UNLIMITED "Vaginas are scary" discussion thread!

[Doktor Howl]

Oh, I guess today's maternal mortality rate would be relevant too. According to the NIH it's about .01/1000.

Here's a good article: http://www.ajcn.org/content/72/1/241S.full

I guess the whole "get the axle grease off your hands before attending the childbirth thing" paid off.

Funny bit is, the guy who figured that out was damn near blackballed by the medical profession.   

[Doktor Howl]

The US still has an absurdly high rate of infant mortality, though.

That's due to insurance companies interfering in medical decisions, I think.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The US still has an absurdly high rate of infant mortality, though.

That's due to insurance companies interfering in medical decisions, I think.

The prevailing theory is that it's mainly a combination of very poor rates of access to prenatal care and education, leading to more premature and low-birth-weight infants. Other less significant contributing factors are thought to be exposure of infants to resistant bacteria in the hospital, and excessive medical intervention during birth; ie. the absurdly high rate of induction, which often leads to emergency C-sections when the baby goes into distress.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, I guess today's maternal mortality rate would be relevant too. According to the NIH it's about .01/1000.

Here's a good article: http://www.ajcn.org/content/72/1/241S.full

I guess the whole "get the axle grease off your hands before attending the childbirth thing" paid off.

Funny bit is, the guy who figured that out was damn near blackballed by the medical profession.   

Well, he made them look bad.

[Cain]

It also seems socio-economic status plays a large role - black women are far more likely to have a child suffer from infant mortality than Americans as a whole, for example, or at least there were for the last statistics I saw (2004 or so).  Apparently, even accounting for access to quality healthcare etc this is unusually high, so something else is definitely going on there.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It also seems socio-economic status plays a large role - black women are far more likely to have a child suffer from infant mortality than Americans as a whole, for example, or at least there were for the last statistics I saw (2004 or so).  Apparently, even accounting for access to quality healthcare etc this is unusually high, so something else is definitely going on there.

Black women also are much, much less likely than White or Asian women to have access to prenatal education and care, which is directly linked to socio-economic status in the US, so there's a strong correlation there.

Hispanic infants have an unusually low mortality rate for the overall socio-economic situation of Hispanics in the US as a whole, which is most likely because there is very strong maternal support in Hispanic communities, despite the lack of access to formal care. My guess is that maternal nutrition, social support, and informal but high-quality prenatal education are better in Hispanic communities.

[Freeky]

The US still has an absurdly high rate of infant mortality, though.

That's due to insurance companies interfering in medical decisions, I think.

The prevailing theory is that it's mainly a combination of very poor rates of access to prenatal care and education, leading to more premature and low-birth-weight infants. Other less significant contributing factors are thought to be exposure of infants to resistant bacteria in the hospital, and excessive medical intervention during birth; ie. the absurdly high rate of induction, which often leads to emergency C-sections when the baby goes into distress.

There's probably something to that last bit.  When I had the monkey, they induced me, and for hours they had me rolling back and forth because he couldn't breathe in there after they broke my water. 

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Is this the thread where I get to bitch about the fact that I was diagnosed with a "lazy uterus"?

[Doktor Howl]

Is this the thread where I get to bitch about the fact that I was diagnosed with a "lazy uterus"?

WELL

     That's your fault for not disciplining it properly.

OR

     Is that a medical condition?

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Maternal death absolutely skyrocketed when birth was medicalized. Keep in mind that the rate of death for a normal attended birth pre-medicalization was about 5/1000, and after medicalization became widespread it reached a peak of 85/1000. By contrast, the most dangerous birth prior to that time was unattended birth, which had a maternal death rate of about 25/1000 (NIH).

Better off unattended than medicalized, holy shit.

[navkat]

Hey, not to discount the truth about the low income lack of access to prenatal care/high rate of depressed, UNhealthy prenatal behaviors thing but could the infant death rate also be affected by the number of preterm babies that are now considered viable due to medical advances that define them so? I imagine if you take the group of babies who have the lowest chance of survival and who used to be counted as not viable but now are counted among the viable, that would cause a statistical difference if such preterm babies were not counted viable elsewhere.

Just supposing for a minute. I am aware that other industrialized first-world nations have just as many medical advances defining viability.

There are also factors like maternal stress: in this country, women are expected to work their fingers to the bone until two weeks before junior pops out and then go back to work after 6 weeks. In Canada, the family is given a year leave to split up between the woman and the man. In France, the woman is given the year, a lactation consultant, a roving home nurse and a fuckton of education and vitamins. The man is given a work schedule that allows him to spend more time at home to bond with the mother and baby and to HELP.

Difference in attitudes: From day one of pregnancy, our culture creates a cognitive dissonance message: "Congratulations on your little bundle of joy who will turn your hair gray and send you to an early grave! If you're like me, you'll be getting drunk in the broom closet after three months. Welcome to my world, mamma!"

