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I was looking back at some old blog posts. Just trying to see what was upsetting me this time last year and what I had to say about topics. It’s always good to do that to see how you might have grown or what was important to you at that time. And in the beginning of October last year I wrote a blog post entitled, MANA Put Up Or Shut Up.
Feel free to go read it. I still stand behind it and honestly looking at it it might have been one of my best blog posts. But it got me thinking. I’m still passionate and just as concerned about the safety of women having out of hospital births in this country. Nothing has changed in that year. In my post I mentioned that MANA claimed that the death rates would be released in 2013. Well, here we are in 2013. It’s the end of 2013. Has MANA released their death rates? Nope, not yet.
As a matter of fact, I actually had another discussion with MANA about the revealing of their death rate earlier this month. A member of MANA wrote an article on the blog Science and Sensibility trying to debunk a study that was conducted that showed homebirth to be unsafe. Of course the obvious way to debunk this myth would be to show the proof in the numbers, right? One would think, but no instead she wrote out this very long drawn out piece, which I admit I lost interest in about halfway through, as it was just a long diatribe about why hospitals are actually worse and midwives numbers are skewed because it’s such a small amount of births that occur at home.
But none the less, it’s more than a year later from the last time we spoke and I had to know where are we on those death rates being revealed. Of course I knew the answer. Lame excuse. But I didn’t entirely expect a lame excuse with clearly nonfactual information. I mean I should have known, they are masters at stonewalling, but they made a rather rooky move. Because you don’t have to be a person who deals with publishing lots of scientific/medical type papers to know what was said here is just wrong:
When I say “in press”, that means that the research articles are in the hands of the editors and reviewers of the journal to which they have been submitted.
In press does not mean they are being reviewed by the editors and reviewers, it means they are being published. It is in the process of being formatted and published. So surely an article that has been approved for publishing one would be able to release information that will be published in there. Certainly they could give a date of when one could look for this published information, but the problem is it’s not in fact in press. I’d be surprised it it was actually in the hands of editors and reviewers quite frankly.
But that was where it was supposed to have been LAST YEAR at this time! And we can’t forget that they have released plenty of other numbers to try to make themselves look better. They are holding back one number and one number alone, the death rates. Go ahead, ask MANA about their VBAC rate, they’ll happily tell you. Ask them about their intervention rate. Ask them about babies birth weights. All this information they will happily share with you. And it will show impressive numbers. I mean they certainly should not be performing c-sections at home after all and their patients should all be low risk that they wouldn’t really need many interventions and babies wouldn’t be born with low birth weights or early. Those are all things hospitals have to deal with.
But what we’re not seeing when they share all of these other glowing statistics is what happens when these midwives take on high risk patients, which don’t let them fool you, they do. The end result (likely because of lack of proper intervention) is a dead baby. If they were to share that, then people would have a hard time focusing on anything but.
Quite frankly I am sick and tired of waiting on this. I mean really, how many more babies have to die at the hands of poorly trained poorly qualified midwives before we do something? A year later and nothing has changed. MANA has a little over 2 months to make their projected release time to the public. Lets put the pressure on them. A petition has been started requesting that MANA release their death rates. Go sign it. It will take two seconds. Maybe it will help, maybe it won’t, but MANA receives an email every time someone signs it, so they will at least know that people do want to know.
Do you want MANA to release the death rates in homebirth?
