Recent Articles of Interest

I can hardly keep up with all of the articles and media coverage related to birth, maternity care, and midwifery in recent weeks! I decided to put everything together into one post:

Birthing the Old-Fashioned Way (from the Mommy Files--lots of comments, many negative or ill-informed).

Midwives see renewed interest in natural births (from the Billings Gazette)

More Young Women Opting To Schedule C-Section Births (From the Hartford Courant. This article comes across in favor of scheduled c-sections and as the person who sent the link to me said, "[responding to this article] is an excellent opportunity for us to raise awareness about the bias towards medical birth and how difficult it is for women to have a normal, "unpushed," birth in our local hospitals. If ever there was a time to make some noise - this is it!")

Would You Give Birth At Home? (Syndicated article)

MOMS Returns to Salone (MOMS = Midwives on a Mission of Service)

On Nov. 20, The Today Show aired a segment about doulas that was negative in many ways and left the doula community feeling disappointed. DONA International responded to the segment with a helpful media kit and encouraged doulas to send press releases to their own local media contacts to correct misinformation in the segment, as well as to raise awareness of doulas throughout the country.

A follow-up article called Expecting parents: What is a doula? is available on The Today Show site.

A week prior to this coverage, Nicole Kidman made very positive reference on the Oprah show to having a doula :) (there is a bit more about this here.)

Additionally the New Space Birth Center in NYC has an interesting new blog.

A few older items of interest:

Midwives speak on birthing (from the Yale Daily News about midwives speaking to college-age women)

ICAN Responds to the Coalition for Childbirth Autonomy's Statement on the Cesarean Rate

Birth by the Numbers (In Birth by the Numbers, Eugene R. Declercq, PhD, Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Boston University School of Public Health, presents the sobering statistics of birth in the United States today.
"Early in the film, he says 'one thousand' when he means 'one million' regarding number of cesareans, as you can see the 7-digit sum in the background when he talks about it. Other than this mistake, the content is excellent! Enjoy!")