But the biggest sin I think this country has committed against maternity was "Choose Similac over nasty breast milk...because feeding your baby reconstituted dried cow's milk with powdered eggs in it isn't just better for your baby, it's STYLISH!"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The US still has an absurdly high rate of infant mortality, though.

That's due to insurance companies interfering in medical decisions, I think.

The prevailing theory is that it's mainly a combination of very poor rates of access to prenatal care and education, leading to more premature and low-birth-weight infants. Other less significant contributing factors are thought to be exposure of infants to resistant bacteria in the hospital, and excessive medical intervention during birth; ie. the absurdly high rate of induction, which often leads to emergency C-sections when the baby goes into distress.

There's probably something to that last bit.  When I had the monkey, they induced me, and for hours they had me rolling back and forth because he couldn't breathe in there after they broke my water. 

Yeah; there are a combination of factors there too, but the main thing with that is that induced labor leads to stronger, more rapid and longer contractions than are normal, and it can negatively impact the oxygen to the baby.

[navkat]

Maternal death absolutely skyrocketed when birth was medicalized. Keep in mind that the rate of death for a normal attended birth pre-medicalization was about 5/1000, and after medicalization became widespread it reached a peak of 85/1000. By contrast, the most dangerous birth prior to that time was unattended birth, which had a maternal death rate of about 25/1000 (NIH).

Better off unattended than medicalized, holy shit.

I wonder how accurate those numbers were in underdeveloped areas of the country though. I imagine if you live out in the Appalachians in 1930, don't own shoes and the nearest coroner/doctor is miles away and no one in your part of the country can afford a car yet, there are going to be a lot fewer non-live births that get reported and a lot more infants that die before they're issued birth or baptismal certificates...especially of Maw gets knocked up annually and loses about half of 'em.

Still, even if that number is off by 20/1000, that's some fucked up shit.

[navkat]

The US still has an absurdly high rate of infant mortality, though.

That's due to insurance companies interfering in medical decisions, I think.

The prevailing theory is that it's mainly a combination of very poor rates of access to prenatal care and education, leading to more premature and low-birth-weight infants. Other less significant contributing factors are thought to be exposure of infants to resistant bacteria in the hospital, and excessive medical intervention during birth; ie. the absurdly high rate of induction, which often leads to emergency C-sections when the baby goes into distress.

There's probably something to that last bit.  When I had the monkey, they induced me, and for hours they had me rolling back and forth because he couldn't breathe in there after they broke my water. 

Yeah; there are a combination of factors there too, but the main thing with that is that induced labor leads to stronger, more rapid and longer contractions than are normal, and it can negatively impact the oxygen to the baby.

Oh, I am dead against Oxytocin except in a narrow segment of cases. Where you goin', lady? You can't wait for the kid's brain to finish cooking? Eat some avocados and sit back the fuck down on that egg, guhl!"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Hey, not to discount the truth about the low income lack of access to prenatal care/high rate of depressed, UNhealthy prenatal behaviors thing but could the infant death rate also be affected by the number of preterm babies that are now considered viable due to medical advances that define them so? I imagine if you take the group of babies who have the lowest chance of survival and who used to be counted as not viable but now are counted among the viable, that would cause a statistical difference if such preterm babies were not counted viable elsewhere.

Just supposing for a minute. I am aware that other industrialized first-world nations have just as many medical advances defining viability.

Since we are comparing the US to other medically advanced countries with the same medical technologies, that hypothesis would fail to explain the discrepancy. While a live birth is typically recorded as a live birth even if very preterm, different countries do have different cutoffs for counting stillbirths vs. miscarriages and this article briefly mentions how expectation of viability could affect the perception of a stillbirth vs. a live birth that later died:

The perinatal mortality rate is widely used as a summary statistic for evaluating the effectiveness of perinatal care. A major drawback with using the perinatal mortality rate in such fashion, however, has been the inclusion of all registered live births, irrespective of gestational age, while stillbirths were registered only after 28 completed weeks; fetal deaths before that gestational age were not registered and thus not included in the perinatal mortality rate. Moreover, at very low gestational ages, the expectation of viability may influence the judgement of whether a fetus is stillborn or is born alive but dies shortly after birth.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7637485

There are also factors like maternal stress: in this country, women are expected to work their fingers to the bone until two weeks before junior pops out and then go back to work after 6 weeks. In Canada, the family is given a year leave to split up between the woman and the man. In France, the woman is given the year, a lactation consultant, a roving home nurse and a fuckton of education and vitamins. The man is given a work schedule that allows him to spend more time at home to bond with the mother and baby and to HELP.

Difference in attitudes: From day one of pregnancy, our culture creates a cognitive dissonance message: "Congratulations on your little bundle of joy who will turn your hair gray and send you to an early grave! If you're like me, you'll be getting drunk in the broom closet after three months. Welcome to my world, mamma!"

But the biggest sin I think this country has committed against maternity was "Choose Similac over nasty breast milk...because feeding your baby reconstituted dried cow's milk with powdered eggs in it isn't just better for your baby, it's STYLISH!"