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- Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!axion!rtf.bt.co.uk!traub
- From: traub@rtf.bt.co.uk (Michael Traub)
- Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative
- Subject: Re: Midwifery
- Message-ID: <1992Dec30.085528.11892@rtf.bt.co.uk>
- Date: 30 Dec 92 08:55:28 GMT
- References: <1992Dec30.040025.3983@sarah.albany.edu>
- Organization: BT Customer Systems, Brighton, UK
- Lines: 36
-
- In article <1992Dec30.040025.3983@sarah.albany.edu> la1002@albnyvms.bitnet writes:
- >As a future midwife (I'm a pre-nursing student now), I am curious to
- >know what the general opinion regarding lay midwives and certified
- >nurse midwives is. I plan to get a master's degree in midwifery and
- >a bachelor's in nursing, and hopefully, another bachelors in sociology
- >with a minor in psychology.
-
- My wife and I had occassion to use midwives recently when our daughter
- was born at home in June. We had two certified midwives and one trainee
- present. We could have elected to have additional lay midwifes available,
- but since UK law requires two certified midwifes to be present at any
- planned home births we had no need for additional midwives.
-
- I personally felt comforted by knowing that the midwives were certified,
- but I was a little taken aback at how ready they were to use modern
- medical quackery. For example they apparently have to recommend that our
- child be injected with Vitamin K at birth and then we have to explicitly
- refuse and then this is noted as such in the records. One wonders how the
- human race survived the first few thousand years without Vitamin K
- injections at birth, but that's another story. I suppose they have no
- choice but to follow the health department's guidelines, but it is
- annoying because they are not even meant to offer an opinion.
-
- We read about half a dozen books on the subject of home births
- beforehand, I can't recall the names of the titles. We found a local home
- birth group which had set up a library of books to swap. All in all
- Brighton was a very good place to have a home birth and the nurses and
- midwives were very supportive. This contrasts with some areas in London
- where the staff are so backward they frown on home births and breast
- feeding and anything not traditional (even though these traditions are
- all less than fifty years old).
-
-
- --
- Michael Traub
- BT Customer Systems, Brighton Systems Centre. traub@btcs.bt.co.uk
-