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Updated ~ Friday December 02, 2005 20:56 

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1. Medicalized Childbirth as Defined  by the World Health Organization  

" i.e. separating a woman from her own environment and surrounding her with strange people using strange machines to do strange things to her in an effort to assist her...

... the woman's state of mind and body is so altered that her ways of carrying through this intimate act must also be altered and the state of the baby born must equally be altered.

The result is that it is no longer possible to know what births would have been like before these manipulations."

2.  Conventional or "flat earth" obstetrics as applied to healthy women is the opposite of evidence-based, physiological management.

Its associated with a high level of medical interventions, obstetrical complications, anesthetic use, instrumental deliveries, Cesarean surgery and post-operative complications including emergency hysterectomy, delayed complications such as stress incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse, downstream complications in future pregnancies, long-term psychological problems such as postpartum depression, lower rates of breastfeeding and increased asthma in babies born by cesarean section. Conventional obstetrics for healthy women is neither safe or cost-effective.


Flat Earth Obstetrics is:                                       (click on thumbnails to enlarge photos)
          . . . . . a failed medical experiment (doctor pulling baby out)

. . . . the systematic application of erroneous 19th century assumptions for the entire span of the 20th century  (vacuum extraction)

. . . . institutionalizing the preemptive strike (episiotomy) as a normal management strategy
. . . . dependence on instruments of massive intervention (forceps)
 
. . . . generating heat instead of light to the detriment of the public  (CS incision -- uterus exposed by surgeon's fingers, bottom edge of incision & bladder pulled back by the stainless steel blade of a metal retractor )
 

... propaganda for the discredited Freudian notion of “biology as destiny” -- that women are physically inferior and psychologically weak and need to be rescued (CS delivery)

  from their inadequacy by the masculine principles
of manual force

... war on women’s bodies and
on their psyches


.... preventable deaths and disability   

 
.... spiritually damaging  to the natural joy of childbearing Flat  Earth Obstetrics survives in the 21st century because it’s convenient for

medical professionals and  profitable for the ‘baby’ business


Understanding the medicalizing of normal childbirth

Medicalized Childbirth / World Health Organization definition:

" i.e. separating a woman from her own environment and surrounding her with strange people using strange machines to do strange things to her in an effort to assist her...

... the woman's state of mind and body is so altered that her ways of carrying through this intimate act must also be altered and the state of the baby born must equally be altered.

 The result is that it is no longer possible to know what births would have been like before these manipulations."


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