Recently a friend of mine (Hi Kim! <waving wildly!>) asked me what the big deal is about prenatal care. As she said, every month she waited in the waiting room for an hour and then got weighed, measured, and was out the door in minutes. The only thing anyone ever told her was that everything looked healthy. End of story. She said all she heard before she got pregnant was how important prenatal care was and she didn't really understand what the big deal was having experienced it. Of course, we both also discussed the fact that she had healthy and normal pregnancies but...wasn't there supposed to be more to it than, "Everything's healthy. See ya next month."
YES! There is absolutely supposed to be more to it than that. If you've ever been pregnant before, you can probably attest to the fact that there's a lot of physical changes but there are just as many emotional ones! Prenatal care needs to be wholistic care that considers the whole woman, physical, emotional, and spirtual. Reducing the whole process down to a couple of measurements is degrading and insulting to what women are actually doing, growing a baby, making a whole other human being, and becoming mothers all at once.
Prenatal visits are billed to insurance companies as being 15 minutes in length. 15 minutes! I find it hard to believe that a woman, the whole woman, could ever be evaluated in 15 minutes. That thought also led me to wonder how many women a typical doctor sees in a day? 20? 30? Does he or she remember their patients or do they need to use their chart to remind them?
A large part of what I do depends on what I remember from the last visit. These are not things that can be charted very easily but are subtle differences. I get to know each baby by feel. I talk to them and I tell them what I am doing each step of the exam. It's so hard for me to believe that I could be as good a midwife if I was seeing 20 patients or more a day.
The more time I spend talking to the parents, the more they open up to me. They feel more and more comfortable with me and my presence in their home. And I believe they need to feel comfortable with me because I will be the one at their birth. It won't be, "If you have your baby on Tuesday between the hours of 8pm and 8am then I'll be your midwife!" I'm your midwife no matter what day it is, there's no surprises here. It will be me! Birth is such an intimate experience. I can't imagine going through it with strangers.
Yet it has happened. Most women get a 15 minute visit if they are lucky and their care providers only have time to look at numbers on a chart. That is how women get misdiagnosed or how women slip through the cracks. A client of mine was told by her hospital midwife that she was "overweight when she started pregnancy." I doubt she knew who she was talking to because that woman is a personal trainer and certainly NOT overweight in any sort of unheathy way. She wasn't looking at the woman though, she was looking at the numbers. This happens all the time with pre-eclampsia diagnosises. Women are told they have pre-eclampsia or are sent for further testing before anyone asks them what they ate last and how long ago that was. Guess what? She's been sitting in your waiting room for the last hour, starving!
It's called prenatal CARE for a reason. Women need to be cared for, nurtured, listened to, and supported. They need to be able to ask all of their questions, without feeling like they are keeping you from another appointment. They need to be able to voice their fears and concerns without judgment. They need to have a place to come with their partner to devote just to talking about this baby and this birth. They need to have a place to let out their frustrations about what their mother said, or that stranger said, or how everyone is asking why she hasn't had the baby yet. These things are all part of prenatal care. And I bet you dollars to donuts this kind of wholistic care leads to better birth outcomes.
YES! There is absolutely supposed to be more to it than that. If you've ever been pregnant before, you can probably attest to the fact that there's a lot of physical changes but there are just as many emotional ones! Prenatal care needs to be wholistic care that considers the whole woman, physical, emotional, and spirtual. Reducing the whole process down to a couple of measurements is degrading and insulting to what women are actually doing, growing a baby, making a whole other human being, and becoming mothers all at once.
Prenatal visits are billed to insurance companies as being 15 minutes in length. 15 minutes! I find it hard to believe that a woman, the whole woman, could ever be evaluated in 15 minutes. That thought also led me to wonder how many women a typical doctor sees in a day? 20? 30? Does he or she remember their patients or do they need to use their chart to remind them?
A large part of what I do depends on what I remember from the last visit. These are not things that can be charted very easily but are subtle differences. I get to know each baby by feel. I talk to them and I tell them what I am doing each step of the exam. It's so hard for me to believe that I could be as good a midwife if I was seeing 20 patients or more a day.
The more time I spend talking to the parents, the more they open up to me. They feel more and more comfortable with me and my presence in their home. And I believe they need to feel comfortable with me because I will be the one at their birth. It won't be, "If you have your baby on Tuesday between the hours of 8pm and 8am then I'll be your midwife!" I'm your midwife no matter what day it is, there's no surprises here. It will be me! Birth is such an intimate experience. I can't imagine going through it with strangers.
Yet it has happened. Most women get a 15 minute visit if they are lucky and their care providers only have time to look at numbers on a chart. That is how women get misdiagnosed or how women slip through the cracks. A client of mine was told by her hospital midwife that she was "overweight when she started pregnancy." I doubt she knew who she was talking to because that woman is a personal trainer and certainly NOT overweight in any sort of unheathy way. She wasn't looking at the woman though, she was looking at the numbers. This happens all the time with pre-eclampsia diagnosises. Women are told they have pre-eclampsia or are sent for further testing before anyone asks them what they ate last and how long ago that was. Guess what? She's been sitting in your waiting room for the last hour, starving!
It's called prenatal CARE for a reason. Women need to be cared for, nurtured, listened to, and supported. They need to be able to ask all of their questions, without feeling like they are keeping you from another appointment. They need to be able to voice their fears and concerns without judgment. They need to have a place to come with their partner to devote just to talking about this baby and this birth. They need to have a place to let out their frustrations about what their mother said, or that stranger said, or how everyone is asking why she hasn't had the baby yet. These things are all part of prenatal care. And I bet you dollars to donuts this kind of wholistic care leads to better birth outcomes.
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