Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Obenieta: Minding the mothers By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
LIKE all kids, mine are suckers about superheroes. What children don’t know, however, is that there’s no venture far more exciting—fraught with fear and wonder that swing precarious between the twin possibilities of death and deliverance—than what mothers go through since Eve.
It may take a village to raise a child but it took only my Mama Violeta to deal with the do-or-die feat of childbirth all alone by herself. When the neighborhood mananabang came, all she had to do was cut the umbilical cord and clean up both my mother and the eight pounds of bloody shrieking me.
How this hardy wisp of a woman did the same with my three brothers is nothing short of amazing, my wife agrees after our two sons came bawling out of her surgically sliced belly.
That many children are now rowdy enough with wishes to become Marvel characters someday is proof-positive of the power of obstetricians. Especially when first-rate medical care goes well with compassion and some doses of humor, not the least for husbands and fathers on the verge of nervous breakdowns, jumpy about their wives’ and babies’ safety while waiting outside of surgery rooms and later wincing under the weight of paper with the doctors’ signature. A hospital bill, after all, is something not even Superman had to endure.
The costly business of having babies is reason why a “staggering” 60 percent of live births are done in homes. With that, swears Dr. Maria Socorro Entera of the Department of Health (DOH) 7 Maternal and Child Health Section, comes “an increase in the mortality rate of mothers.” Out of the 100,000 live births in the country, the DOH records show 162 mothers died during delivery. That’s why the DOH is discouraging mothers to get the help of traditional birth attendants, like the manghihilot and mananabang.
A throwback, it seems, in the early 20th century when the medical profession subjected midwives to a witch-hunt long after Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” initiated the practice of midwifery in Greece. While studies have shown that home births are as safe as hospital deliveries for low-risk pregnancies, most doctors oppose them. In some American states, attending a home birth is deemed illegal and many doctors have been reporting about “dangerous” midwives to various authorities. These attacks are simply attempts by doctors to eliminate the competition and smacks of medical arrogance, according to Dr. Marsden Wagner, a scientist and former World Health Organization official. According to him, “80 percent of births don’t need medical interventions.”
Author of Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006), Wagner has been blowing the whistle against “the rampant medicalization” at the expense of midwives who tended to low-risk births childbirth at home. Wresting obstetric control, says Wagner, has exploded into a crisis “because we have turned a natural event into a medical condition” at the expense of midwives who safely deliver the majority of the world’s babies.
Childbirth Connection, a New York organization dedicated to improving maternity care, recently published their findings from a national survey of 1,573 new mothers who went through indignities and dangers in the hands of doctors. In its wake, there’s now the so-called “mommy uprising” as families hire “hands-on midwives” instead of obstetricians, insisting that they be allowed to have a doula (a labor coach) to support women at birth, preferably in the comfort of their own homes.
Maybe the DOH can really help if it can encourage women to know what’s expected of her, and not merely lie there passive according to the convenience of some doctors who don’t think a mother knows best.
