"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Flirting With Disaster: The New York Times had a disconcerting story on do-it-yourself home births.(link requires registration) These are women who claim to be so disenchanted with modern medicine that they forgo even the aid of a midwife for their home deliveries and do it all themselves. The truth is, they aren’t motivated so much by mistrust of the medical profession as they are by their own arrogance and egotism. There is a disturbing tendency among many women to consider the act of childbirth as “the greatest thing” they’ve ever done. They think it makes them superior to anyone, man or woman, who hasn’t endured it. This just takes that attitude one step further. Deliver the baby on your own, and you don’t have to share any of the perceived glory. Childbirth, however, is more gory than glory, and it’s fraught with potential complications. The lone-birthers’ claims that the “vast majority of complications are inflicted, not prevented, by doctors,” is simply wrong. Doctors have nothing to do with umbilical cords wrapped so tightly around a baby’s neck they cut off all blood and air, with wombs that turn inside out after delivery and hemorrhage hopelessly, with placentas that separate completely from the uterine wall, or with babies whose shoulders are so big they can’t pass through the vagina, leaving the poor things stuck, only half delivered. To expose oneself and one’s unborn baby to such danger seems an awfully high price to pay for ego gratification. posted by Sydney on
5/08/2002 06:40:00 AM
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