Family Maternity Center of Northern Neck - Lancaster Healthy children and families by providing high-quality, compassionate, family-centered, and cost-effective maternity and pediatric services to those living in the Northern Neck. The Center was authorized by House Bill 2656 (2005) as one of the State’s two Birthing OB “Pilot” projects and operates with non-profit, 501(c)(3) status.
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The VCU Institute for Women's Health invites you to an afternoon of Celebrating Women's Health: Our Bodies Ourselves. Judy Norsigian, co-founder of Our Bodies Ourselves, will speak from 40 years of advocating and inspiring women to take charge of our own health by providing accessible, research-based information about women's health and sexuality.
Join us to learn more about taking care of yourself!
Date: Friday, Sept. 25, 2009 Time: 1:00 to 4:30 pm Location: Science Museum of Virginia. Free, but reservations are requested.
For more information, or to register, visit www.womenshealth.vcu.edu or call 804-827-1885.
There is a new resource for mothers and childbirth advocates! InJoy and Lamaze have partnered up to make childbirth videos available to mothers and childbirth educators on the web! So far, there are 6 videos available as part of a series entitled Healthy Birth Your Way: Six Steps to a Safer Birth. To see the videos, click here.
When Robbie Goodrich's wife died just 11 hours after giving birth to their son, Robbie had to figure out what to feed their son - both he and his wife were very pro-breastfeeding. The hospital ordered breastmilk from a milk bank, but it wouldn't arrive for 2 days, and at $5.00 an ounce, it came with a staggering price tag. What changed things for Robbie and his newborn son, Moses, was an amazing phone call.
USA Today reports that aging well can start even before you are born! According to recent data, chemicals that the mother comes into contact with during pregnancy either through pesticides, diet, drugs / prescriptions, or other environmental factors, can effect the baby's DNA. While chemicals cannot alter the DNA contributed by mother and father, it can cause certain genes to turn on or off.
"Many things, such as chemical contaminants, can cause epigenetic changes. So babies exposed in the womb to synthetic hormones may begin responding abnormally to the natural hormones later made by their own bodies, says Hugh Taylor of Yale University School of Medicine.
That's why, doctors believe, many babies exposed before birth to a drug called DES, or diethylstilbestrol, later developed rare cancers or fertility problems, Taylor says.
Doctors stopped prescribing DES, which had been used for decades to prevent miscarriages, in 1971. But Taylor and other scientists are concerned that "hormone-disrupting" chemicals, such as those used in pesticides and even common plastics, could cause similar problems.
Babies and children also can develop abnormal reactions to stress, says Jack Shonkoff of Harvard University, co-author of a June paper on early influences in health in The Journal of the American Medical Association."
It's just one more reason to educate yourself, get good prenatal care, and advocate the same for others!
To read the full article and learn more causes and effects, click here.
85% of American women will give birth at some point in their life. Having a midwife attend her birth, in the safety and comfort of her home, should be an option to any woman experiencing a low-risk pregnancy. If you've ever wondered, "What's the big deal? Why are midwives so important?" check out The Big Push and watch the video! Access to care is half the battle!
Mr. Wagner poses the question, "How can you safely and effectively manage labor when the vast majority of care providers don't even know what normal labor looks like?" When you look at the boundaries that seperate a normal labor from one in need of medical assistance, it is often found that no real studies have been done to see what the normal range really is; most of the limits are arbitrarily set! When labor is viewed as something that happens to the woman, as opposed to something mother and baby do, the need to "help" becomes stronger...
"In active management, if a woman's labor was not progressing at a rate they arbitrarily defined as satisfactory, the doctors said she was suffering from "dystocia" and needed oxytocin. Confusion reigns in obstetrics over what should be labeled dystocia: it was originally defined as a mechanical failure but shifted to a time-bound failure to progress (Rothman 1993). A WHO study revealed enormous variation from country to country in the percent of births with the diagnosis of dystocia: Australia 23 percent, Canada 31.5 percent, Czech Republic 20 percent, Greece 17.4 percent, Israel 9.7 percent, Slovenjia 33.8 percent, United States 22.1 percent (Stephenson 1992). Does this variation in dystocia among countries reflect variations in the ability of the uterus or is there a variation in how much the doctors have sped up the clocks during labor?
[...]
