Update on the baby

Shabana reported yesterday on our jihad against the conventional wisdom in a medical establishment that seems more interested in keeping doctors’ weekends open for golf than providing their patient medical care that is personalized to her needs, legitimate desires concerning her body and birthing experience, and the medical specifics of her pregnancy. 

We received the full court press, with 3 different doctors trotting out every imaginable argument to scare us into inducing labor a week before her due date, despite the fact that by the standards of their own certifying body–the College of Obstetrics and Gyncology–the is no clear reason not to allow Nature to continue to take its course until we reach the due date.

The most recent doctor inadvertantly let the cat out of the bag by admitting under our cross examination that this recommendation is based largely not on objective medical criteria but on local regional policy.  He admitted that were we in Ohio, he might be advising us differently.  So all these guilt trips about us putting the baby at risk were just hot air.  This is about bureaucracy, personal preferences on the part of doctors,  and, I have to suspect, cost-cutting rather than medicine or safety.

Shabana’s cousin, who lives in the area, is 10 years her junior, at the same stage of pregnancy and free of gestational diabetes, is also being pressured to induce early!   The justification?   Similiar airy arguments about some nebulous threat posed by "unnecessarily delaying" the child’s birth and waiting till the 40th week.   Funny coincidence, no?  You’d never guess that not so long ago doctors were not allowed to perform inductions without a clear threat to the baby.  (Today, some women are choosing to do inductions in order to catch the Christmas holiday season.)

It’s sad that we’ve reached a point where an attempt to have a reasonably natural childbirth if at all possible is treated as cooky and irresponsible.   

I can’t help but see the influence of Big Business here.  Doing things the way things have worked for millenia doesn’t sell drugs or justify complicated new forms of bureaucracy, training and administration.  We must make the process more complex, mechanized and as remote from nature as possible in order to keep everybody employed and sales of widgets up.

P.S.  There are some juicy new developments.  Stay tuned.