maternal mortality rate to be climbing instead of falling. Currently the US spends the most amount of money on maternity care of any nations on the planet.... yet obviously they are spending too much money pushing medical and surgical interventions and not enough money on supportive health care and natural childbirth education- for parents and medical practitioners alike. Instead of encouraging and funding midwifery training and recognising the role of doulas as an essential part of supporting birthing mothers, they have instituted a dictator-like regime that bans mothers from having VBAC births and takes away their human rights to make decisions on how, where and when they will give birth.

Until ACOG , the CDC , and other major health organizations stop meddling in politics and accepting backdoor funding from companies with conflicting interests, the Maternal Mortality rate will only continue to climb. Because right now, these organizations are only interested in the bottom line instead of getting to the bottom of the reason that mothers are dying in childbirth in the 21st Century.

Too Many Women Dying in U.S. While Having Babies

By Jennifer Block

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1971633,00.html#ixzz0i0Lib1Ry

Amnesty International may be best known to American audiences for bringing to light horror stories abroad such as the disappearance of political activists in Argentina or the abysmal conditions inside South African prisons under apartheid. But in a new report on pregnancy and childbirth care in the U.S., Amnesty details the maternal-health care crisis in this country as part of a systemic violation of women's rights.

The report, titled "Deadly Delivery," notes that the likelihood of a woman's dying in childbirth in the U.S. is five times as great as in Greece, four times as great as in Germany and three times as great as in Spain. Every day in the U.S., more than two women die of pregnancy-related causes, with the maternal mortality ratio doubling from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006. (And as shocking as these figures are, Amnesty notes that the actual number of maternal deaths in the U.S. may be a lot higher, since there are no federal requirements to report these outcomes and since data collection at the state and local levels needs to be improved.) "In the U.S., we spend more than any country on health care, yet American women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes than in 40 other countries," says Nan Strauss, the report's co-author, who spent two years investigating the issue of maternal mortality worldwide. "We thought that was scandalous." (See the most common hospital mishaps.)

According to Amnesty, which gathered data from many sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately half of the pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable, the result of systemic failures, including barriers to accessing care; inadequate, neglectful or discriminatory care; and overuse of risky interventions like inducing labor and delivering via cesarean section. "Women are not dying from complex, mysterious causes that we don't know how to treat," says Strauss. "Women are dying because it's a fragmented system, and they are not getting the comprehensive services that they need."

The report notes that black women in the U.S. are nearly four times as likely as white women to die from pregnancy-related causes, although they are no more likely to experience certain complications like hemorrhage.

The Amnesty report comes on the heels of an investigation in California that found that maternal deaths have tripled there in recent years, as well as a maternal-mortality alert issued in January by the Joint Commission, a group that accredits hospitals and other medical organizations, which noted that common preventable errors included failure to control blood pressure in hypertensive women and failure to pay attention to vital signs after C-sections. And just this week, a panel of medical experts at a conference held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommended that physicians' organizations revisit policies that prevent women from having vaginal births after having had a cesarean. Such policies, designed in part to protect against litigation, have contributed to the rise of the U.S. cesarean rate to nearly 32% in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available.

The Amnesty report spotlights numerous barriers women face in accessing care, even among those who are insured or qualify for Medicaid. Poverty is a major factor, but all women are put at risk by overuse of obstetrical intervention and barriers to access to more woman-centered, physiologic care provided by family-practice physicians and midwives.

Amnesty is calling on Obama to create an Office of Maternal Health within the Department of Health and Human Services to improve outcomes and reduce disparities, among other recommendations. The report also calls on the government to address the shortage of maternal-care providers.

"Access is only one factor," cautions Maureen Corry, executive director of Childbirth Connection, a research and advocacy organization that recently convened more than 100 stakeholders, including members of the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the NIH, in a large symposium on transforming maternity care. "We need to make sure that we reduce the overuse of interventions that are not always necessary, like C-sections, and increase access to the care that we know is good for mothers and babies, like labor support."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1971633,00.html#ixzz0i0LSUPmk

Canada gets a "C" for infant mortality

The statistics for infant mortality rates in our group of 17 peer countries is in and Canada Receives a "C".... ranking only above the UK and US for worst infant death rates in it's peer group.

While Canada's infant mortality rates have greatly improved since the 60's falling significantly between 1960 and 1980—from 27 deaths per 1,000 live births to 10 deaths- and continued to improve in the 1980s and 1990s, the lowering numbers have basically stalled since 1998, although it did drop from 5.4 in 2005 to 5.0 in 2006.

Even though Canada’s infant mortality rate has decreased since the 1960s, the rate of improvement has been lower than in most of Canada’s peer countries. Japan’s infant mortality rate, for example, was higher than Canada’s in 1960, at 31 infants per 1,000 live births. In 2006 it was 2.6, about half the rate in Canada.

In 1990, Canada ranked 5th among the 17 peer countries. It is now tied with the U.K. for the second-highest infant mortality rate—only the U.S. performs worse.

The study suggests that some of the statistical differences between countries may be due to different reporting measures and classifications. Other researchers suggest that Canada’s ability to reduce infant mortality is constrained by the successful delivery of more preterm babies and babies with very low birth weight. These babies face higher risk of death. Still more researchers point to vastly improved infertility treatments also bringing about far more multiple births as a factor in the infant mortality rates of Canada.

.... But no where do they talk about the fact that Canada and the US lead the pack with the highest numbers of Caesarean Sections and medical interventions in child births. I think that if we really truly want to analyse the abominable infant mortality rates that our country has right now, we need to point the finger in the direction that shows the greatest impact: The medicalization of Child Birth and the interference of the medical machine trying turn maternity care into a 9 to 5 business and to press birthing women through a cookie cutter than they are incapable of fitting.

Now THAT is a Study that I really want to read.

Health Infant Mortality

[ September 2009 ]

Description Grade Assessment: Definition Infant Mortality The number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

Key Messages

• Canada gets a “C” and now ties the U.K. for 15th place out of 17 peer countries. Its infant mortality rate is shockingly high for a country at Canada’s level of socio-economic development.
• Although Canada has dramatically reduced its infant mortality rate over the past few decades, other countries have done better.

• Infant mortality is a sentinel indicator of child health and the well-being of a society over time.

Has Canada improved its relative performance on infant mortality?

HERE to read the entire article