The justification of active management, the reduction of cesarean section rates, is self fulfilling prophecy. If we decide that labor over 12 hours is an indication for cesarean section and we find a technology to hurry up labor, then, of course, the cesarean section rate will fall. But we have not questioned the 12 hour policy, and have not considered what factors may slow the labor, and have not considered less invasive and less risky alternatives. If the belief is that labor is happening to the woman, the focus is the uterus, not the woman, and the solutions considered are medical and pharmacological interventions directed to the uterus."
Jane Fonda is more than an actress! She is an activist and an advocate! She was recently published in the Huffington Post, and we found it very interesting!
"A doula is a birth assistant who provides emotional and physical support to the mother and her family during labor and delivery. Our doulas, however, go beyond the call of the traditional doula. Many times they take on the role of mother, big sister, friend, counselor, social worker, advocate, life coach and more. The doulas make weekly home visits to pregnant teens and their families starting in the third trimester and up to one year after the birth of their baby. They help young mothers (and often times fathers) understand the birth process, and support them during labor and delivery. So many of these young parents don't know what a real relationship feels like, but through their example, the Doulas model for the mothers and fathers how to be in relationship, how to bond. This is what transforms the young parents forever and gives their babies a better chance in life."
As a step toward our goal of educating women about their choices and options during the childbearing years, Birth Matters Virginia solicited short videos about evidence-based maternity and delivery care. With our nation ranking 41st in maternal mortality and our cesarean rate surpassing 30%, it is more important than ever for women to be educated about their options.
We were pleased to have received nearly 40 informative and thoughtful videos on topics ranging from personal birth journeys, the role a doula plays, midwifery care, cesarean sections, birthing in the Amish culture, birth in Ireland, and more. Each video carried a message of the understanding that change needs to occur in our culture related to pregnancy and birth for the well-being of both mothers and babies.
The choice was not easy for our panel of judges (which included women from varied backgrounds, all mothers, all interested in change, some working in the field of birth professionally and some not). We also were honored to have Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein from the Business of Being Born and internationally recognized and respected author and doctor, Sarah Buckley join us in the judging. Each film had so much heart and all contest entries were obviously made with wonderful intentions as well as good information backing the spirit of the project. However, in the end, we choose with confidence.
To all of those of you who made a film and submitted it to us, we are extremely grateful for your time and effort. Each film was unique and as has been said, made with the best of intentions. The films are a part of the necessary and ongoing discussion we must have in order for pregnancy and birth to be viewed and treated as the normal process of a woman’s life that it is.
The goal of Birth Matters Virginia is to encourage and support evidence based maternity care in order to educate not just women who are considering pregnancy or already are pregnant but all people, young, old, female and male. We feel by sponsoring this video contest, we have exposed an enormously diverse population of people by flooding YouTube with positive and informative birth documentaries. We encourage everyone to watch the videos, tell your friends, your family, all of your connections about the films and encourage them to go to YouTube to view them. Refer women, professionals who work with pregnant women and mothers to the Birth Matters Virginia website www.birthmattersva.org for excellent resources and research to support the healthiest and safest way of birth.
We believe that all of our efforts, yours and ours are making a difference in this world and we are grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the change.
Why is that one doctor can evaluate a fetal heart rate strip and see fetal distress, and another sees simple variations? The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has refind their monitoring guidelines to try to make evaluations more uniform, eliminating these discrepancies.
"The intent of FHR monitoring is to help keep an eye on the status of the fetus during labor and intervene if necessary. There are two main FHR monitoring methods. The most commonly used method is EFM, which detects the fetal heart rate and the length of uterine contractions and the time between them. EFM allows physicians and nurses to measure the response of the fetal heart rate to uterine contractions. A lesser-used method is manual auscultation, which employs either a small handheld Doppler device or a fetoscope (similar to a stethoscope). A normal fetal heart varies between 110 and 160 beats per minute. A heart rate that doesn't vary or is too low or too high may signal a potential problem with the fetus.
[...]
"Our goal with the ACOG guidelines was to define existing terminology and narrow definitions and categories so that everyone is on the same page," says Dr. Macones. One of the problems with FHR tracings is the variability in how they're interpreted by different people. The ACOG guidelines highlight a case in which four obstetricians examined 50 FHR tracings; they agreed in only 22% of the cases. Two months later, these four physicians reevaluated the same 50 FHR tracings, and they changed their interpretations on nearly one out of every five tracings."
Click here to read the full story and see the newly implemented guidelines.
