June 18, 2008
To: The American Medical Association House of Delegates
Regarding: Resolution 205, 4-28-08
I am not a physician or insurance company - I am a woman, mother and sometime patient. I am writing because I am horrified at the language of your resolution which calls for legislation to address where births should take place - legislation. I dislike being so blunt, but the truth is that your membership needs to understand something critical if you ever want your malpractice suits to decrease: you have no right to tell people what to do. You have no right to tell me where I can give birth. The government has no right to tell me where I can give birth. I will give birth where I feel safest and that is not going to be under the thumbs, or electronic fetal monitors, of any of you. How dare you act to restrict my choices? How dare you?
And while I am on the topic of "how dare you?", how dare you pass resolutions pretending that you are concerned about the "safety" of midwife-assisted home birth, given the track record of your membership? Less than one percent of U.S. births occur at home so it is not midwives who are responsible for the fact that the U.S. has the second highest rate of maternal mortality and the highest rate of infant mortality in the developed world. Those deaths happened in your hospitals, attended by the physicians of your membership...because that's where births happen and who attends them in the U.S. If you were addressing the ignorance of your members first, and the true causes of our country's crisis in maternity care, and we had a very low rate of maternal and infant death...then, then perhaps, you could make a case for expending energy bad-mouthing midwives...as long as you left us with choices. Given the current state of maternity care in the U.S., however, you need to be looking to your own house and hospital. That is where the true problems exist.
My readers and I would very much like to hear that you are changing course, respecting women's choices and addressing the role of physicians and hospitals in the current crisis. I will happily print your response.
Sincerely,
Mariah Boone
Publisher, Lone Star Ma Magazine
2 comments:
The place where I wanted to give birth was closed by the hospital that took over to make way for a cardiology center. Then, when I showed up at that hospital that did the original take-over (because I wanted my doctor to catch my baby), I spent 15 hours in triage waiting for a room. I had a number of complications that culminated in a caesarian birth after 24 hours of labor. Would that have happened in another setting? I don't know. It may have well been so. But I'm haunted by the "what-ifs."
Thanks for speaking up to the AMA.
Far too many of us are...and we are the lucky ones.
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